The Lower East Side of Manhattan is rich in stories -- of poor
immigrants who flocked there in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; of beatniks, hippies, and artists who peopled
it mid-century; and of the real estate developers and politicians
who have always shaped what is now termed the "East Village".
Today, the musical Rent plays on Broadway to a mostly white and
suburban audience, MTV exploits the neighborhood's newly trendy
squalor in a film promotion, and on the Internet a cyber soap opera
and travel-related Web pages lure members of the middle class to
enjoy a commodified and sanitized version of the neighborhood.
In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the
political and cultural forces that have influenced the development
of this distinctive community. He describes late nineteenth-century
notions of the Lower East Side as a place of entrenched poverty,
ethnic plurality, political activism, and "low" culture that
elicited feelings of revulsion and fear among the city's elite and
middle classes. The resulting -- and ongoing -- struggle between
government and residents over affordable and decent housing has in
turn affected real estate practices and urban development policies.
Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by
community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to
perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic,
and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to
the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray
it as "new and improved".
Ironically, this very image of urban grittiness has been
appropriated by a cultural marketplace hungry for new fodder.Mele
explores the ways that developers, media executives, and others
have coopted the area's characteristics -- analyzing the East
Village as a "style provider" where what is being marketed is
"difference". The result is a visionary look at how political and
economic actions transform neighborhoods and at what happens when a
neighborhood is what is being "consumed".
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