“Rent” the Broadway musical portraying the bohemian life in NYC’s East Village in the early 1990’s is closing this September. This passing in the cultural life of the city and an article in today’s New York Times examining the changes that have occurred in New York City since the times the show was set in have me reflecting on my own tenure in the Big Apple.

I should start by saying I never saw “Rent“. I’m not much for musicals and in fact have never seen a single one since I moved to New York in 1994 for college. But what I’ve shared with Jonathan Larson’s bohemian epic is a neighborhood: the East Village. A neighborhood that has constantly changed since my arrival in New York City at a speed I never dreamed possible for a piece of land. The East Village intimately introduced me to gentrification, a force that has been a constant throughout my adult life, and a fitting associate, seeing how I fast realized after moving into the area that I was a gentrifier.

The rough New York that my parents had feared was still visceral upon my arrival downtown. Pot dealers still lined St. Mark’s Place with their ever-present calls of “Smoke, smoke” to passersby. The “juice bars” and other storefronts that functioned as little more than retail illicit drug shops were to be found with a simple walk around the neighborhood. Prostitutes prowled 9th and 10th Streets around my dormitory building and it was not an uncommon sight to see a pimp stop by for his money or even to smack one of his workers around. But even as I was beginning the process of acclimating myself to the city, I noticed that something was changing. Initially it was forays deeper into the neighborhood, pushing into Alphabet City’s 4 “Letter Avenues” which at the time were labeled by college kids, going from west to east toward the East River, as :

• Avenue A: Adventurous
• Avenue B: Brave
• Avenue C: Crazy
• Avenue D: Dead

Venues such as Brownie’s, Babyland and indeed Life Cafe, featured in “Rent”, whose $1 beer late night Happy Hours brought myself and many a friend over to Avenue B, provided a draw for young people to venture into what had for years been the neighborhood from the climax of Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” that the well-heeled set was afraid to go near. But soon this began to change too. More and more venues began opening up east of 1st Avenue - restaurants, bars and shops catering to young urbanites just like me rather than the old neighborhood.

However a loose, anarchic feel remained throughout the neighborhood. Drugs and sex were openly sold and consumed and the large number of junkies seen throughout the neighborhood, particularly around Tompkins Square Park, who had little or no interest in the everyday workings of consumer culture beyond their dealers remained. Squatters, with even less interest in the workings of commerce, occupied buildings on Avenue A and 13th Street, paying no rent and devising ingenuous access to the city’s electricity grid and water supply within their dwellings, keeping the neighborhood true to its 30+ year roots in social activism.

It wouldn’t last long though. Within a few years Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in what might have been considered a warm up or maybe a sideshow to the “cleaning up” he did of the Times Square area - a civic sweep recently referred to as “replacing shit with a different kind of shit” in a PBS special about NYC - essentially declared war on the lawless elements of the East Village and waged multiple initiatives to alter the neighborhood, permanently. I’ll never forget the day they took away the pot dealers in what was the most brazen police action I have ever witnessed. Police cars blocked in all of St. Mark’s Place from Third Avenue to Avenue A at Tompkins Square Park. Paddywagons and hundreds of cops on foot, horseback and bicycles were sent in and hundreds of mostly Jamaican pot dealers were scooped up and carted off, most never to return to the neighborhood. The efficiency of the operation was startling, as it couldn’t have taken more than a few hours, but the scariness of seeing government, for once, working as an effective, cohesive force that actually carries out its policies, and with unstoppable physical force to boot, was also a little frightening.

Soon the juice bars and retail pot stores were gone too, busted more quietly, one by one, with the City apparently preferring to use code violations and procedural methods to make clear to the business owners it was time to go. The prostitutes for whatever reason, seemed to stick around longer than the drug dealers - perhaps it was because of their out of the way location, off the hustle-bustle of St. Mark’s Place - but even they seemed mostly gone within a few years of the clearing out of the pot dealers.

The most astonishing thing I witnessed during my time in the neighborhood though was the eviction of the squatters on 13th Street in 1996. One day while casually walking up Avenue B, I noticed the block completely blocked off at both ends by Police. A Police helicopter hovered in the air and hundreds of cops stood up and down the block accompanied by a fire company from the FDNY. Down the block a building was burning while the City personnel stood there watching it. They were smoking the squatters out. “Move along.”, a cop stationed at the end of the block told me, and by the look on his face he was not kidding around. I kept walking, but returned many times over the next few days to witness the events unfold. I even saw journalists arrive with television cameras only to be forcibly removed by the Police and prevented from filming a single frame of the action. I never saw anything about the event on any of the local television channels or newspapers, yet I could smell the fires burning from my apartment when I went to bed at night. I remembered something a photography Professor had told me in college when discussing Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 19th Century during the rule of Napoleon III, “This is the kind of stuff democracies need not apply for.” Giuliani and his advisers had obviously come to the same conclusion about 13th Street and decided to suspend the normal rules when it came to dealing with city residents who themselves refused to play by them.

Obviously, throughout all this time, rents climbed. Within 5 years, apartments in the neighborhood were priced as much as $800 to $1000 dollars more per month than what they had been leasing for when I moved in. Young people had arrived, en masse, downtown, lured by the promise of great nightlife, ample social opportunities, and a fascinating urban lifestyle coupled with the new bonuses of safety and security. That trend has only continued and the neighborhood, while still retaining its place as a nightlife destination in the city, is now more likely to have a well paid creative professional or a young attorney looking for La Dolce Vita as new residents than the bohemians and artists of 20 years ago.

Can I complain? I could, I guess. But since I’ve lived in New York, I’ve always known old timers who complain about how things “used to be” - and I’d rather not be that guy. The new neighborhood is much safer and in may ways more pleasant than the place I moved to while still retaining some of the old businesses and character of an area that are difficult to shake. If I had my druthers, I guess I would take it back to a sort of middle ground when enough new businesses had opened up to make it a truly fresh exciting experience to live in the East Village, but it hadn’t become old and stale yet. I fondly remember those times in the salad days of my young adulthood, hitting spots like Nation on Avenue A, Anseo on St. Mark’s and Element Zero on 10th Street. But whether that was a function entirely of the neighborhood or simply my age I can’t say for sure. I imagine a bit of both. Regardless, the gentrified East Village of today has benefited some and taken away from others. If you had a family in the area before the huge uptick in prices and were living on a working class income, chances are your kids would need to move out of the area. However if you owned property, gentrification is probably the best thing that ever happened to your financial fortunes. So while the new East Village certainly lacks the struggle and intangible romance of it earlier incarnation, it has made many changes for the good, and many of those changes have resulted in calculable benefits to many of the old neighborhoods residents who were fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor.

Personally, I’m just glad to have been a part of it, because just like “Rent”, this September I will be exiting New York City. So it’s nice to think that the neighborhood I’ve called home for so many years has finally achieved a sort of balance, a stasis, a stability. But I can’t be that naive. This is New York after all, and things are always changing in a way and at a pace unimaginable anywhere else.

You can takepart in helping neighborhoods that haven’t been as fortunate as New York City’s East Village in revitalizing themselves by checking out Habitat for Humanity.

LINKS:

New York Times: Bohemia Takes Its Final Bows

Playbill: Rent Extension: Hit Show Will Close September 7

Broadway.com: Rent Extends Its Broadway Run Through September 7