NEW YORK, NY

A Conversation

Pete Cenedella, Jon Angeles, and Neil deMause grew up in white middle-class neighborhoods in the New York City metro area in the 1960s and 1970s, and have lived in and around the region, on and off, for most of their lives. One Wednesday in May, they sat down over vegetable dumplings and turnip cakes in Manhattan's Chinatown to discuss their role as gentrifiers, and as gentrified.

Pete: Gentrification is the story of my life. As soon as I was an adult, I was cast out of the neighborhood I grew up in. This was the Upper West Side in the 1980s, which during the Reagan boom became the co-op and condo bedroom community to the first wave of Wall Street types who bum-rushed the city. So I wound up in the East Village, formerly known as the Lower East Side. And I saw the East Village change around me. It's just a constantly repeating struggle - you can go down the list of neighborhood names.

Jon: It seems to happen faster and faster. It took a long time for Soho. Williamsburg is the blink of an eye.

P: I wonder is somebody out there - developers, politicians, whatever - learning some lesson with each new frontier that gets developed. Like you say, Soho was a 20-year trajectory. So why is it that the East Village has taken ten to 15 to 20 years and always has little pockets of holdout, and then you've got Williamsburg where they've just got it down.

J: Soho being manufacturing is different. Whereas the East Village has people who landlords haven't been able to kick out of their buildings yet.

Neil: It's also timing. Soho still exists because of Robert Moses's Lower Manhattan Expressway. It was 25 years when these buildings were sitting there vacant and nobody was developing them because they were about to build an expressway through all of this. Then finally this thing gets abandoned, and it's the late '60s and early '70s and the city's in a financial crisis. People were abandoning the city, they weren't moving into the city. Yuppies didn't exist.

So it took until the '80s to even have gentrification. And I think also you're right that the gentrifiers have gotten smarter. It also doesn't seem like Williamsburg was really organizing against it the way the Lower East Side was.

P: There's a pretty strong resistance movement - and admittedly, it's led by the people that are sort of the "us" of Williamsburg - if we're talking about ourselves as that leading edge of people whose natural proclivity is to live in that gray zone. It's not abandoned, it's not totally poor, it's not completely ethnic, it's mixed, it's got some sort of bohemian aspect in place, yet there's certainly no yuppies in sight. That certainly has been my role - partly because I'm the kind of person who's never going to make a lot of money, but also out of proclivity.

But it's like a seesaw that needs to go one way or the other. And it's at that moment that it's at an equilibrium, and it's kind of a beautiful thing. But then it tilts, and that's it.

N: And it tilts in part because of us.

We've been looking for a place for about two and a half years. And when we were looking at buying something, we decided to stop telling people where we were looking. Because we did not want to create a buzz. We didn't want people to hear, oh, you're looking in that neighborhood? Then the next time it came up in conversation, they would say to their friend, "Oh, I know someone who's looking out there."

J: And then Time Out calls it the next hot neighborhood, which I'm sure they have already anyway.

N: And now we're in that weird place where we're renting. So now do we want to encourage more people like us to move to our neighborhood - and by "people like us" I mean overeducated, underemployed white folks, basically, because that's who we know, being of that class. We could encourage people to move to our neighborhood, and then we'd have more of our friends around, but then that's a beachhead, right?

P: That's that leading wedge of the gentrification process.

N: Our personal interests are completely at odds with our political interests. And our personal monetary interests are at odds with what kind of neighborhood we want to be in.

P: Well, that raises the really important question: Where do the poor go? They're gone from our sight a lot of times, but where have they gone? Because clearly we haven't eradicated poverty. Now, the second part of that question is: Where are the poor in the world? To look at our experiences as 30-something white guys, you would think that really there wasn't that much poverty in the world. We are able to function in ways where we can always get by. We sort of choose this sort of genteel downward mobility. So where the hell are the poor? Because they're out there.

J: I was looking for a temporary place to live in Jersey City last year, and I saw some incredibly dire rooms - basement rooms with no windows, ten by ten, totally substandard by every governmental standard. And they weren't cheap - 400 or 500 bucks a month. I think the poor have moved in with each other, and into places like that, and are not visible for that reason.

N: We get pushed to Greenpoint, and they get pushed to basements. When we were looking in Sunset Park, we saw places where under the stoop would be this warren - four rooms in a row, each like you describe them, ten by ten. Sometimes there would be one person, sometimes there would be a little family living in the one room. Out in the little hall would be this smelly kitchen - a sink and a hot plate, which everyone in the four rooms would share, and they would share the bathroom.

The one that really struck me was this place that actually was in very nice shape. But it had been divided into 11 apartments - it was a two-family row house, basically, that was being used as an SRO.

P: This was in Sunset Park?

N: This was in Sunset Park. And all the owner could talk about was: "The rent roll's 6300 dollars a month! It's a gold mine!' So we go down to the basement, and then we go down to the cellar. And he's showing us the rooms that he's built there: ŒLook at this! This is good walls here!" And I say: ŒYes, it's a very nice wall - you're trying to house people in a cellar!' And he was very proud of it.

And the problem of course was, when we're looking just for somewhere to live, we have to pay a price that competes with people who want to be slumlords. If we wanted to buy a two-family house and rent out part of it, we couldn't charge a reasonable rent. Because the high rent is built into the mortgage.

P: There was a bust a couple years ago, in Jackson Heights, another neighborhood that has gotten the "up and coming" tag from TONY. And it was exactly what you all are describing: it was a basement warren. The whole building was just choked with people, and they slept in shifts. If you've read Luc Sante's Low Life, he's describing the proletarian barracks of turn of the century New York on the Lower East Side, with the new immigrants at that time, doing this. We don't really live in a different world, we haven't eradicated poverty in any way. It's just that the standards of wealth have gotten so opulent and so routine. And at the same time, nobody wants to look at it. There's not the Jacob Riis imperative. There's no moral shock or outrage at this thing in our midst. It's like "Just make it go away, I don't want to even know."

J: The New York metro area and California are the two areas of the country where the number of people living officially below the poverty level has increased the last ten years. Everywhere else it's decreased - the whole middle of the country, Appalachia is dramatically more wealthy, such as it is. When you consider how much faster than inflation housing has increased in the New York area...

P: But the supreme irony of that is that this is where the jobs are. You got to come here to work. You come here to work, but what are you going to do? There's no place to live except in these warrens.

J: It's only okay if you're able to make dollars and change them into a weaker currency, and support a huge bunch of people back in your native country. Then at least you can figure, okay, my life completely sucks, but I'm just writing it off in the interest of making life better for a whole lot of other people.

N: Is it a similar situation in southeast Asia, where it's the economic center of the region, but again you have people living in substandard warrens?

J: In Bangkok that would be true for sure. There are two different economies in Thailand: one in the Bangkok metro area, and one in basically the whole rest of the country. And there are huge amounts of migrant workers in the Bangkok area.

In China, where I was for eight months in the early '90s, it really had just become possible for people to leave their work groups and move to a different part of the country without having to pay enormous bribes. Since then, Shanghai, I assume, is just warrens galore filled with people from other parts of China, where it's very poor in the countryside.

I was buying crafts and sending them back here to be sold, for my parents' store on Long Island. Initially I just saved up money and went and traveled around for about eight months. Then the second time I went I started to buy some stuff. And then, the emphasis did change over time - there were a couple of trips toward the end of my travels in Asia that were more economic. But mostly I was just traveling around eating and learning languages and spending not much time working.

P: So have you noticed any kind of linkup between the local experience of being in this position in gentrification, and your sort of low-budg tourism?

J: I'm going to just be very blunt about making it a racial question. I think white people are the most destructive poisoners, because it's white people who are afraid to be away from their own kind who are the bulk of the people coming along with lots of money.

Traveling, language is a big part of it. People who are handy linguistically - wow, they are the really destructive ones. They can go to places where other tourists would have second thoughts about going. China is a perfect example. I come along to a town that's really pretty neat, and there are all sorts of hill tribe people in colorful authentic native clothing roaming around. And I think gee, this is great, I love it. Then as I'm traveling around I tell other people. And then as soon as there's more than a trickle of people... The initial people are the people who don't require any tourist infrastructure. And I don't know where exactly the moment comes, but there's a moment where the tourist infrastructure starts to exist, where it's not necessary to speak the native language, you can get by in English.

And then the floodgates open. Once there's a little bit of an infrastructure, then you have a Hard Rock Café. I mean, I was in one town that had five Hard Rock Cafés when I was in China. None of them, of course, with any connection to the Hard Rock Café.

P: The analogy to what you're saying then, to go back to gentrification: When I moved to Fifth Street between Second and Third Avenues in 1982, there were no boutiques in what's now the East Village. There weren't chichi little cafes yet. Not that I don't love my little cafes. But the point is, in terms of its business infrastructure, it looked largely as it had looked during the downturn years of the '50s and '60s and early '70s. There were still a lot of vacant lots, there were a lot of Polish businesses, there were a lot of poorer businesses, and there were a lot of bodegas and little Dominican restaurants. And a lot of locked doors and gates. And I was the tourist, if you will, who came in at a time when that was fine for me. That's where I wanted to be; I thought that was interesting. You're a flaneur, in the grand tradition: I'm hipper than my compatriots, because I'm willing to be in this funky neighborhood. Or go be in China. You've got a whole series of travel books called "Off the Beaten Path." It's a marketing scheme.

J: I learned pretty quickly that tour guides were of no interest to me. By the time I got to China, I never read a single book on where I should be going.

P: But the people who come after you are precisely the market for that stuff.

J: Well, the person who writes that book will be in the guest house, and hear me saying: Oh, such and such a town is really great, all the hill tribes had super clothing on. The next thing you know, it's got a star on the map.

N: You're the first scout out into Indian Territory.

P: Exactly. It's the frontier.

J: Those were disaffected people who were out on the frontier. Those were people who didn't want to deal with society.

P: They're weirdos. Just like us. And at some point you're able to keep some balance where you think, this is good, it's authentic, but I'm just here. I'm this gray person in this area. And you know what? That's bullshit.

J: I'm already pretty freaked out and unhappy at that moment of equilibrium - that's already too late.

P: Well, that's more the case now, I think. You recognize it for a moment of momentary equilibrium.

N: Twenty years ago you're living on Fifth Street and you see a cafe open, and you think: Wow, this is great! Not only is this this cool funky neighborhood, but now I've got a cafe to go to! Now, you see that happen, and you think, oh, there goes the neighborhood.

P: That's it. I've got five minutes to get out. Unless I want to be mistaken for what I probably really am.

N: What you really are?

P: You know. Some sort of gentrifier.

N: But you're not a gentrifier in the same way. You are the scout. You are the frontiersman.

P: But what happened to them? They had to keep going, and then-

N: And then they ran into the ocean.

P: And frankly, how many Indians did they have to kill to have their little fantasy? If you want to push this metaphor into the red.

N: It's the same impulse that's driving people: to find that unspoiled place where they can escape from whatever society they were trying to escape from. You can go back to the friggin Puritans, right? You're trying to escape from it, and set up your own little enclave somewhere where you can just go and be whatever sort of freak you want to be.

P: Slave traders.

N: Johnny Appleseed. Have you read The Botany of Desire? It's a book about apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes, and how these plants developed in concert with human desires. The modern apple was developed to basically provide alcohol to the European pioneers in North America. That's what Johnny Appleseed was doing, he was bringing around the seeds. Apples don't grow true: If you take a bunch of seeds from a Red Delicious apple, you'll get all kinds of crap, most of which won't be edible - but you can make great cider.

But he was this weirdo. He had strange cultish religious beliefs, and would go around barefoot and befriend natives. He had to be out on the frontier by himself, carrying a big canoeload of apple seeds, because there's nowhere else that he could possibly survive.

But by doing this, he was always right on the edge. And he was selling apple trees to the more established settled farming families who needed an apple orchard - the government, in order to let people homestead, required that you planted a certain number of apple trees, because they figured that that way you weren't just try to flip the property. Apple trees take a while to grow, they want to make sure you're actually going to farm the damn thing.

So he was out there, Johnny Appleseed, the Starbucks purveyor of the 1820s, on the frontier. And whenever you get out there you see, oh look, it's apple trees, it's a familiar sight. This must be an okay place to live - we're not in Indian territory.

P: We can get latte! We can get cider!

N: So I think it's the same impulse that's driving it all along. Now, It's going to be interesting to see what happens when we run out of planet...

P: This is what I was going to say before. The problem with the frontier ideology is this notion that there's always some other place, some unspoiled, virgin territory -

J: Which is so long past, at this point.

P: So we're all Teddy Roosevelt's children, we've all turned the frontier back in on itself. In 1900, Frederick Turner officially declares the frontier closed. Teddy Roosevelt is an amateur historian, he loves Turner. But as Turner points out, it's the frontier that has driven the American character. And for these people, it is. And on some level, maybe we're these people's bastard children. And so TR remakes the whole notion of the United States in the image of turning the frontier inward again - and outward.

You've got American imperialism on the one hand, and its little cousin the tourist, but there's also the frontiers back in the cities, or back in the state parks, or back wherever you may find it. And you recolonize and reconquer territories - always from savages, right? Always from the poor.

I've thought about it before, and it's made me want to slit my fucking wrists. Because you have to look at your own place in it. But what can you do?

J: Well, one thing you don't do is you don't write about your tourist experiences. I may have let slide certain things, I may have told people in person too much. But in fact I would never have written about the places I went to, for fear that it would be out of my hands as soon as I wrote about it.

P: Though of course you don't want to let go of being able to go be a tourist. Because on some level the most radical interpretation of a lot of what you're saying is: So stay home.

J: What we're bemoaning is the homogenization that comes with the fully-grown tourist industry. I really value the time that I spent traveling, because it was incredibly educational. But it was educational because the places that I was traveling to were different than where I was coming from.

P: Because they hadn't been spoiled by your kind yet!

J: Exactly. Once they're the same, then you might as well stay home. As a buyer of baskets from native peoples, I would buy a lot of things that were old. And I had very mixed feelings about that. I thought it was pretty obviously destructive, because many of these people, when they sold a basket, sometimes they would make another basket, and sometimes they would just take the money from the basket, and buy a plastic bowl with it. And there, poof, in an instant goes something beautiful about these people's culture.

N: Interaction between different cultures doesn't have to be a bad thing - you wouldn't have Italian food without Columbus, right? There are all sorts of good things that cultures can get from each other; it's the power relationship. It would be very different if you were a Chinese person coming to visit New York; you wouldn't be worried about your impact, and your homogenization of the local culture.

P: Well, you mention Columbus. There's also the discipline of anthropology, which is the great shock troops of empire. I went to India, when I was still an undergrad, and I was still taking anthropology classes, and studying politics. I went to City University of New York, and a lot of my friends were from all different parts of the world, so it felt very organic that I would go to India. And I'm sure I still have somewhere these journals filled with incredible self-doubt and soul-searching about my place, going around doing this low-budget tourism, some of it off the beaten path, some of it going to see the Taj Mahal, because hey, what are you going to do, you go to India, you gotta see the Taj Mahal. I remember feeling the weight of my gaze was different from, for instance, an Indian woman that I happened to look at, in the bazaar of some small Indian town like Pushka. Oh, I'm sorry, erase the reference to the specific town.

J: Don't worry, it's ruined by now anyway.

P: Trust me, it was ruined already. A lot of hippies there. But if she were here on my block, walking down my street, and I was sitting on my stoop, and she was looking at me, her gaze is somehow intrinsically different from mine walking down her street. And it made me want to close my eyes. It made me want to not have that gaze.

J: I never carried a camera the whole time I was in Asia. I've become even more anti-photography since then - I hate having my photograph taken, and I hate taking other people. But the gaze of a camera is something so much harsher and heavier.

P: When I was in India, I had this little camera, and I was on the fence about exactly what you're talking about. And needless to say, as the trip went on and I got more and more concerned about these questions about my gaze, I took less and less pictures. But nonetheless, I probably went through four rolls of film in six weeks.

J: That's nothing. As you know, you see tons of people whose cameras never leave their face.

P: What I basically did was an image I knew I really want to burn into my mind, I'm going to stare at it, and then I'm going to take a picture of it. Whatever. I tried to somehow devise a system that was purer.

J: Making you very unusual for even thinking about it.

P: But nonetheless taking the pictures. I got home, and after a week or two, I decided I'd develop the film. And while I was waiting for them to develop, I found this thing happening to me that I was getting more and more excited about seeing the pictures. So I went to the pharmacy the day that they were due, and I excitedly plunked down my money, and they handed me these thin envelopes. I had not loaded the film correctly or something, and they were completely blank. There were no photographs.

I walked away saying, all right, lesson learned: Don't take yourself out of the moment.

J: I mean, I guess it's great if they can spark some sort of reverie or story that you were to tell someone. But everything we experience becomes part of us. You're constantly changing, you're constantly learning as we go through life. And think that's retarded by being behind the camera.

I did encounter some people over years spent in Asia who I thought were sensible photographers; who would keep their cameras in a bag, and only take it out at the time that there was something they really wanted to photograph. They were usually not photographing people or social situations, they were taking landscapes and architectural photographs and things like that. There's something so inherently intrusive about taking a person's photograph.

N: I'm interested to hear from either of you if you've ever heard back from the subjects - the objects - of this process. Conversations with the people in the Chinese towns, or in the neighborhoods, about how they feel about this. Because there are people who do like having their pictures taken; there are people who do like having their towns gentrified, or turned into a tourist trap, because it means a job, or maybe they like Starbucks.

J: It's very easy as someone who comes from a "modern culture" to say that it's really super that these people who aren't from a modern culture should stay just the way they are.

Is it really bad that the Akaa tribe gets plastic bowls? And are they inherently less Akaa because they use plastic? And I guess you have to say Yes, because their baskets were unique, and their plastic bowls no longer are. But it's still not necessarily something earth-shatteringly bad.

But I hate the modern world no matter where it is. I hate the modern world right here in the United States. I would be perfectly happy to be living, optimally, I think before electricity would be fine, but I think before recorded music.

P: When I went back to school at the age of 24 and started studying anthropology and politics, I was making all these connections between the radical politics that I was coming up with and the anthropology that I was studying. This was the early days of Cultural Survival Quarterly, before it became a sort of a boutique for indingenous peoples to sell their goods on the world market. For the most part it seemed to be politically radical, well-meaning anthropologists, who, as I found myself doing, were kind of romantic champions of hunting and gathering. Basically looking at the sum total of "human development" and saying, Jesus, what a mess. What a load of crap.

The anthropolgist Richard Lee did a lot of work with the !Kung-San in Southern Africa, and they came to the conclusion that - well, there's two logical leaps. The first is that the !Kung can somehow stand in for humankind in some pure, more authentic form. And the second that the !Kung, and therefore all of humanity in its earlier form, had more leisure time than we do in our modern society, that they were much more egalitarian than we are, that they tended to raise happier, healthier children, that they have a longer lifespan - that they were basically just living the good life.

So the conclusion is that we've taken not one but a series of dreadful wrong turns, to get to our cities and our specialized divisions of labor and all this. When you look at a "simple society" where people all chip in and do the work together, and where families or groups of people all sit around for hours telling stories and looking at the sky and having fun, sucking up the mystery of the universe - it's a lovely vision. And it led me to really romanticize non-modern culture in all its forms, and to think, well, squatting, for instance, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan is really a kind of a modern primitive thing. And what you're seeing is the cracks of our modern society, where it breaks down, is something where people are living the way hunters and gatherers live.

Then one day it occurred to me that that's sort of like Pol Pot's starting point. Pol Pot wrote this brilliant disseration at the Sorbonne where he did a total history of Vietnamese society - sort of a Marxist anthropological analysis, looking at these modes of production: you go through hunting and gathering, and horticulture, simple low-level agriculture, big agriculture, and then the economy that comes with imperialism, which is this push to modernity. And he says, you know, I'm not so sure about hunting and gathering, but horticulture to low-level agriculture, that's swell. That made a lot of sense, and after that everything got bastardaized and fucked up. So he went and he tried to do it.

Obviously I'm not going to be Pol Pot, but I don't want to romanticize and go down this slippery slope where you're saying, "Modernity is so fucked up, and we should go back." You can't. How do you do that? How do you wrench people out of the present?

N: There's a certain irony to any of us saying we want to go back to a time before recorded music.

P: Meanwhile we're recording this conversation on this high-tech-

N: And all of us are hip-deep in recorded music our entire lives.

J: But my point was that I would be willing to trade that-

N: Trade that for the people sitting around and making their own music and all the things that have been lost. But we all understand very well the lure of the modernity and the technology and the things that you get. Modernity didn't just spring up from the drive for capital.

J: People wanted recliners, too.

N: People want plastic bowls. People want plastic bowls for really good reasons: They're easy to clean, they last a really long time. There are all sorts of horrible things that come along with plastic bowls, but there's all sorts of reasons why they do want them.

J: I think it's maybe impossibleto know what you've got until it's gone. In Thailand, people are remarkably adept at choosing parts of modern culture that are practical for them and useful for them, and leaving other ones behind. But wow, what a strong culture they have, and what a sensible bunch of people they are.

To compare it to say, Malaysia, which is just across the border, where people want everything: They want trash compactors and microwave ovens. I think it's just a proud culture that's made them not want to just grab the whole thing willy-nilly. I think they're aware that it's not all good.

P: My impression is that most people who are either in fact or the potential sort of subjects of processes like gentrification, tourism, the penetration of their markets with all kinds of commodities they don't need, they're mostly just really too busy to think about it in the abstract. What they really want is to make a living, and provide for their families and themselves. On some level the fact that we're sitting here and having this conversation as an abstraction is a measure of our position in the world.

N: Most people don't have three hours to sit around in Chinatown in the middle of the day to have this sort of conversation. Or to travel.

P: And the debate at our level of being too educated is really split along these absurd extremes of: No, everything about capitalism and modernity is awesome and fucking great and everyone's buying in and that's what poor people want, they just want to have their standard of living raised and the best way to do it is the market. Or this romanticized-

J: Patronizing.

N: "Let's all go eat dirt."

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