Nature as an icon of urban resistance: artists, gentrification and New York City's Lower East Side, 1979-1984 - social conditions depicted in art

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1997 by Gregory Sholette

Malignant City

Like myself, many of the artists immigrating to the Lower East Side in the mid to late 1970s were voluntary refugees from the managed communities of New Jersey, Long Island or towns in the mid-West or California - places where life's rough edges and natural disorder had been displaced in favor of the regularity of landscaped yards, shopping malls and parking lots. To these children whose parents had themselves fled the cities, the mix of Afro-Caribbean, European and Asian cultures proved enduringly vital despite the crumbling tenement buildings and empty lots.

In many places the Lower East Side circa 1979 indeed looked like a B-movie version of life amidst the ruins of a nuclear or environmental catastrophe. Overturned cars, their chassis stripped of parts, were strewn along the sides of streets, especially on the alphabet Avenues B, C and, most of all, D. Burnt out or demolished properties cut spaces between tenement buildings. These openings became filled with rubble, trashed appliances, syringes and condoms, as well as pigeons and rats. Often they appeared to be returning to a state of wilderness as weeds and fast-growing ailanthus trees began to sprout from the piles of fallen bricks and mortar. Along some stretches of these avenues there were more square feet of this antediluvian scenery than extant architecture.

Still, residents in this predominantly Latino community could be seen organizing gardens amid the rubble and entering and leaving tenements to go to work, always outside the neighborhood, to shop or to visit social clubs. In the summer Ukrainian men played checkers in Thompkins Square, while the women sat together on the opposite side of the park conversing. Black leather and mohawks, remnants from the already fading punk scene, shared sidewalks with kids chilling in open hydrants. There was always the sound of a conga drum, meting out a near 24-hour pulse.

Even the neighborhood's ethnic and cultural vitality could be read as a dense forest of signs where typographical tracings, mostly in Spanish or English but some in Hebrew, Chinese or Slavic characters, overlapped on brick or stucco walls and in shop windows.(10) The total effect on the influx of young artists in the late '70s was that of a mongrel thing: part living, part mineralized ruin, part text but always more authentically "natural" than the genteel communities of either SoHo or Nassau County.

The anti-suburb

In the later half of the 1970s came a new wave of young "immigrants." Many of these young people who moved to the streets west of the Bowery, south of 14th Street, and north of Delancey were artists - a class of individuals traditionally willing to forego bourgeois comforts and even risk their safety in pursuit of three goals: cheap rent, discovery in the traditional manner by a patron - a ticket out of the East Village for the lucky few - and finally, contact with something "authentic," such as the imagined organic quality of other peoples' (ethnic) communities. However, the national and regional economy of the 1970s was in a depression and the low-income areas of the city were the worst hit. This malaise was reflected in the fin-de-siecle spirit of the art and club scene in the Lower East Side. Downward mobility caused by high unemployment and a tight money supply cut off any route leading out of low rent neighborhoods and back into the middle class (at least until the boom years of the mid-1980s).