[Photo by Michael Sean Edwards]The Times has posted content from the fall issue of T Magazine, which includes an essay by novelist Edmund White titled Why Can’t We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s?
Specifically he's talking about 1977-1982… an excerpt:
Those were years when rents were low, when would-be writers, singers, dancers could afford to live in Manhattan’s (East, if not, West) Village, before everyone marginal was further marginalized by being squeezed out to Bushwick or Hoboken. Face-to-face encounters are essential to a city’s vitality, even among people who aren’t sure of each other’s names, for the exchange of ideas and to generate a sense of electricity. In the ’70s, creative people of all sorts could meet without plans, could give each other tips or discuss burgeoning theories or markets or movements.
You can read the whole piece here … there's also an accompanying slideshow that provides a sneak preview of "The Downtown Decade: NYC 1975 – 1985," on display now through Oct. 10 at Rare/Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 17 W. 54th St.
7 comments:
Joey at Coney Island pic.....
......nice legs!
Thanks for highlighting this and greatly enjoyed the slideshow though too few pics. Brought back memories. Oh those clothes and those pants.
I moved to the EV in 1981, had not lived in NYC before and had no idea what I was getting myself into. A lot of what this articles mentions is true regarding how "high" and "low" often mixed and enjoyed keeping company together even if it was just during a gallery open or a night at a club. NYC was not the only American city in decay during this time but it became the poster child for all that was wrong with cities. The most important point this article hits on is the scale of bohemian life (my words) downtown, east and west. How easy it was to live with almost no money and how money didn't lead to happiness.
The Downtown Decade catalog in PDF form is intereting:
http://www.glennhorowitz.com/images/exhibitions/DowntownDecadeCatalog.pdf
Articles such as the one by Edmund White (which is kinda poorly-written, but never mind) might seem cool to people unfamiliar with the subject matter, but it's unfortunate that they're taken as gospel, whereas they're like panoramic vistas cropped to fit into a small frame that will fit nicely on someone's wall. The fact of some figures' being enduringly prominent or enjoying resuscitated notoriety by virtue of retrospective revisionism serves to ignore that such retrospective presentations are selective and prejudiced.
Looking for an artistic playground amid low-rent urban squalor now? Detroit. But don't tell anyone else, or it'll be over in five years.
People seem to think that because one time NYC was in such a state that certain groups could survive with no money means that that should happen in perpetuity. To your point, this could easily happen in other cities but people don't want to do the heavy lifting these people did to create the environment - they want it ready made at no cost and they want it in NYC below 14th street. They could do this elsewhere but lack the drive to do so.
I know I came to NYC to be around people with various points of view and backgrounds. Not everyone I knew back then was dirt poor but we were all after the same things. Art, music, culture high and low, not the boring stuff we escaped from. My first year here made it clear that there was a big extreme in who had money and who didn't. Culture hounds from uptown would come downtown sometimes to slum it, sometime to get a dose of reality. Remove all pain and how do you know you are still alive? Not having money back then meant working a lot just to get by but we could still live in this fantastic city with very little. Sameness moved in during the Bloomberg years, and all the people we thought we left behind in small towns and anti-septic suburbs had found us. 14 years ago today New York was attacked and besides the horror and loss of life on that day the cities soul died and a manic consumer society took over. The country pitied us, the world believed it was safe again to come here. Safe not in the low crime rate way but safe as in nothing here will challenge tourists and visitors, it will be just like home for them just a lot bigger. We can be proud I guess of having the country's largest Olive Garden now. Yeah.
Gossip girl buried the coffin deep. fucking cultural dead end shit. And people aspire to be that way.
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