Twenty Blocks

North window, birdsong; south window, sirens
 

Turning the steel handle of the window crank my hand connects with the 1930s, when Chelsea was built in art deco curves. Manhattan’s construction boom before the depression included a series of residential buildings in West Chelsea, a few streets back from the industrial piers, which were aimed at attracting office workers to a new convenient neighbourhood. The High Line was also built to elevate the freight railroad that then ran down 10th Ave (“Death Ave”).

Since the levelling of New York, after the time of the Lenape, Chelsea has been home to different ends of the class spectrum: wealthy settlers in the eighteenth century; workers of the docks and riverside industry in the nineteenth; residents of the two public housing projects built in the 1940s and 1960s, and of such urbane residences as this one. The inhabitants of the apartment, with whom I have traded places for the month, moved here from other parts of the city in the late 1980s. At the time, members of the queer community were beginning to move up the street from Greenwich Village, which, amid the AIDS crisis, was gentrifying fast.

If this seems like a quick ten words for what became a tragic set of changes, it is. Sarah Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind recounts from personal experience the ways in which the tens of thousands of people dying from AIDS, hence vacating their flats (81,542 in NYC alone by her time of writing in 2008) meant that real estate prices could be hitched up all-the-more quickly. At the same time, a mainstream mindset of homogeneity — aside from the typologies of choice within choice of consumerism — was encouraged by the political class, to erase AIDS deaths from public consciousness and obscure the accountability of those who had stigmatised the disease and blocked funding for research and treatment. Chelsea wouldn’t become a visibly gay neighbourhood until the mid-1990s, as James writes to me: “Heading up from the Village, people knew they had to stop holding hands once they crossed 14th Street.”

Schulman suggests that the time of gentrification must pass, but this has not yet happened, and it seems that as long as there are ways to turn property over, the logic of pioneering profit will continue. Now, with most of the gay-run coffee shops and bars gone, there is another level of hypergentrication: the starchitected skyscrapers alongside the developed Highline path. Here apartments sell for many tens of millions, often to overseas buyers or absent investors: render ghost settings with plush living rooms and ground floor gyms, that, from the raised city park, you can see right in to. West Chelsea has the fourth starkest income inequality in New York — a match for the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, which the British settlers of course named it after.

It is lonely to stay in a neighbourhood dominated by chain stores and fitness centres. From Berlin, even as the city comes into its own cosmopolitanism and patchy affluence, the contrasts of capital are loud and lurid. But walking towards the water there are those early red brick dwellings with long stoops and yellow-turning trees; there are the sports courts and bright murals of the projects; there are old depots with continuous glass windows, vast like a steamliner, catching glitter. Whatever the vulgarities, the inconsistencies of world view, there is always potential to become Romantic for the city.
Chasing the scent of weed down the Highline at sunset, grasses lit in a way that makes me momentarily sympathetic towards “urban regeneration”. Easily moved by the miniature Statue of Liberty raising her beacon in the distance — beckoning the beholder into just what kind of present dream? At the river I’m wetted by a landing water plane in the still warm air. Derek Walcott’s poem written for a street a little further south:
 

tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper

it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water

down littered streets that lead you to no water

and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

— from “Bleecker Street, Summer”

It is not summer, should be fall, but few leaves have fallen because, as Anne Boyer writes, “we are living in a phenological catastrophe,” or at least, confusion. They are constructing the “Winter Village” on Bryant Park but everyone is in tees. A butterfly on 8th Ave; wasps sucking honey at the greens market; a girl reading fantasy in hard copy; all possible signs of an era soon lost.

The art deco foyer, with turquoise streamlined armchairs and black-and-cream tiled floor, is invariably better dressed than me. In the foyer, there is a poster about a meeting to address homelessness in the area. I don’t go because feel too much of an outsider, but I regret not finding out what the clash of lines “tackling the problem / what we can do to help,” really meant. “The exit from our building is less than pleasant,” or, “this is the worsening of a social crisis, in which we are implicated”? Likely both views were presented but in the days that follow I notice the homeless on the block — men and women, majority Black — are fewer in number, and that some faces have changed. I wonder if this and the meeting are related, or if my perception is skewed; whether some were “moved on.” The next morning, a police fundraiser on the telephone. “Can we count on you, ma’am, to make a donation to the local precinct?” “I don't live in this neighbourhood,” I say, “Just visiting,” but what I think, as I put down the corded receiver, is, “I don’t give money to police.”

Inside the flat, it could just as easily be Reagan’s as Drump’s America. The Silence = Death posters; artworks and paraphernalia related to the ACT UP years; a David Wojnarowicz diptych: “losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country”; and tacked to the door John & Yoko’s “WAR IS OVER — If You Want It” poster, which, at the beginning of each new year, Yoko takes out whole-page ads in the New York Times to have printed.

On the streets the robust rhetoric of the American dream rings strong. “That’s America — You make it, they clap; you fail, they boo.” “Have a good day… just think positive”; God blesses aplenty. From the living room I can overhear conversations of these lives passing by: the processing of work, worries, dates, dinner plans, with a friend on the other end of the phone. No walk is wasted, no free call-time unused. The city speaks to itself, a chatterbox with ceaseless fuel. And for those looking down into the mirrors of their phones, a corrective: Eyes up!