Abstract
Every generation gets the Lower East Side study it deserves. Richard E. Ocejo’s lively ethnographic account of this well-known New York City neighborhood updates us after three decades of gentrification. The Lower East Side, the Bowery, and the East Village are the sites for Upscaling Downtown, Ocejo’s examination of the explosive growth in bars in downtown New York. The book is filled with thoughtful character portraits drawn from extensive fieldwork and interviews in which we hear from bar owners and customers, police officials, community board members, local activists, and artists. Ocejo dives into the “nostalgia narratives” that motivate these residents and bar-owners, new and old.
This book follows most obviously from Sharon Zukin’s (1989) political economic analysis of neighborhood transformations within New York. It can also be placed in a tradition of Lower East Side gentrification accounts, especially those by Neil Smith (1996) and Christopher Mele (2000). As with other recent urban accounts, especially by David Grazian (2003) and Richard Lloyd (2006), Ocejo focuses on culture and consumption as key points of analysis. In this case, shining a light on bars provides a grounded understanding of community and conflict. Readers looking for a predictable political narrative, based solely on the needs of capital, will not find it here. Instead, Ocejo’s micro-sociological focus shows how democracy is an emotionally charged, unsatisfying, never-ending process.
Upscaling Downtown begins in a “dive bar” and moves to outline the unholy trinity of cheap housing, charitable food programs, and cheap booze joints that historically defined the area around the Bowery. The upscale trinity of boutique hotels, expensive restaurants, and themed cocktail bars replaces these earlier institutions. This book’s strength is Ocejo’s willingness to fully explore the romantic connotations associated with a place, but also to see what is in front of him: alcoholism is real, many of the old-timers are disagreeable drunks, and many of the newcomers are clueless. But everyone cares about this neighborhood as a place to live, work, or both.
The biggest contribution of the book is Ocejo’s unraveling of the contradictions in the “nostalgia narrative” where slums are praised but noisy bars are a threat, where punk bands are creative but DJs a nuisance, and where the vices of the past are happy memories. Residents and business owners move ahead based on their early experiences in the neighborhood. The entry point for an individual informs his or her sense of community. Divergent starting points and divergent narratives lead to divergent goals.
Considering the amount of alcohol imbibed by the author, there is reason to initially wonder if this book will be another form of “stunt ethnography,” such as joining a street gang. But Ocejo’s methods take him out of the bar, following the tendrils linking bars, the state liquor licensing system, and residential discomforts. In stages throughout the book, Ocejo comments on how policing diverges along class lines but also due to a disinterest in nuisance calls. New bars may be fined, but their intoxicated patrons are ignored.
Implicitly, this book raises a difficult policy question: how do cities reconcile successful affordable housing initiatives with radically different commercial enterprises? The mostly Latino residents in public housing and the many early gentrifiers in rent-stabilized apartments are stuck, unable to afford to move, but no longer catered to by local businesses.
Ocejo’s fieldwork throughout the neighborhood makes a great contribution by reanalyzing gentrification along temporal use of spaces rather than geographic expansion. Bars are enterprises of the night. Upscaling Downtown shows how this version of advanced gentrification is one in which time shifts the use of the streets. Storefronts are closed during the day, but open late at night. Residents need daytime businesses, outsiders venture in when everyone else is trying to sleep.
This book can serve as a bridge between urban and political sociology. The chapters on “Regulating Nightlife Scenes” and “The Limits of Local Democracy” bring to life the messiness of local politics. Multiple actors, including the community board, old and new residents, bar owners, police, and the State Liquor Authority, intersect in trying to shape the neighborhood. Through public hearings, committee meetings, neighborhood organizing, and face-to-face confrontations, these groups and individuals are seemingly doomed to remain in intractable and perhaps irreconcilable positions. Ultimately, the growth and taxation needs of the state are disconnected from the needs of residents and even many bar owners.
Two issues lurk in the background of this book, and considering Ocejo’s additive ethnographic style they might eventually come to the foreground: women and parenthood. Throughout this book, examples of women’s position as bartenders, as non-bar storeowners, as residents, and as revelers are mentioned in ways that seem distinct from their male counterparts. But those different experiences within the neighborhood never congeal. And for an ethnography that startsin a bar, the sociological literature demands more focus on this issue. So what happens as gentrification advances and as early gentrifiers have children? Residents entering this new life-stage are mentioned in asides. But much of the crux of leaving the bar scene, becoming disenchanted withlate-night noise, and being concerned about safety revolves around parental responsibilities.
“Upscaling” is late gentrification. But there are two key terms that riddle this book without being given a focused definition: “slum” and “postindustrial.” What is a slum? On and off since at least Jacob Riis (1971), the Lower East Side has been identified as a slum. But what does that term entail here? Relative poverty? Family instability? Segregation? Demonization by policy makers, journalists, and the bourgeoisie? And when is the “postindustrial” moment? Does it start in the 1980s with the new financialization of New York City’s economy? What are the class implications of this change? Isn’t the existence of gentrification premised on the demographic and economic forces of a service-oriented economy inserting themselves into disinvested areas? Well, yes; but Ocejo needs to say so. Then make the equally important point that this reorganization of the economy and reinsertion of capital is not a one-time event, but a decades long process. By not better defining these terms, Ocejo misses an opportunity to set the ground for why “community,” “public interest,” and “balance” are difficult for the different actors to define for themselves. Was the slum a community? How does the shift to a postindustrial economy differ from ethnic invasion-succession models? What distinction does the term gentrifier capture?
Readable, funny, and willing to pinpoint the contradictions in each group and person’s positions, Ocejo has given us a model ethnography. The methods section provides enough clarification to allow for replication. Readers and students can take his book and go to the neighborhood to confirm his findings. Or, better yet, use it as a model for other places going through the later waves of gentrification.