Yeah, "place" gets trickier. I remember after two years away from NY coming
back to find a block I had lived on intact except for two buildings, the
scenes of all my early loves, which had been replaced by empty lots. Felt
like I was floating, and not pleasantly, in space. Not to speak of the
change in the character and population of entire cities. Even places where
the architecture is largely protected undergo the same: the Marais in
Paris, once the worst of slums, is renovated to house the wealthy,
Menilmontant loses its workingclass population to drab suburbs, etc. And
we're all perforce part of the process.
I've been on the other side of this process, too. Years ago I bought a
house in a predominantly Irish and Irish-American workingclass neighborhood
in Brooklyn (but with a fair proportion of New York's other ethnic
populations) that bordered an area that had once been wealthy, had fallen
on hard times and had become wealthy--and very fashionable--again. I needed
a place to live, the house was reasonably cheap (and in need of a hell of a
lot of work), and I expected that it was a good investment. I was the first
outsider in the neighborhood, as far as I could tell, in a couple of
generations. This was the pattern:
Each house was two floors, divided into upper and lower flats. On the upper
floor, at the head of the stairs, was a small separate room, with its own
entrance to the hallway. The proprietary family would live in the
downstairs flat. The separate room upstairs would become the domain of
their oldest child when he or she had reached marriageable age and
presumably was working and paying rent. The upstairs flat would be rented
to a newly-married couple from the neighborhood, who would live there until
one of their parents retired or died, at which point they would inherit or
buy the parental house and move into its downstairs flat, etc.
This system had worked since the houses were built c. 1900, but depended
upon rents and social class remaining more-or-less stable. Rents when I
moved in were in the area of $125 a month. My tenants, refugees from the
astronomical rents of the fashionable neighborhood, paid $750, which
provided me with a very small profit after expenses and a cheap place to
live. And the neighborhood system began to fall apart, as it would have
anyway.
At 11:59 AM 2/23/2001 -0600, Chris Hayden wrote:
>> >
>> > 'rootless' yes on the grounds of an abolished family, a childhood
>> > disappeared under the bulldozer, and an inhabitation of that City which
>>is
>> > Every City
>> > but no in that my voice, my accent, is stamped with what I am, am from
>> >
>Chris Hayden comments: That's deep. I somehow had thought the process of
>so-called Urban Renewal-- I call it Urban Removal--was somehow only going on
>only here in the U.S. Have experienced the same feeling of past bulldozed
>under, connection with city I have lived in the past fifty years fading with
>each building and block demolished.
>
>I would describe my tribe as underground urban intellectual
>
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