There is no doubt that Sharon Zukin (along with Michael Sorkin, to a lesser degree) is pining for a New York City which can no longer exist: a land of low prices, seemingly effortless ethnic intermingling, and a Honeymooners-esque fetishization of the working class. However, according to her claims, that NYC is being encroached upon by boutiques, galleries, and other vestiges of wealth. While it is regrettable to see a neighborhood enveloped by gentrification and made unaffordable, Zukin’s concerns lie elsewhere, and are by extension misplaced.
Despite Zukin’s status as one of the Nouveau Village residents herself, she sees the neighborhood (and indeed the whole city) as having “lost its soul.” She hearkens back to a time of factories and their hourly inhabitants, ignoring the positive aspects of a city evolving past hard labor as its economic core. This is where her myopic views really start to take hold. There is no reasonable explanation for Zukin’s love of the past except for one: nostalgia.
Her nostalgia is one that makes her selective in her criticism, viewing Starbucks as the avatar of all wrong with the American city and striving for a return to the 1960s. Not only is her regressionism tiring and played out (how many Williamsburg types, the very ones Zukin puts on blast, mimic her blanket laments?) but it hides within it a payload of privilege that the author seems unable to see. To wish for a regression to a time of stifled civil rights and, comparatively, a lower standard of living for immigrants and other disadvantaged groups, is to put one’s memories above palpable advances in human rights. Zukin’s position is surprising considering her sociological background, but nonetheless disturbing. Perhaps the professor herself should take a hint from her own book and begin the de-gentrification process by moving somewhere else.
