Gregory Heller

Today, renovation and gentrification have almost completely transformed the Lower East Side. Twenty years ago, entire buildings sold for tens of thousands of dollars while today co-op apartments sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The LES is no longer a low-rent district. There may still be some tenants paying low rents, but they likely moved in before the early 1990s. Many politicians and developers as well as new residents attribute the district’s transformation to the natural laws of the market. Many people accept that gentrification is inevitable and beneficial. Few, however, express concern for where the displaced residents will go. At the height of the 1980’s boom, one developer reportedly explained, “They will be pushed to the river and given life preservers� (Abu-Lughod). The tragedy of displacement through gentrification involves more than the displaced. The entire culture of the neighborhood changes, and often the very characteristics that attracted the gentrifiers in the first place are lost to the process they perpetuate.
Such is the case on the LES. As the district advances through the gentrification process, the artists and musicians that helped establish the area’s attraction twenty-five years ago are being displaced. The independent, locally-owned businesses that made streets unique and lively are rapidly being priced out of the area. There is also a mounting “anti-nightlife� sentiment in the Community Board and the city government (Tran, 1999, p. 56). The very industries and institutions that brought the neighborhood back from the brink of desolation are now being banished. The planners’ and real estate developers’ goal of gentrification has been accomplished. The poor and politically threatening radicals have, in many cases, been disempowered. The inner city is becoming sanitized in the way Downs prescribed. The threat of unrest and disorder is gone. Although the less radical and diverse newcomers have displaced the traditionally charged atmosphere that resulted from the Lower East Side’s historic ethnic and racial diversity, there are signs that the activist spirit of the district is not yet lost.