Manhattan Neighborhood Map, 1989–2001

The Tip-Over

In 1989, Tompkins Square Park was a tent city. The municipality had ceded the green rectangle between Avenue A and Avenue B, East 7th and East 10th Streets, to a population of several hundred people who had built their own community in the space, under a rough tolerance that the neighborhood’s Community Board had endorsed and the 9th Precinct had accepted because the alternative — clearing the park with force — had been tried once already and produced a riot. The police action of August 6–7, 1988, in which officers wielding batons dispersed protestors and park residents in a sustained melee visible on videotape shot from the surrounding rooftops, had not resolved the question of who owned the park; it had only made the cost of the question visible.¹ The tents remained. The 9th Precinct, covering the East Village and Alphabet City, was visibly stretched across the blocks radiating east from First Avenue: drug corners on Avenue C and on Avenue D, heroin still sold in some building courtyards, squats operating in buildings on East 7th, 9th, and 13th Streets whose owners had abandoned them in the fiscal-crisis years and whose titles had become legally uncertain. CBGB operated at 315 Bowery as it had since 1973. ABC No Rio held its exhibitions and hardcore matinees on Rivington Street. The Pyramid Club, at 101 Avenue A, was running its drag nights and performance-art bills. Mars Bar held its position at Second Avenue and 1st Street, indifferent to the changes approaching from the north and west.

The structural story of the East Village across the following twelve years was not complicated, though the political argument about it was. The city closed the park in June 1991, evicting the remaining tent-city residents, and reopened it in the summer of 1992 with a redesigned perimeter fence and operating hours, converting it from a de facto commons into a managed municipal park.¹ The visual anchor of the neighborhood’s resistance was gone. Within eighteen months the blocks east of First Avenue had begun what brokers and city planners alike called a tip-over: restaurants opened on First, then on Avenue A, then east of A; the clientele was not the clientele that had been there the year before; the rents in the buildings above the storefronts were rising, in some cases faster than the buildings were being maintained. The mechanism was the housing stock. Most of the tenements east of First Avenue had been built before 1974 and fell under state rent stabilization — a regulatory category covering pre-1974 buildings of six or more units, in which annual rent increases were set by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board rather than the market. Tenants who held stabilized leases were protected. Tenants who vacated, or who had never had a formal lease at all, were not. The owners had every incentive to accelerate vacancy and every legal means, short of harassment, to do so. The demographic press operated in one direction.

By 1993 the L-train connection through Williamsburg had begun to factor into the East Village’s residential calculus: artists and young professionals priced out of the East Village were finding the Bedford Avenue stop tolerable, which meant the East Village was now receiving pressure not only from the west but from the east, as its own displaced residents found cheaper rents one stop into Brooklyn and created there the same dynamic that had begun here. The blocks east of First Avenue gentrified in roughly the sequence the dossier describes: Avenue A as the line between gentrified and not through the mid-1990s, Avenue B crossed by 1997–2001, Avenue C substantially changed by 2001, Avenue D next.² The squats negotiated their transitions toward HDFC co-op conversion; formal agreements followed at the period’s end, but the political ground had been cleared in the years before. By 2000, the St. Mark’s Place corridor between Third and First Avenues — the block’s historical identity as the East Village’s main drag, the block that had produced punk and hardcore and experimental theater — felt touristic. The punk merchandise in the storefronts had become a costume.

The Lower East Side underwent the same transition by a slightly different route. In 1989, Orchard, Ludlow, Rivington, and Stanton Streets were primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican residential blocks, with the remnant Jewish commercial presence that had anchored the neighborhood for a century: Katz’s Delicatessen at Houston and Ludlow, which had been there since 1888 and was still there; Russ & Daughters at 179 Houston, in continuous operation since 1914. Max Fish opened at 178 Ludlow in 1989, a bar that arrived before the brokered apartments. The bar was, in this sense, a leading indicator: artists and late-night crowds generally precede the real-estate calculation, providing the proof-of-concept that convinces a second wave that the block is safe.² By 2001, weekend nights on Ludlow and on the blocks around it were approximating what the East Village had looked like in 1995. The time lag was not coincidence. The same engine was running at a later start date, on the same fuel.

The Migration

In 1989, SoHo was at peak gallery. Mary Boone operated at 417 West Broadway; Leo Castelli, Pace, Sonnabend, and OK Harris held their positions along West Broadway and its surrounding blocks. The cast-iron loft buildings of Greene, Wooster, and Mercer Streets — eight- and nine-story structures with Corinthian columns stamped from metal plate, facades that looked like masonry but were not — had been in some cases artists’ lofts since the early 1970s, their residential conversion slow and legally contested, their industrial-zone designation at odds with the residential reality of several thousand people living in them under a succession of permits, variances, and eventually the 1971 Loft Law, which had begun the long work of regularizing what the market had already decided.³ Dean & DeLuca anchored the block at Broadway and Prince. Fanelli’s, at Prince and Mercer, had been serving drinks since 1847. The neighborhood was the center of the American contemporary art market, which meant it was also the center of a specific kind of real-estate pressure: gallery tenants paying commercial rents in buildings that were simultaneously attracting residential conversion interest, in a neighborhood that had become, through the 1980s, a place where certain categories of people wanted to live.

The pressure that displaced the galleries was not sudden. It was the slow accretion of retail conversion: a clothing store where a gallery had been, then another, then a restaurant that required a larger footprint. The rents that the new tenants could pay — national retailers, European luxury brands conducting their American expansion, the first wave of Sephora and Old Navy and the architecture of mass consumption dressed up as downtown — were not the rents that mid-tier galleries could carry. The economics were simple and the timeline was roughly a decade. Between roughly 1993 and 2001, the galleries left, and the storefronts turned.³

They went to Chelsea. The structural reason was the ceiling height. Contemporary art — large-format painting, sculpture, installation work — required ground-floor spaces with at least twelve feet of clear height, and the former garages and warehouses on the streets between West 19th and West 29th, west of Tenth Avenue, provided exactly that, at rents far below what SoHo had become. The Dia Center for the Arts had been at 548 West 22nd Street since 1987, and its presence had already established that the western edge of Chelsea’s industrial district could hold a serious cultural institution.⁴ In 1994, Matthew Marks opened at 522 West 22nd Street — the move that galvanized the migration, establishing that a dealer of the first tier would make the bet. Barbara Gladstone, Pat Hearn, 303 Gallery, and Andrea Rosen followed in 1995 and 1996; Paula Cooper took a space on West 21st in 1996.⁴ The mid-tier galleries moved in bulk between 1997 and 1999. Larry Gagosian opened at 555 West 24th in 2000, the blue-chip cap on what had already happened.⁴ By 2001, roughly two hundred and fifty galleries operated between West 19th and West 29th, west of Tenth Avenue — a gallery district that had not existed in 1989.⁴

The cluster was the point. A collector in Chelsea could walk twenty galleries in an afternoon on a single set of blocks west of Tenth Avenue between West 19th and West 29th; in SoHo the same set of galleries had been more dispersed across West Broadway and its side streets, with no single corridor that delivered the same density. Density was both a market advantage and an operational one, and the two fed each other. By 2000, SoHo’s storefronts were completing the last phase of their turn. The Prada Epicenter at Broadway and Prince, designed by Rem Koolhaas and opening at the end of 2001, was the landmark that the transformation had been building toward: a European luxury brand spending heavily on architecture at the exact address where one of the most important galleries in America had operated. The cast-iron blocks had become an outdoor mall. Neither the galleries nor the mall had been planned; both were the outcomes of the same set of rent calculations, running in sequence.

Times Square underwent a version of the same process through a different mechanism. In 1989, the 42nd Street corridor between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was porn theaters, peep shows, and three-card-monte tables alongside the legitimate Broadway houses that had survived the previous fifteen years of disinvestment — the Marriott Marquis, which had opened in 1985, was the only large modern structure in a landscape of low-rise buildings in deep disrepair.⁵ The city and state had been attempting a redevelopment plan for the 42nd Street corridor since the early 1980s; the condemnation authority was exercised in 1990, authorizing the 42nd Street Development Project to take the properties by eminent domain.⁵ Disney negotiated a lease on the New Amsterdam Theater in 1995 and began a restoration that the city helped finance; the theater reopened in 1997. The Bertelsmann Building, One Times Square, and the Morgan Stanley Tower filled in through the late 1990s; Condé Nast moved into 4 Times Square in 1999, consolidating its titles — including The New Yorker, which relocated from its longtime offices at 25 West 43rd Street — in the new tower at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. By 2001, the area was global-tourist territory: LED density doubling each year, the Good Morning America studio at Broadway and 44th occupying what had been a theater lobby, Madame Tussauds operating where the peep shows had been.⁵

The two migrations — Chelsea and Times Square — produced similar visible results through dissimilar mechanisms. The galleries chose Chelsea through market preference; no public authority directed them, and no eminent domain was exercised. The 42nd Street redevelopment was a public taking, subsidized by city and state, executed over a decade through instruments of municipal power. Both produced block-level shifts from one user class to another within roughly seven years. The difference was negotiation: the galleries were the market; the theater district was what the market could not be trusted to produce on its own.

The Exodus

Little Italy, by 1989, was already a name for a neighborhood that had largely ceased to exist as a residential community. The four or so blocks of Mulberry Street south of Canal that retained the name, the signage, the restaurant facades, and the September festival were inhabited by a population that was, in terms of Italian-American origin, perhaps five percent of the area — the rest having moved to Bensonhurst, Carroll Gardens, Howard Beach, or the suburbs during the postwar decades when car ownership and middle-class wages had made departure possible and the old residential density of the tenement blocks had made departure appealing.⁶ The businesses that remained — the restaurants on Mulberry, the cannoli shops, the few remaining Italian imports on Grand Street — were oriented toward the tourists who came for the performance of the neighborhood rather than toward the residents who might have needed a neighborhood in the functional sense. The San Gennaro Festival, in the third week of September each year, drew hundreds of thousands of visitors to the same four-block corridor; for that week the neighborhood was at its most intensely itself, which meant it was at its most thoroughly a spectacle. The Most Precious Blood Church on Baxter Street was the religious anchor: real masses, real sacraments, a real congregation, however attenuated. The neighborhood persisted as signage and streetscape without persisting as community.

The pattern repeated in Yorkville, though with different timing and a different surviving inventory. The German-American enclave around East 86th Street and Second Avenue had been the largest German-speaking district in the United States at the peak of its early-twentieth-century density; by 1989 the population had thinned considerably, the community reduced to a set of surviving institutions rather than a residential critical mass. Schaller & Weber, the butcher at 1654 Second Avenue, had been there since the 1930s and was still operating — selling Westphalian ham, weisswurst, smoked meats, the inventory of a working-class German immigrant kitchen. The Heidelberg Restaurant occupied 1648 Second, between 85th and 86th, the last of the original German restaurants on the East 86th Street block. Kleine Konditorei and Café Geiger were within a few hundred feet. The Goethe-Institut, which had occupied 1014 Fifth Avenue since the early 1960s, was closed that autumn for a renovation in the early 1990s. By 2001 the streetscape around East 86th was still recognizable — the butcher and one or two of the restaurants were still there — but the working-language demographic had thinned further with each passing decade. The anchor venues persisted; the residential community that had given them their reason for being had not. The customers who still came were, in increasing proportion, people who remembered the neighborhood rather than people who lived in it.

The Meatpacking District, in the blocks around Gansevoort Street west of Ninth Avenue, offered the third instance of the pattern — different from both Little Italy and Yorkville in that the exodus was an industry’s rather than a population’s, but structurally similar in the relationship between name and reality. In 1989 the district was still a functioning meatpacking district: the slaughterhouses and cold-storage facilities and rendering operations that had occupied the blocks since the late nineteenth century were still operating, if at reduced scale, and the pre-dawn hours on Gansevoort were still marked by the sounds and smells of that industry — truck bays open, the cobblestones wet, the air at certain hours holding the density of the work that went on there. The gay leather bars that had defined the nightlife of the area in the 1970s were mostly gone: the Mineshaft had been raided closed by the Health Department in the mid-1980s; the Anvil had already closed. Florent, the 24-hour French diner on Gansevoort that had opened in the mid-1980s, was the first business whose presence indicated that the neighborhood was becoming a place people came to voluntarily, rather than a place they came to work or to cruise or to buy meat in bulk.

The decade-long displacement of the meatpacking operations — which were expensive to run in New York City and could be run more cheaply in the outer boroughs or in New Jersey — coincided with, and in part enabled, a sequential series of new uses. Hogs & Heifers, a biker bar trading on the working district’s remaining grit, opened in 1992 and drew a clientele of tourists and celebrities alongside the meatpackers. Queer nightlife arrived later in a different register from the vanished leather bars: Mother and the Lure, venues whose identity was legible to a crowd that included tourists and bridge-and-tunnel visitors alongside the neighborhood’s older regulars. Fashion and media followed at the end of the decade; Pastis opened in 2000, Stella McCartney shortly after. The trans sex workers who had worked the stroll on West 14th and on the side streets across the 1990s were pushed out by NYPD enforcement as the neighborhood’s commercial value rose. The name on the street signs was still Gansevoort, the cobblestones were still there, but the industry that named the district was functionally absent by 2001. Three neighborhoods, three departures, one pattern: the name outlasts the thing it names, sometimes by half a generation.

The Continuation

Washington Heights was not a neighborhood in transition in 1989. It was a neighborhood in consolidation. The blocks between 155th Street and the northern tip of the island — the Heights and Inwood, the westernmost ridge of Manhattan where the schist comes to the surface and the streets run steep from the Harlem River toward the Hudson — were the Dominican capital of the United States by any measure that counted: the density of Dominican-owned businesses along Broadway and on the side streets, the radio stations, the newspapers, the social clubs and community organizations that had been building institutional presence since the mid-1960s immigration wave and had deepened through the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990 Census recorded Latinos at sixty-seven percent of Washington Heights and Inwood; by 2000 the figure had risen to seventy-four percent.⁷⁸ The trajectory was not toward displacement but toward deeper settlement.

The physical markers of the neighborhood in 1989 were still the physical markers in 2001: the colmado with its plantains and yuca and malanga stacked on shelves built for the space they had; the social club whose door opened onto the sidewalk on summer evenings; merengue and bachata from second-floor speakers on weekend afternoons; gypsy cabs working out of bases on Broadway and on St. Nicholas Avenue; botánicas on Amsterdam. Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center at Broadway and 168th was the largest single employer in upper Manhattan throughout the period. The George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal at 178th and Broadway anchored the northern end. The 33rd Precinct was created in the mid-1990s by splitting the lower part of the 34th Precinct’s territory, a geographic administrative acknowledgment that the population density in the southern Heights had reached a scale that one precinct could not adequately cover. Otherwise the bones held. Inwood, at the northern tip, shifted through the 1990s toward an extension of the Heights’ demographic rather than persisting as the Irish-American neighborhood it had been through the 1980s; by 2001 the Dyckman Street corridor and the blocks south of it were functionally Washington Heights, while the north end around Inwood Hill Park retained its older character.

Harlem was a different version of the same pattern — a neighborhood that deepened and transformed from within during the period rather than turning over in the way the East Village or SoHo had. In 1989, 125th Street still had empty lots and blighted commercial frontages, the long physical legacy of the arson and disinvestment of the previous two decades. The Apollo Theater at 253 West 125th was the anchor, and it had been enough of an anchor to survive years of financial difficulty; the Hotel Theresa at 125th and Seventh Avenue had been converted to senior housing. The African vendor market that had operated on 125th Street between Lenox and Fifth Avenues — a dense row of vendors selling clothing, incense, Afrocentric merchandise, religious items — was closed by the Giuliani administration in October 1994 and the vendors relocated to a fenced lot at 116th and Fifth, a move that generated considerable conflict and that the vendors and their advocates described as punitive.⁹

The federal intervention that reshaped the structural conditions on 125th Street arrived the same year. The Clinton administration’s Empowerment Zone program, designated for central Harlem in 1994 and operationalized through the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation, began flowing money into the neighborhood in 1995: commercial-tenant subsidies, façade-improvement grants, small-business loans, infrastructure investment that had been delayed or deferred through decades of lower priority.⁹ The Pathmark Supermarket at 125th and Lexington Avenue opened in 1999, the first major supermarket in central and east Harlem in roughly thirty years — the span of time during which a neighborhood of several hundred thousand people had been without a large-format grocery store in its own borders.⁹ Harlem USA, the retail and entertainment complex at 125th Street near Frederick Douglass Boulevard — a Magic Johnson-backed nine-screen multiplex alongside an Old Navy, an HMV, and a Disney Store — opened in the spring of 2000.⁹ The brownstone-restoration market in central Harlem, detectable from the mid-1990s, was by 2000 producing prices that made low-six-figure transactions increasingly rare; the properties were moving. East Harlem remained predominantly Puerto Rican but received a substantial Mexican migration through the 1990s that reshaped 116th Street between Lexington and Third as a Mexican commercial corridor. Italian Harlem had reduced to a few blocks around Pleasant Avenue and Rao’s at 455 East 114th, a restaurant operating by reservation only and with a waiting list measured in years, the last legible trace of what had been a neighborhood.

At the southern end of Manhattan, and along the western edge of the island, two neighborhoods spent the period as close to unchanged as Manhattan allowed. The Upper East Side — Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Madison Avenue as the wealth corridor; Lexington and Third as the upper-middle range; Yorkville east of Third moving slowly upward — was the most stable physical environment in the city across these years. The school-uniform-and-doorman-building combination that defined the visual fingerprint of UES childhood in 1989 defined it in 2001; the museums along Fifth Avenue from 70th to 92nd Street anchored the corridor without needing to change anything about themselves. The rent-stabilized walkups east of Third in the 70s and 80s held a stratum of older tenants throughout the period; a person could live on the Upper East Side on a modest income if she had been there long enough to hold a stabilized lease. The West Village — Bleecker between Sixth and Hudson, the streets running west toward the river — held its bookstores, its used-record shops, its Italian salumerias, its older gay bars and their complicated relationship to the pier culture at Christopher Street, through roughly 1998. St. Vincent’s Hospital at 12th and Seventh was the grounding fact of any medical scene in the neighborhood; its emergency department had been the front edge of the AIDS crisis since the early 1980s and remained so through the period. The neighborhoods that did not change were the neighborhoods whose occupants had either the legal protection, the purchasing power, or the institutional density to resist the same market forces that were remaking the blocks five minutes south and east. Stability and instability were not opposites. They were outcomes of the same system, running at different speeds in different directions on different blocks.