The New York Times has not one but two pieces about the current actions of the ever-more repellant city government to replace hundreds of newsstands, each different, many of them long-since optimized for their particular circumstances, with standardized metal boxes deigned less to work as shops than as frames for corporate advertising. To get a better sense of what is lost, go to this site for a sample.
I loved the New York I grew up in. I loved it with a passion that I ache to remember. And, as much as anything else, that city was characterized by the individualistic expression of the love of books, magazines, and anything else that could be made with ink and paper. Many of my hundreds of early science fiction and design books were bought from the various street vendors, almost all of them grizzled vets, who sometimes knew their stock with jawdropping attentiveness and chose and arranged what they sold in ways that made it quite plain what their conclusions were, damnit. I bought from the guys who used to sit along Broadway in the seventies and eighties. I bought from the tables in west midtown, the parts of the Times Square area that weren't sordid enough to get mentioned in most articles but were most certainly a vital and reliable part of the streetscape. Hard though it may be to believe to look at it now, but occasionally I could buy from guys laying out their wares right on Fifth Avenue, which wasn't so crowded and certainly not so exclusive back when I was a kid.
All of this makes me loathe the anonymous, standardized mall accretions that are now being forced upon newsstand vendors. But, more importantly, it helps me focus on what should be instead of what is.
New York is clearly being eviscerated and having many of it's most vital pieces of public life replaced with pod people and plasticized corporate dreck. But out here in Portland, while bookselling may not be much in evidence on our streets (yet) food carts are thriving and spreading. Crafts people line Alberta any chance they get. Individuality is doing just fine here and will as long as we stay vigilant. Because we certainly know that the Portland Business Association, with which our new mayor seems to get cozier by the day, would like to reduce Portland to the same kind of deadened, corporation-optimized, devitalized outdoor mall that so many other cities are being turned into. The simple prohibition on sitting on the sidewalk and the associated ban on most street vendors and musicians that the PBA fought for and got are just the kind of thing that emasculates a creative community and turns a community into a simulation of one, complete with "art" that's made in China and vendors who are paid badly, don't care about what they're selling, and have the truculent, dismissive manner such circumstances reliably create.
I moved back out here fully planning to sell my posters and pocket guides from a blanket at the edges of Saturday Market, with occasional trips up to Seattle and down to Eugene to do the same there. I see no legitimate reason yet why I am prohibited from doing so.
We must not let our city be reduced, like so much of New York, to a theme park and sanitized playground for the affluent and fastidious. Nor will should we let this city suffer the fate of Providence, where a vast monstrosity of a mall has been dropped like a VOC-spewing meteorite, into the middle of downtown, blocking the rights of way and killing much of the local business community.
Portland has thrived in the past few decades by sticking to the road less taken. It's worked very well indeed. We shouldn't let that falter now.
-Rustin
Comments