A Few Notes on the Gentrification of The Lower-East Side
I moved out of my tiny central Brooklyn studio to the Lower East Side in December 2020, lured by the convenience of a cheap and massive (by Manhattan standards) pandemic apartment. I had my eye on a doctoral program in New Jersey at that point, so the idea of living within closer proximity of the PATH train drew me in. I quickly fell in love with the area after a few months living there. Unlike most places in Manhattan, this area still felt like it was part of a real city and not just a Disneyland for tourists: there were charming independent bookstores, thriving immigrant-run small businesses, a diverse mix of people, racially and socioeconomically, old-time Jewish delis that survived the test of time, vintage stores run by aging 70s punks, and other things that distinguish it from the bland mix of chain stores and luxury condos that is Manhattan these days. Yes, the area was gentrifying, or maybe past that point, but there was a real history that was breathing and palpable on every block.
Little did I know that my rent would begin to skyrocket within a year, and that I would live within a stone’s throw of the flashpoint of a very particular form of internet discourse. Over the past months, articles about my neighborhood began to explode on social media. In particular, I started noticing an obsession with that small triangle of pedestrian walkways just behind the East Broadway F stop, on the border of the Lower East Side and Chinatown. First came the memes, calling the area “Dimes Square,” a cringey pun referencing an overpriced and overrated restaurant/café in its vicinity. Then came the news that the area was officially trendy. The forecast was that we were becoming “nolitafied.” Just like that, I was beginning to witness the creation of a fake, hype based neighborhood right before my eyes. Or rather, a new “scene” of young people creating a place with little regard for the history of the neighborhood and the people who for years have called it home.
As a scholar of urban environments, I am perpetually fascinated by the ways in which a marketable idea of “cool” or authenticity (to borrow an idea from Sharon Zukin) is bolstered in the interests of capital in order to perpetuate a cycle of urban gentrification and financialization. We see this in city after city, with a homogenous instagrammable aesthetic made for tourists taking over the urban space and pricing out residents. My writing on this topic has gone viral once before, with regards to my hometown. I plan a dissertation on the topic with regards to Mexico City, and have a short ethnographic manuscript about Bushwick stashed away in my hard drive. This corner of my neighborhood is no exception to these phenomena. Every day, new expensive restaurants and boutiques selling 700 dollar hats seem to pop up around here. I begin to sense that my days in the neighborhood are increasingly numbered.
However, there is something here that is different for me. I am intent on demolishing the absurd mythos of “Dimes Square”, not just because I am an urbanist who studies gentrification or because I happen to live around here and its presence threatens to raise my rent, but because I am finding several loose threads in the discourse which I think warrant deeper discussion from an academic standpoint. Mainly, the fact that this is not just a case of trendy gentrifiers acting as the foot soldiers of real-estate interests. Something much darker seems to be at play here.
In particular, I began to notice breadcrumbs hinting at a darker underbelly to this whole thing. Several of the pieces written around this place hint at various particularly troubling aspects of “Dimes Square,” namely ,this crowd’s association with a neoreactionary political streak, which may have implications beyond this tiny microcosm. Articles on the local scene have hinted at dark money funding from Peter Thiel funneled towards the local art scene, a ‘vibe shift’ towards anti-wokeness, flirtation with White Nationalist philosophers and ideas, mass conversion to a particularly fundamentalist and anti-Semitic brand of Catholicism, adoption of the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and far-Right militia groups as a fashion statement, and others. It is clear that this neighborhood is developing a new ethos, that seeks to dabble in reactionary politics as fashionable aesthetic, or a fetishization of transgression for its own sake. However, these threads are just left at that. Hints. In reality, this might be the actual story worth pursuing about what is happening here. And yet, this angle is merely teased and never fleshed out. The insidiousness is just left to simmer. Nobody is willing to expound on the implications of these ideas for local politics or what their presence in New York in particular means. And that is a tragedy.
In this sense, “Dimes Square” is the uglier, White Supremacist face of gentrification laid bare. A historic immigrant enclave in the process of being colonized not just by real-estate, but aided by an emerging Neo-Fascist intelligentsia and reactionary NFT nouveau riche types with money from powerful venture capital interests aimed at remaking US society in the image. Gentrifiers nakedly embracing the position of colonizers on what Smith once called the “urban frontier” It seems just too on the nose that it cannot be unintentional. Whether planned or not, the alliance of real estate, venture capital and far-Right gentrifying creatives on the Lower East Side points at a disturbing new turn in the transformation of New York City.
