Whose New York is it anyway?

A friend and life-long New Yorker was bitching the other day about how New York City is changing. His Appalachian-born fiance retorted, "Well, it's the city. If it didn't change, it would be the country."

There is truth in her remark and this sentiment came on the heels of numerous conversations I've had of late with a variety of my peers that have called New York City home over the years. The prevailing opinion is a lament on the continuing 'commercialization' of New York City. Witness the engorged development of soulless high-rise residences that now line Sixth Avenue, supplanting the bazaars of parking lots-cum flea markets that used to dot the neighborhood. Witness the demise of CBGB's and the Bottom Line, the latter the victim of NYU's voracious downtown land grab only to be turned from music icon into a foyer for an administrative building. There is the ridiculous Adidas building at the corner of Houston and Broadway where the cabs of the city once washed at Whale of a Wash. Further down the block, a shiny new Whole Foods slings outrageously-priced Icelandic lamb instead of the low-grade heroin that once fed this block. Word has it that even the venerable cornerstone of the Lower East Side, Katz's Deli, is in the firing line. They will be surrendering their iconic restaurant to the pounding surf of urban progress.

I must confess these 'developments' seriously trouble me as one who has loved the city I have lived in for the past 14 years. Yet there is a legitimate point towards the fact that New York must change. New York is nothing if it is not the epicenter of raw, unbridled commerce. To deny this commercial evolution here of all places would be in effect to cause New York itself to deny its own nature, its own very essence.

Those of us who love New York always in some way want to claim personal ownership of our metropolis. We love it for its wildness, its unpredictable nature. It has always been this way. We see the 'development' and the encroachment of generic chains as our fair city being 'tamed.' Yet those of us that wish it to stay status quo for how we have found it and experience it are also guilty of trying to 'tame' it ourselves, by asserting the foolish notion that it should stay how we know it on our own terms.