poetrypository

[ecce-felix]

I always ask the very good question of ‘if rhaenyra wanted to rule successfully and shut the greens down before they could gain traction why didn’t she foster more alliances besides with the velaryons and arryns’ like alliances aren’t just marital you can foster good relations and give lords attention and listen to them personally (since you have a dragon that gives you increased travel mobility) and make them feel important. She’s a woman in a misogynistic society and has three brothers (along with two nephews) that many would consider heirs above her, I genuinely don’t understand why she didn’t realize how weak her position was and work to combat it. She just squatted on dragonstone for years to the point that a betrayal from house Baratheon (who are literally just across the channel) came out of nowhere to her. She just expected they’d be her allies bc she didn’t consider the rumors about her sons might anger the baratheons. She knows she has two unmarried brothers that the greens could use to form marital alliances, why didn’t she try to figure out which great house with eligible daughters was their target? It’s just bizzare. I would’ve been visiting all the time to check the vibes at storms end and trying to charm them into forgetting they aren’t Actually related to my heir. Granted she’d have a harder time of it bc misogyny & her habit of lying but if she gave an effort the greens would’ve had a much weaker leg to stand on. It’s like she grew up so entitled/watching her stupid father flounder in KL that she forgot being a monarch is an actual job that requires networking with everyone and not one or two houses. She finally started networking during the war by sending her heir to treat with the north but by then it was too damn late to stop the war from happening. I blame viserys for being a fuckup bad example to her and I also blame Targaryen exceptionalism for making her ego & sense of delusional entitlement worse.

[darquedeath4444]

The Deity of Spring

Chapter FIVE

From the moment he had been conscious, Naruto knew he had one purpose in life. He hadn't known what exactly this purpose was, but he had always somehow known that the empty feeling within him was a calling towards it. He grew up in an isolated village located near the edge of Land of Fire, yearning for the day he could venture out into the world so that he could fill the void in his chest.

Back then, even though the fighting within the Land of Fire caused by small groups and factions vying for control had been ended by Senju Hashirama uniting the lands, many still suffered from the occasional attack lead by the surviving groups that had mostly been crushed by Hashirama and his men.

Still, his early life was not necessarily bad. Some, in fact, would even call it full of happiness. His parents had been nice and kind, and his fellow villagers all knew each other and were always willing to help. There had been times when food and other resources were a little scarce, but no one was truly unhappy. The tug in his chest grew every day, but he forced himself to ignore it because he would not leave behind his family and friends for a gut feeling.

Then one day, when he was eighteen, a huge earthquake hit his village. Everything was destroyed without a trace and he ended up being the only survivor. The empty feeling within him almost consumed him, and it felt as though the world was punishing him for ignoring it. Left without a choice and nothing left to live for, he had left the lands where his village had once been and listlessly followed the tug.

After days of travel, he found himself at the edge of a forest and almost as though welcoming him, the branches and parted and the sun had shone through the trees, lighting a path for him to follow.

What he found on the other side made him freeze.

There was a small house in the clearing, and in front of the door sat a raven-haired male who looked barely older than him. The teen was breathing heavily and Naruto could see the blood pooling around him. In one hand he gripped a crimson drenched sword and the other was clutching his stomach. He could see blood seeping through his fingers.

A little away lay a long-haired man who looked slightly older. He could see the faint rise and fall of this chest but judging from all his injuries, Naruto knew the man would not make it.

Around the pair lay a countless number of men dressed in similar dark clothing. They were all dead and badly mutilated, and Naruto felt the sudden urge to throw up. The raven teen looked up as he stopped by the trees and his eyes narrowed dangerously. He clutched at the door behind him and slowly dragged himself to his feet. "Another, huh?" He muttered, and his eyes flashed.

Naruto opened his mouth to deny whatever the teen was accusing him of when a quiet voice made them both freeze.

"Sasuke?"

Naruto saw the door behind the teen opening, and it appeared he did too. The raven threw himself backward, slamming the door shut. "Do not come out," he hissed, eyes still fixed on Naruto. "Not until I tell you you can."

Naruto heard quiet footsteps falter before they vanished as the owner of the voice hurried away from the door. "I-"

"Are you here for her too?" The teen snarled. He raised his sword and remained standing despite how blood continued to flow from his wounds.

"Who?" Naruto asked.

"Do not play dumb," the raven snapped. "Why else would you be here?"

Naruto then watched in fascination as something like black smoke seemed to gather behind him, and soon began to take the form of wings. However, he then doubled over and spat out a mouthful of blood, and the smoke disapitated. He took a step forward in worry and the teen instantly had his sword pointed at him.

"Do not come any closer," he snarled. "Do not-"

A soft groan cut off whatever he had been about to say, and both teens turned towards the long-haired young man. "Sasuke, you've got it all wrong," he whispered, and for a moment, the raven looked torn between going to his side and continuing to hold his position of guard in front of the door, before he glared at him one more time and hurried over towards the dying man.

"He's here for me," the man whispered. "Just like you came for Madara years ago."

The raven, Sasuke, froze before slowly looking up and giving Naruto a once over. "So he is…."

The man nodded, then slowly raised a hand and made a 'come here' gesture in his direction. Naruto hesitated but the pull in his chest seemed to intensify, and he slowly made his way towards his side. The man reached out towards him and Naruto warily took his hand.

Instantly he felt a rush, and suddenly he felt alive. He instinctively tried to pull back his hand but the man kept a tight grip on it, not allowing him to. "You protect her," he whispered, pleadingly. "You look after her, and keep her safe."

Before Naruto could ask what was going on, the man turned to dust before his very eyes. He breathed in sharply and, for a second, it felt as though there was something in his throat and he couldn't breathe. Then the moment was gone and something warm appeared in his chest, and soon spread through his entire body.

"What-" Naruto choked out. "What is going on?" If this was how being alive truly felt, he could only describe life until this moment being half dead.

Sasuke slumped backward, breathing heavily. The door once again opened and this time, the raven did not complain. A head full of pink hair and green, green eyes peeked out from the house before the door was completely thrown open and a girl darted out. "Sasuke!" She cried. "Are you okay? Are you-" she cut herself as she caught sight of him and froze. "Hashirama?" She called out hesitantly, but Sasuke chose that moment to collapse forwards and the pinkette rushed to his side, Naruto forgotten for the moment.

"Sasuke?" The girl prodded, eyes wide. "Sasuke, are you dying?"

The raven let out a weak scoff. "No," he said. "I...would not mind some help to bed though."

The girl instantly grabbed his arm, then dropped it when he let out a groan of pain. "Sorry-"

"Um," Naruto called, and the girl turned towards him, eyes wide. "I could help?"

The pinkette's eyes brightened and she nodded. "Yes please," she said softly.

Naruto carried over to Sasuke's side and this time, the raven did not complain. He grunted as he lifted the teen onto his back and turned to the girl, who was hovering beside him. "Where do I take him?" He asked.

The girl led the way into the house and up a set of stairs. "This room," she said, pushing the door open, and Naruto lay the now unconscious raven onto the neatly made bed. The pinkette gestured for him to step out. "That one is yours," she added, pointing to the door to the left.

Naruto froze. "What?"

"Hashirama usually cooked, but since he is gone I am afraid we will not be eating anything too grand for a while," the girl continued. "There is not much here, but it is not inconvenient. We grow things around the back and sometimes we have meat. There is a river close by and we can catch fish there."

"Wait, no, that's not what I meant," Naruto said, and the girl turned to face him. However, instead of answering his question, the girl simply smiled.

"What is your name?" She asked, and before he could stop himself, Naruto was answering.

"Naruto," he said.

The girl nodded. "My name is Sakura," she told him. "Welcome home, Naruto."

Sakura had then vanished into Sasuke's room for the rest of the day and when the raven stepped out with a sleeping pinkette in his arms just as the sun was setting, he looked as good as new.

The other teen nodded in greeting before entering another room. When he came back the girl was nowhere to be seen and Naruto watched as the raven took a seat at the table opposite him. "You must be wondering what is going on," he said, and Naruto slammed his fists the table.

"Damn right I am," he snapped.

Sasuke eyed the table, then the door to Sakura's room, then shrug. "That is expected," he said. "I was like that when I first came here."

"That-that man earlier?" Naruto said. "You guys said Hashirama. Hashirama, as in Senju Hashirama?"

It was only two years before he had been born when Senju Hashirama, the man that united the Land of Fire, had gone missing. Apparently, search parties from the capital had come even to his village looking for any signs of the Hokage. It had been the first time most of the villagers had ever seen people from the capital, a place that lay too far for any of them to hope to ever visit, and so many remembered it well and the tale was often told to the children.

Sasuke nodded once, confirming it. "Where should I start?" He asked.

"The beginning would be nice," Naruto replied blankly.

Sasuke smirked. "Are you sure?" He asked. "Because this tale spans over course of thousands of years and we only have a little time until sundown." Still, he shifted so he was comfortable. "How much do you know about the story of the Creation of the World?"

While briefly, Sasuke told him a tale from Naruto's childhood. How, millennia ago, the Gods created the human world. How Kaguya had given them forms and Sakura had given them life. How Kaguya had years later turned against her own creations and how Sakura, and the rest of the Gods, had stood up to her. How the Gods finally managed to seal Kaguya after a huge war and how they decided that they needed to leave the world in order to allow mankind to live for themselves. How, as a result of the war, Sakura had become unable to return to the realm of the gods and how she decided to remain here to watch over mankind. How Kaguya's two sons had been ridden with guilt for their mother's actions and how they decided to stay with Sakura to take care of her and protect her. How they retreated to the Forest of Death to stay out human attention and how they had passed this role to their descendants...

"Hang on" Naruto said, eyes wide. "Are you saying I'm a descendant of Kaguya?" He asked.

Sasuke nodded. "We all are, in a way, because the Otsutsuki, the first humans, were once Gods, and a part of them are still with us. Still, we are direct descendants, somehow," he explained. "When the replacement Guardian is born, the current Guardian begins to lose their powers. Then, when the two meet and make contact, the last of the Guardian's powers are passed from the predecessor to the next Guardian."

Thoughts ran through Naruto's mind, threatening to overwhelm him. "So what? Naruto asked. "That Hashirama guy looked like he was twenty, maybe twenty-five. Am I going to die in less than ten years? Because some other kid who's going to replace me is born?"

"Believe it or not, Hashirama was forty-six," Sasuke said, then raised a hand when Naruto opened his mouth to deny it. "Really. He left Konoha more than twenty years ago, it makes sense. He was twenty-six when he became a Guardian. Once you take up the role, you do not age, and you cannot die unless you fall in battle."

"Wait, so-" Naruto tried to put his words together. "So Hashirama didn't die because I touched him?"

"No," Sasuke replied. "He was dying, but he couldn't truly die until he passed his powers onto you."

"But-but-how?"

Sasuke shrugged. "Sakura is a Goddess," he reminded him softly. "Everything is so that she always has two Guardians with her. It could be fate, it could be destiny, it could even be some unknown Deity of luck. Whatever it is, everything happens so that when one Guardian falls, the next is already there."

Naruto thought of this reason he had left his village. "My home was destroyed in an earthquake," he whispered, rage slowly filling him. "Did the Gods cause it so that I arrived here at the perfect time? Did Sakura have it so that I would be here to look after her after her previous servant died?" He got to his feet, knocking back his chair as he did so, and he felt a sudden, unknown feeling deep within him.

Sasuke followed suit, his onyx eyes now a bright red with black markings in them. The black smoke was back and Naruto watched, momentarily forgetting his anger, as huge, black wings sprouted from the raven's back. They threateningly fanned out behind him and Naruto felt something within him roaring in response.

"Do you think any of us asked for this?" Sasuke snarled. "Do you think Hashirama wanted to leave the nation he fought so hard to pull together? Or that any of our predecessors asked for the lives they were forced to live, that I asked to be born the way I did?"

Naruto heard shuffling, and Sakura slowly stepped out of her room. "Sasuke?" She called, and the raven seemed to calm down a little.

He raised his hands in her direction and the pinkette hurried over to his side, burying her face into his feathers. "Sorry," he said. "Did I wake you?"

Sakura slowly shook her head, then turned towards Naruto. "Are you angry?" She asked softly. "You must be, and I am sorry about that."

"You have nothing to be sorry about," Sasuke quickly said. "Go back to sleep, okay? You have yet to fully recover."

Sakura sadly glanced up at him, before she ran her fingers gently over his wings. The feathers shivered in reaction to her touch and she nodded. "Okay."

The two of them waited for the pinkette to leave the room before they sat down again. There was a certain tenseness in the air, but Naruto found himself unwilling to wake the Goddess again. He bitterly wondered if his status as her guardian was forcing him to feel things.

"No one asked for this," Sasuke said after a while. "Not even her."

"She seems pretty fine to me," Naruto muttered. "Even when you and Hashirama were fighting. You were half dead and Hashirama died. She looks perfectly clean."

"Sakura is no longer the Goddess she once was. During the war, she gave a part of herself to stop Kaguya. That is why she could not return to the Realm of the Gods with the others."

"And who were those people in black?"

Sasuke shrugged. "I do not know," he said. "There are always people after her. Look hard enough and no matter how well the Gods hide, humans can find them. Sakura cannot protect herself; that is why we are here."

Naruto sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "So, how old are you?" He asked, changing the subject; he needed time to think.

Fortunately, Sasuke seemed to understand and he went along with it. "Twenty one," he said. "Though I was eighteen when I took up the role."

"Where did you come from?"

Sasuke's eyes darkened at that, and Naruto decided not to press. "And-and your wings?" He asked. "I've got to say, those were pretty cool."

The raven smirked. "Guardians are passed down power that once belonged to Hagoromo and Hamura," he explained, "though these powers tend to manifest within every individual in a different way."

"Do you know what mine is?" Naruto asked, glancing down at himself. Nothing seemed to be different, but Sasuke had looked normal until he had sprouted wings, so he guessed it wasn't an obvious change.

Sasuke shrugged again. "You will have plenty of time to find out."

Naruto glanced down at his hands again. His village was gone, and the only people he had ever known had died with it. He had nowhere to go, and nothing to do. "I….guess." He closed his eyes. "Though first thing first, we're going to have to do something about your stiff way of speaking."

Sasuke's eyes flashed dangerously at this. "I will never allow myself to talk in an unsophisticated manner like you."

"Did you just call me unsofisti-you bastard!"

"You are loud, idiot!"

Suddenly, the trees outside seemed to go quiet and Naruto was dragged out of his memories. He could feel the faintest vibrations of footsteps treading carefully through the woods.

These humans had actually managed to navigate through the forest, where everything that existed within the trees were engineered to kill outsiders. He had to admit, he was a little impressed.

"They're here," Sakura said, and he nodded.

"I'll be stepping out for a while and I'll be right back," he said reassuringly. "Don't leave the house and if someone actually manages to get past me, wake up the Teme, okay? The sun might be up, but he'll be able to function for a little bit."

Sakura nodded slowly, eyes wide. "I would like to talk to them, Naruto," she said. "They coming here is inevitable."

Naruto felt something grip his chest. Everyone who had ever ventured into the forest looking for the Goddess always wanted something. They wanted to use her, hurt her, take advantage of her. No many had gotten as far as even catching a glimpse of her, however, and if he had anything to say about it, these 'humans of war' would not be getting anywhere near her either. Sakura had never spoken up for any of the trespassers, though, and he feared that their quiet days in the Forest of Death might just be coming to an end.

"I'll go ahead, then, and make sure they're not evil idiots, then," he told her gently, hoping against hope that Sasuke would be able to say no to her, to keep her here while they killed off the intruders.

Sakura nodded. "Be careful," she said.

Naruto grinned and called upon the power that lay deep within him. He felt a roar echo through his body and when he glanced down, his entire body was surrounded in an aura of bright orange fire. "I will."

Chapter SIX>

<Chapter FOUR

Chapter List

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Heroes and Villains of New York’s Changing Cityscape

Greene Street facades from The Lofts of Soho

Six years ago, speaking at Cooper Union, musician Patti Smith warned aspiring artists against coming to New York City. The city, she said, has “closed itself off to the young and the struggling.”

The remarks were controversial, probably because Smith deflated the archetype of the New York denizen that she embodies. Her career is a sort of downtown fairy tale: The creative misfit leaves the provinces, dives into an edgy, affordable bohemia, struggles for years, and makes a name for herself beyond institutional norms and with artistic integrity intact.

This partly accounts for the popularity of Smith’s nuanced memoirs, Just Kids (2009) and The M Train (2015), as well as the nostalgia boom around New York City in the 1970s — in TV series like Vinyl (2016) and The Get Down (2017), in urban studies like Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning (2006) and Fear City (2017), novels like Let the Great World Spin (2009) and City on Fire (2015), as well as conferences, film festivals and art exhibits. “Gritty” and “real” are the commonplace adjectives applied to New York City in the 1970s. If we accept that premise, what, by comparison, is “unreal” about contemporary New York?

Lower Manhattan, 1974 (© Susan Saunders)

One answer is that the number of millionaires who live here has increased exponentially. As a result, their priorities have reshaped the city. Factor in a corporate-centered homogenization of economic life enabled by a city government that duplicates national and state tax policies favorable to private equity and real estate speculation.

Skyrocketing commercial and residential real estate costs have narrowed retail options, creating a glut of Chases, Walgreens, and Starbucks, as well as luxury complexes like the Greenwich Lane, Hudson Yards, and the Domino Sugar redevelopment. The public transit system, meanwhile, is trapped in the 1930s. Challenges to tenants’ rights in gentrifying neighborhoods escalate daily. Debating these conditions is often made to seem like bad manners, so it tends to happen privately, among confidantes, in bars, over drinks. Frustrated shrugs ensue. “What can you do? The city has always changed.”

Such civic resignation was not always the norm. Once upon a time, in a “grittier” New York, residents took to the streets and took over buildings to reclaim the city for themselves.

Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City (Altimeter Films, 2016) examines the victories of resistance movements in Manhattan that pushed back against the regimenting, state-sponsored programs that were known as “urban renewal” in the decades after World War II. In a brilliant cameo, the writer James Baldwin calls these forced evictions and relocations “Negro removal programs.”

The heroine of Citizen Jane is Jane Jacobs, the social philosopher and urban theorist who articulated human-centered, pragmatic approaches to sustaining neighborhoods so that they operate as well-trafficked egalitarian spaces.

Photo of Jane Jacobs from Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (courtesy IFC Films)

Jacobs was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916. She was a restless and driven student disinclined to accepting academic generalizations. Inquisitiveness and attentiveness to concrete detail were her twin attributes.

In Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2016) Jacobs recalls studying how the tools, machines, and locomotives in her native Pennsylvania “were painted in a way to show how [their components] worked.” In 1934 Jacobs followed her sister’s example and moved to New York City. There she worked as a feature writer for the Office of War Information and the State Department before becoming a freelance journalist and striving polymath, taking classes at Columbia University’s School of General Studies while publishing features about New York City’s residential and commercial life in the Herald Tribune, Vogue, and Architectural Forum.

After witnessing the exacerbation of social problems caused by new, large-scale developments in Society Hill in Philadelphia and East Harlem in New York, she turned against the urban renewal schemes that were steamrolling cities.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and subsequent books, Jacobs defines the “organized complexity” and “intricate order” of cities, tracking pedestrian tendencies, itinerant crowds, workaday routines, and shopping and socializing habits throughout the daytime and nighttime hours in robust districts and neighborhoods.

Her premise is that “a city cannot be a work of art.” A city’s unruliness and variability are its symptoms of health. She makes crucial distinctions that urban planners fail to make. For example, she differentiates the positive outcomes of “high concentration” from the bane of “overcrowding.” She notes how some streets facilitate motion between the public and private realms while others alienate neighbors from each other and frighten residents into their homes. She explains how the abstract idea for “a new park” is meaningless unless it accounts for the instinctive ways that residents in the area currently use constructed spaces. Residential, commercial, and leisure-time pursuits depend on each other, transforming city dwellers into “natural proprietors of the street.”

Her exhaustive, well-informed attentiveness has a political mission. It debunks drafting-table simplifications concocted by urban planners — in her time, these planners were mostly well-heeled white men — who view the city negatively from above. To them, it is a place scarred by slums and blight, remediable only through razing and modernization. Against this diagnosis, Jacobs argues that a city’s innate resistance to logic and predictability requires that planners turn to present-day, real-world successes, and to study them as the only legitimate grounds on which to encourage the regeneration of distressed neighborhoods.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs attacks the “Garden City” model of city planning, devised in England by Ebenezer Howard around 1898. That anti-metropolitan scheme, championed by postwar American regional planners and influential thinkers like Henry Wright, Lewis Mumford, and Catherine Bauer, aims to “decentralize great cities, thin them out and dispense their enterprises and populations into smaller, separated cities or, better yet, towns.”

The Hudson Yards development, New York (2015) (via Wikipedia)

Jacobs traces how this decentering of cities also informs the Modernist architect Le Corbusier’s ideals for a purified, slum-free urban plan developed in the 1920s. Having surveyed Paris from an airplane, Le Corbusier created his “Radiant City” prototype for buildings that envisioned a “vertical garden city” consisting of “skyscrapers within a park” housing “1,100 inhabitants to an acre” infused with highways, superblocks and one-way arterial roads instead of customary footpaths, intersections, and cross streets.

Throughout Citizen Jane, experts echo Jacobs’ insight that this “superblock” Modernism took off like wildfire in postwar United States urban development and ruined cities, producing an epidemic of isolated high-rises that worsened the social ills they purported to cure. These behemoths destroyed the city’s fabric, superimposing sprawling expressways, gargantuan civic centers, insular public housing projects, boxy office buildings, and soaring cruciform residential towers upon its once interconnected networks.

The power broker Robert Moses is the Darth Vader of Citizen Jane. Against the grain of past documentaries, in which Moses is framed as a hard-charging champion of the new middle-class for whom he constructed parks, beaches, bridges, and tunnels, Citizen Jane spotlights the despotic, late-period Moses in his capacity as New York State Parks Commissioner and as New York City’s Construction Coordinator, bankrolled by an endless stream of federal and state money, much of it serving the needs of the booming automobile industry.

The Robert Moses of Citizen Jane is a crypto-fascist who singlehandedly condemns entire New York City neighborhoods to the bulldozer, declaring you “have to move people out of the way” because such “ill informed” residents are part of a “cancerous growth that has to be carved out.” Under Moses’ supervision, thousands of tenements were razed. To make room for an expressway that took 17 years to excavate, the Bronx was cut in half, atomizing neighborhoods, causing an exodus of the population, a free-fall in property values, and widespread incineration. The Cross Bronx Expressway instantly turned into the congested traffic debacle it remains.

In Citizen Jane, such cringe-inducing missteps by Moses pile up, spread, and continue to this day. One commentator warns that “China is Moses on steroids.” There are also chilling scenes of the mindset’s monumental failures: the controlled demolitions of massive Moses-era housing projects that took place in cities across the United States throughout the 1990s.

Photo of Robert Moses from Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (photo by C.M. Steiglitz, courtesy IFC Films)

As ruthless as Moses was, he did not always get his way. When he proposed extending Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park in the late 1950s, Greenwich Village residents, including a young Edward I. Koch, protested. Jane Jacobs was their strategist and public spokesperson. That victory was followed in the early 1960s by opposition to Moses’ proposed construction of a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have plowed through Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho, effectively displacing thousands of residents and scores of businesses, and suffocating the community.

Jacobs, by then a longtime Greenwich Village homeowner, was focusing on new writing projects and reluctant to be thrown back into the public spotlight. Allied with longtime local residents led by Father Gerard LaMountain of Most Holy Crucifix Church on Broome Street, Jacobs and the other activists thwarted the project, though it kept rising from the grave throughout the decade, with Moses as a kind of smoke-filled backroom Dracula, until Mayor John Lindsay drove a stake through his heart, firing him in 1970.

The defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway is why Soho as a flourishing artists’ community happened. In less dramatic terms than Citizen Jane, Princeton scholar Aaron Shkuda’s The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art and Industry in New York 1950-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines the tangled commercial, governmental and artistic forces that sought to remake the area south of Houston Street and north of Canal Street.

The mixed primary uses (residential, retail, industrial) as well as adaptive reuses, long championed by Jane Jacobs, shaped present-day Soho’s existence. Against the conventional wisdom characterizing artists as trailblazers who become unwitting victims of New York City’s brutalizing real estate market, Shkuda’s work offers a more ambiguous narrative.

The neighborhood south of Houston Street originated as a mid-19th century precursor to Times Square, with hotels and high-end shops close by theaters, casinos and brothels. During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, the district’s world-famous cast iron construction was a prefabricated imitation of earlier French Renaissance and Italianate styles. By the early 20th century, it was a center for “light industrial enterprises, garment manufacturers, waste recyclers and warehousing concerns,” augmented in subsequent decades with storage and printing operations, which, by the 1960s, employed outer-borough workers, especially African-Americans and Puerto Ricans — a thriving commercial neighborhood by almost any standard with “an average of 3, 500 trucks” entering and leaving each day.

Reinforcing Jacobs’ proposition that urban planners ignore positive conditions that prevail within a city neighborhood, Shkuda explains how, in the 1960s, Robert Moses, in league with land-hungry New York University, deemed the area south of Houston Street a “commercial slum” that needed to be cleared for demolition and renewal, a thesis codified in The Wastelands of New York City (1962) published by the City Club of New York and endorsed by the powerful City Planning Commission.

The neighborhood was earmarked for razing in order to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway. As Shkuda explains, the expressway project, combined with diminishing industrial occupancies, deflated the value of the area’s buildings. Desperate landlords began to rent “work space” lofts to artists whom these owners knew were covert, full-time residents.

Shkuda’s study falters here and there regarding the history of downtown artists. Its titular premise implies that loft living by artists originated in Soho. But long before there was a “Soho,” artists had been renovating and living in lofts on the Lower East Side and Chelsea as early as the 1930s. Still, Shkuda’s copious research – complete with statistical tables, legal accounts, and firsthand interviews with dozens of the area’s first resident artists — produces a multifarious story. If there are heroes, they are the artists who, sacrificing anything resembling security and at great physical risk, remade lofts into homes during the neighborhood’s inhospitable era of the early 1960s. Sculptors like Mark di Suvero and Donald Judd were drawn to the expansiveness of the loft spaces. Many such pioneers, like Romare Bearden, were eventually evicted.

Shkuda’s cast is a motley assortment of city bureaucrats, manufacturers, land owners, artists, labor leaders, preservationists, urban planners, and art dealers. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the same hard-pressed building owners who looked the other way as artists became full-time residents of their loft-studios, would just as frequently turn against them for profit or to avoid city inspectors, fines, or tax liens.

To further complicate matters, struggling small industries aligned with resident artists when landlords, cashing in on the neighborhood’s cache, began pushing them out in favor of more affluent tenants. On occasion, financially successful artists (along with affluent non-artists and/or art dealers) made strange bedfellows with owners against certain manufacturers.

Throughout the 1970s, the nearly bankrupt city, enduring fiscal crises and commercial vacancies, sought to revise commercial and residential regulations of the lofts in lower Manhattan. The regulations, however, remained murky and tangled well into the early 1980s.

Prince Street art fair, SoHo, by Robin Forbes, 1976. (reproduced with permission from Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

In response to such uncertainty and cross-purposes, artists formed community advocacy groups and cooperative galleries. Groups and venues such as the Soho Artists Association, Fluxhouse, Mercer 55, A.I.R., and the Kitchen fought off threats to their community, including an idiotic plan to rename West Broadway “Jackson Pollock Place.”

Art dealers like Paula Cooper, Richard Feigen, and Betty Cuningham were among the first to open galleries in what by 1970 was officially known as “Soho,” (South of Houston Street). More gallery owners followed. By 1975, more than fifty galleries had opened. The industrial aesthetic of renovated lofts led to a brand new market that commoditized the artist’s practices into an urban look available to anyone who could afford it. Soho gave birth to gourmet shops, specialized clothing and furnishing retailers, and restaurants like Tamala, Allsteel, Dean & DeLuca, and Food, some of which were run by entrepreneurs with art-world backgrounds, or in the case of Food, by artists themselves. Lifestyle feature writers and real estate speculators further publicized the place.

In his conclusion, Shkuda describes how new “Sohos” proliferated in cities around the world and that, in the end, the New York City neighborhood was a model of “growth” and “success.”

But is Soho a “success”? One could argue that the neighborhood became the model for a luxury-ghetto paradigm that has been replicated on the Bowery, and in the adjoining neighborhoods of Nolita, and Tribeca, transforming downtown New York into a glitzy outdoor shopping mall peppered with high-end eateries.

The question comes back to who the city is for. Or, as Jacobs puts it, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Today, the measure of “success” in urban development should be the rate at which democracy rather than money predominates in determining what a city is and what it should become. Activist groups around New York meet on a regular basis to insist on this. But mainstream newspaper accounts cynically reduce real estate coverage to tales about treasure hunts by a lucky few.

Almost ten years ago, I watched a tenement that housed a popular local bar as it was razed on a busy East Village corner. The tenement’s retaining wall revealed centuries of colorful wallpaper and scarred brick zigzags where the stairwell used to be. I wondered what was going up in its place. And who decided it would. And who encouraged it.

Southwest corner of 12th & 3rd Street, 2009 (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

For well over three years, as the new building was constructed, I navigated a detour familiar to anyone walking in Manhattan. The sidewalk was sealed off. Pedestrians were diverted into a treacherous, plywood-paneled tunnel manned by a few, half-dozing workers. When the massive condominium was finally finished, its façade imitated the look of a 19th-century industrial building, the kind that Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning once renovated so they could make art in that same neighborhood — the very sort of structure that Robert Moses and his ilk once despised and targeted for “renewal.” Five years ago, when it opened, the most affordable apartments were listed at $3200 per month. It went without saying, and bears repeating: artists need not apply.

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