Cleaning Up Canal Street

In the Times today, an article celebrating the gentrification of Canal Street is getting strong reactions.



This type of article is a long-time staple for the paper. For years, they've sent writers into "up and coming" neighborhoods to highlight the new shops and eateries. As a record of the changing city, these articles are invaluable--I relied on them when I wrote my book, Vanishing New York. But they also help to hype the changes.

And in all of them, someone makes a statement about how the old neighborhood was dead and the new one is alive, how "no one" was there before and now it's full of "people."

In today's piece, the owner of an upscale new jewelry shop says, “I think people were afraid of Canal Street for so long, and now they’re recognizing there are just so many advantages to the area. I think we’re just beginning to see the neighborhood come alive."

In the hyper-gentrifying city, where City Hall works with developers and corporations to rezone and "renew," where more and more upper-class white newcomers move into working-class neighborhoods of color, we hear this sentiment all the time. It is what one writer referred to as colonial myopia. In her book Harlem Is Nowhere, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts recalls sitting in a new Harlem café listening to a conversation between two white men. One lived in the neighborhood and one was visiting. “This is fabulous,” the visiting friend exclaimed. “Really, you have to do something to get the word out. There need to be more people up here!” As Rhodes-Pitts points out, the men were “afflicted by that exuberant myopia common to colonists.”

Bloomberg's Planning Commissioner, Amanda Burden, was famous for this affliction. She told the Times in 2012, “We are making so many more areas of the city livable. Now, young people are moving to neighborhoods like Crown Heights that 10 years ago wouldn’t have been part of the lexicon.” Livable for whom? Which young people? Whose lexicon?

We know who.



In the lead photo for the Canal Street article, we see two young, fashionable, well-heeled white women walking into Canal Street Market, a kind of clone of Chelsea Market, that hyper-gentrification machine.

Behind them are at least five people of color, not fashionable and not well-heeled. But they are not the focus of the photo. They are not the stars of this story. They are in the background, as if already fading into the past. They have been coming here for years, shopping for the bargains that Canal has long been known for. But they are not here. They are not part of the lexicon.



Like much of the city, Canal has recently been high-rent blighted. Bloomberg cracked down on counterfeit handbag sellers. Legit shops were forced shut.

In their place are coming new shops for a new population of people who want their spaces controlled, curated, and very clean.



But the wild and vital messiness of New York life still hangs on here.

The aliveness of Canal Street are the crowds of bargain shoppers. The diversity of its clamor. The gray-market merchants and knock-off artists. Canal Plastics and Canal Rubber. (It was, until very recently, the crazy spillage of Argo Electronics. And Pearl Paint. And the Cup & Saucer.) It's the Chinese vendors with their carts of fruits and vegetables and delicacies sending up steam. It's the t-shirts with their "New York Fuckin City" slogans next to "I Heart NY."

This place has been alive for a long time. And now it is being killed by the same force that is killing so much of the city.



On the Times article, the vast majority (if not all) of the comments are critical. Readers are angry.

Tony says, "Seems to me this story is saying in all sorts of coded language that Canal Street became reputable once it became less Chinese and more white. Shade, anyone?"

(Some of that coded language, with a reference to Mandarin, was removed in an online edit last night. The original headline, "Canal Street Cleans Up Nice," was changed to "The Gentrification of Canal Street.")

Scott says, "This article is incredibly tone deaf. Chinatown locals are being pushed out by rising rents, and these writers are celebrating the means by which this is happening."

Bronx girl says, "Real people lived and shopped and went to work and created crowds on Canal Street... This is so distressing. Bye home."

BB says, "Having lived a blocked removed from canal Street for the past 4 decades, Canal Street was the livliest are for as long as I can remember, filled with real people living and working as normal people do most parts of the world. That NY Times would write 'I think we’re just beginning to see the neighborhood come alive,' is offensive to those of us that's lived and enjoyed our real neighborhood."

It goes on.



So maybe it's time for the Times to retire this feature. No more celebrating gentrification. No more selling the corporate white-washing of New York's neighborhoods. The tide is turning on gentrification. People are simply tired of it.