For the past year or so, I’ve been following New York Nico, a filmmaker, Instagram personality, and native New Yorker who calls himself the city’s “unofficial talent scout.” During the darkest weeks of lockdown in March and April, when interaction with any human I didn’t live with felt particularly menacing, his “Great Moments in NY History” videos were reminders of the glorious weirdness of the Before Times, when you might see a man dancing wildly in the middle of Union Square, or a woman walking her pet duck through Greenwich Village.
In his pursuit and promotion of the New York City characters—from street golfer Tiger Hood to the Green Lady of Brooklyn—Nico feels kind of like a Joseph Mitchell for the Instagram age. Appearing on his page can vault subway buskers to perform on “Ellen,” or an 11-year-old into a food critic with thousands of followers. Mitchell, a New Yorker writer during the 1940s-60s, was known for his profiles of local personalities and places, from McSorley’s to, most famously, Joe Gould—a Village eccentric who claimed to be writing the longest book ever written, The Oral History of Our Time, which Mitchell believed didn’t exist. (Gould’s life was later turned into a movie directed by Stanley Tucci, and his literary boasting reinvestigated by Jill Lepore.)
During the pandemic, New York Nico has hosted contests for charity like the #BestNYAccent challenge and the #Best NYT-Shirt Challenge. While raising money for worthy causes, these contests have also strengthened his brand as an arbiter of an authentic “New York-ness”: a certain brassy, quirky, and unpredictable gestalt that gives the city its great sense of possibility.
I can’t help compare the version of New York that Nico shares to that of another city commentator I follow: Jeremiah Moss, who has chronicled the last 13 years of gentrification in East Village through his blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. While New York Nico celebrates the people and small businesses that give the city its texture, Moss is self-proclaimed “bitterly nostalgic” chronicler of constant loss. In his view, most of what made the city good is already gone, wiped out by hyper-gentrification spurred by Bloomberg-era rezoning fueled by global capital. The city has been turned into a playground for the rich and basic midwesterners. I don’t disagree, but I’m also wary of his nostalgia.
Perhaps this way of thinking is my own kind of survival/self-preservation tactic, but doesn’t everyone pine for the New York of their 20s, or the New York that existed before they arrived? The New York they just missed?
As I’ve been putting New York observers like Moss and New York Nico in dialogue with each other, I’ve started thinking more about what makes a person or place “authentically” New York. In sociologist Sharon Zukin’s book Naked City, which is devoted to answering this question, she writes: “Though we think authenticity refers to a neighborhood’s innate qualities, it really expresses our own anxieties about how places change.”
Of the East Village, Zukin says: “From the 1950s to the 1980s, most cultural migrants came to the East Village because they felt ‘different,’ and they believed the neighborhood was ‘authentic’ because of its concentration of difference… The cultural infrastructure of Beat poets, cheap cafés, avant-garde theaters, and eccentric performance spaces created another kind of authenticity. The area was an incubator for a new and experimental culture and was promoted as a creative terroir, like the later scene in Williamsburg, by independent local media and artist-entrepreneurs.” Reading Moss’s Vanishing New York book, it felt like he was differentiating himself as an someone who came at the right time (he’s from New Jersey) with the right intentions, reticent to acknowledge that today there are new arrivals who want to engage with and enrich the city, not just get drunk at brunch and shop at chain stores.
I guess I’m drawn to the celebration in New York Nico’s work, of the people who make the city, even in the face of hypergentrification. (And as for Joseph Mitchell, it turned out many of his characters were composites, albeit unforgettable ones.)
In Zukin’s book, I found an important and nuanced reminder that the search for an authentic urban experience by people like me (young, educated, new arrivals—a.k.a, gentrifiers) can help drive out the people who give a neighborhood its “authentic” aura in the first place. When New York focuses on rebuilding from the devastation of the pandemic, I hope that city leaders and residents like myself heed the following:
“It was easier, at the end of the past century, to see the shards of both origins and new beginnings in urban decay. Though few city dwellers want to return to those years of abandoned houses and dangerous streets, reclaiming our origins in the small scale of old buildings, the low rents of working-class neighborhoods, and fewer corporate names would take us a long way towards regaining that era’s strong sense of authenticity. But we cannot limit our efforts to buildings; we must reach a new understanding of the authentic city in terms of people. Authenticity is nearly always used as a lever of cultural power for a group to claim space and take it away from others without direct confrontation, with the help of the state and elected officials and the persuasion of the media and consumer culture.”
Stat of the week:
-Speaking of Vanishing New York…: 2,800: number of small businesses that have permanently closed since March 1, according to data from Yelp, reported in the NYT, more than any other city in the nation. About half of these closings have happened in Manhattan. And according to a new report from the Partnership for New York City, roughly 1/3rd of the city’s small businesses may never reopen.
Around town:
-This appears to have been fixed, but the original story is still hilarious: Google’s search algorithm was generating X-rated results for searches of 13 Metro North stations along the Hudson Line (Queens Eagle)
-A woman shouted “We love you, Cuomo!” at de Blasio during a visit to Bed-Stuy’s Kosciuszko Pool. (NY Post)
-After two deaths in less than two weeks, Revel has pulled its electric scooters off New York streets. (Streetsblog)
-As apartment vacancies increase, could rent regulation be in danger? (The City)