CCarp sent this to me! I had complicated feelings of how we're supposed to loathe the bachelorette party people, whether they were objectively loathe-able, and how hard I should work - as-a-feminist-laydeez - to not loathe them.
Nashville -- or whatever city they're visiting -- becomes their playground. And in the case of the bachelorette parties, they get away with it (and have entire industries cater to them) in large part because they are white, and because they have money. Restaurants create rooms and reservation systems to accommodate them. The New York Times writes "36 Hours" itineraries for them. New businesses paint murals to attract them. New companies figure out new ways to get crazy while being contained in a kind of organized chaos.
This does indeed sound like a new and unprecedented phenomenon. And, while we all abhor neologisms, I feel one is called for: perhaps we could describe this phenomenon as "tourism"?
they get away with it (and have entire industries cater to them) in large part because they are white, and because they have money.
Yeah, I can't imagine huge groups of Japanese people descending on foreign cities for a holiday. The idea's ridiculous.
3: I don't think so! I get in trouble finding people loathesome when I project indifferent politics or conservative politics onto them. Something about the cavalier party-ish bachelorette party makes me struggle inside with whether or not they're terrible people. They're probably not! Probably some are, some aren't, and they look the same.
Our bride hates tacky shit
Isn't that implicit in the concepts of "Nashville" and "wedding", singly or combined?
There was another piece recently (maybe multiple pieces, now that I search) about particular sites in public parks that were little-known until the popularity of their photos on Instagram started pushing traffic there.
I have a quibble with the article's use of "inflatable penis." Technically, they're all inflatable on humans. They need to say "plastic, inflatable penis" or something.
Who can afford this kind of thing? You have twenty-something (mostly) people, already paying for an expensive dress/tux plus, in some cases, travel to a wedding, plus gift and all. Then, you turn a mostly cheap night out into a trip that's got to cost a few hundred dollars plus airfare.
10: They don't have children yet.
Also you don't have to buy a new dress/tux for every wedding you go to.
9: well, technically, everything is inflatable to some extent.
Doesn't inflation imply gas rather than liquid?
I think that requires a review of Boyle's Law.
Yes, I think so. Still. You could inflate pretty much everything to some extent.
12.1: Mostly, if you are in the wedding party, you do need to buy a new dress (if a woman) or rent a tux (if a man).
And if you aren't in the wedding party, you probably aren't flying to Nashville with the bride to get tanked in the back of a pick-up.
10 gets it right. Getting a bunch of friends to all fly somewhere for a party is foreign to my experience. It's hard enough to get people to go to a destination wedding, let alone having a completely separate trip for the bachelor party. Yet the people who do do it see it as totally normal.
This is addressed in the article. If your city is going to have a tourism industry, from a strictly economic point of view this seems to be the tourism industry you want because it consists entirely of affluent people between 25 and 35 who might move their affluent selves to your city if they like it enough.
Is it considered gauche to bring the same inflatable penis to multiple wedding parties?
If you use multiple inflatable penii, you'll get a reputation for being a slut.
The truly cultured keep their pinky extended when waving the inflatable penis.
The truly cultured replace their pinky fingers with adorable little penises, and keep them extended by inflating them.
Mostly, if you are in the wedding party, you do need to buy a new dress (if a woman) or rent a tux (if a man).
Not if you own a tux. And if you're going to go to more than a handful of black-tie parties, owning makes far more financial sense than hiring.
Fair point on the bridesmaids' dresses, though.
Theorists believe penile inflation erases curvature, yielding supersymmetric hardons.
23.1: Even if you own a tux. You're supposed to have a tux that matches the other men in the party exactly.
Even if you say "men's clothing hasn't changed since the 90s therefore this tux will match any other tux."
Nashville is great and would be a fun trip for anyone. Food, music, drinking, compact. I sometimes dream about moving there. Maybe I just have the taste of a basic bachelorette. I guess no one knows whether I'm typing this comment with a penis straw.
Not if you own a tux. And if you're going to go to more than a handful of black-tie parties, owning makes far more financial sense than hiring.
British people tend to say this. What black-tie parties are there anymore, besides weddings? None on this side of the Atlantic, unless you're a member of Mar-A-Lago or the board of directors of the local symphony orchestra.
That's not true either. I own a tux because there was a period in my life when people would give us tickets to fundraising galas that were black tie. They're cheaper than a good suit.
That may not be everybody's experience, but I maintain I'm typical of all those of my place and time.
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Ying Shao lists at least five types of threatening offspring in addition to the wolf children.|>
Is "daughter with comically expensive wedding plans" on there?
Penises are nominally more expensive than they used to be because of inflation.
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A fifth category that should not be reared was infants born with mustaches and a beard. The popular theory behind this belief asserted that only in their mid-forties did men develop full beards, so a child who had facial hair at birth would harm its parents.|>
Ajay, you supercilious git, the article explicitly acknowledges the existence of tourism (it's about Nashville, ferchrissakes!) and explicitly claims that the sort of tourism it describes is qualitatively different from the tourism that Nashville previously experienced. You may disagree with that, of course, but your comments just make you look like a tendentious twit.
You should use a pseud if you're going to be insulting.
Shit. It just occurred to me that the best man is supposed to throw a bachelor party.
British people tend to say this. What black-tie parties are there anymore, besides weddings?
Admittedly I haven't been to one in a while, but if you go to Oxbridge there are plenty (during and after, now that I think about it). I got a second hand tux for 30 quid while I was at uni and I still have it. Even with maybe a dozen lifetime uses that's cheaper than renting it even once.
The hard part is ironing all the little pleats in the shirt.
British people tend to say this. What black-tie parties are there anymore, besides weddings?
Even if you limit it just to weddings, how many of those are you going to go to? If it's more than a handful, then buying makes sense.
You're supposed to have a tux that matches the other men in the party exactly.
My attitude is that if you're inviting me to a party, and I don't already own the clothing you want me to wear, then either you provide it or I don't go.
36 is wrong. I've looked like a tendentious twit for years.
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All small mountains lack proper spirits as their masters, for their masters are mostly energetically refined spirits of wood and stone, thousand-year old creatures, and blood-drinking ghosts. They are all deviant and harmful. They never think of blessing people but only of wreaking calamities.|>
But that article just really irritated me. Oh noes your deliberately constructed tourist trap town has been overrun by tourists! Drinking heavily!
It's Buzzfeed. It's supposed to irritate you.
When I visited York a few years ago, the local papers were full of "Are Stag and Hen Parties Ruining York?" think pieces. Maybe York can send them all to Nashville.
I've been to I think somewhere between 3 and 8 weddings in my life and not one has been black-tie.
York is sending out scouting parties to all sorts of improbably American cities.
Strikes me that a similar thing could happen to Sacramento. We've already got the beer bikes.
Oh noes your deliberately constructed tourist trap town has been overrun by tourists!
Judging by wikipedia it's more of a college/music town than a tourist trap per se.
Don't the British wear morning suits for weddings, not dinner jackets/tuxedos? That is what movies have led me to believe.
36 is wrong. I've looked like a tendentious twit for years.
"Your comments just make you look like a tendentious twit" is not the same as "Just your comments make you look like a tendentious twit"!
Nashville isn't a tourist trap at all, but I also doubt it's being ruined by bachelorette parties.
I was going to post this! I hear you, ajay, but there's this phenomenon where "the city" becomes a place for people who live elsewhere to play, and or sojourn, which makes it very difficult for people who traditionally live and work in cities (poorer, darker, people) to keep living there. It's gentrification, but on a whole-city scale, which is different from "annoying drunk tourists are annoying." The article does a good job of discussing the tradeoffs. I kind of hated Nashville, though I recognize its charms, but hell, the kids played in Seveirn Park and I would have had no idea that it used to be "needle park."
I also doubt it's being ruined by bachelorette parties.
What's the rule, you only need three examples to write a "trend" piece?
My experience was colored by the fact that members of our party wanted to visit a plantation, and while there, we saw people planning their wedding there. It reaffirmed my belief that the South should have been razed and burned in its entirety.
This is not just a dumb trend piece. The bachelorettes were the hook, but it's a pretty smart look at the dynamic that changes a city.
I travel to Nashville reasonably frequently for work (my main academic mentor works there) and the leap in hotel prices over the past few years is remarkable and frustrating. The shitty hotel that isn't even close to campus that used to be $100/night now is often over $300/night!
The obvious solution is to sell inflatable penises on your trip.
My attitude is that if you're inviting me to a party, and I don't already own the clothing you want me to wear, then either you provide it or I don't go.
Yeah, the only time I was in a wedding party that did the matching outfit thing, it was provided (ie rented) by the groom's family. And, in case RH is curious, yes it was a morning suit. Generally if you're not in the party it's just any old suit. But I've been at a wedding or two with a black tie reception.
it's a pretty smart look at the dynamic that changes a city.
That reminds me, I'd be interested in good articles about Seattle. I'm close enough to be startled by how much Seattle has changed in the last decade but I don't spend enough time there to feel like I have a good perspective.
I find AHP a good follow, and her explanation of how it was that she ended up writing this particular thing is a useful explanation of how feature journalism works.
Don't the British wear morning suits for weddings, not dinner jackets/tuxedos? That is what movies have led me to believe.
I believe that's only if the wedding occurs in the hours before evening, which were all traditionally considered "morning" by hungover Edwardians.
Didn't all weddings used to be in the morning, so you weren't too tired to consummate it?
It's also usually easier to find a pigeon pre-noon.
They're on my fucking window sill all day long. Which is why I'm moving when my lease is up.
Because it's either that or buying a falcon.
A falcon can't eat a Bachlorette party.
I still lurk occasionally, but the years have been cruel to me and I can no longer convince myself that the secret police are amused by my comments.
69 - if you master falconry, promise to use it for good by destroying pigeons, and are willing to wear a superhero suit and wander through the city as a free-range falconer helping others for no charge, I may be interested in helping you acquire a falcon.
Also I believe that falconers are sexxxxxxxxy to bachelorette party members so you may do well in Nashville.
I will executive-produce the show suggested in 73.
There should be a few pigeon coop afficionados as subplots. I would suggest competing tribes of pigeon coop people-- one of cheerful bachelorettes who wear yoga pants.
A second group centered around cousins who are both Marlo Stanfield's descendants and whose pigeons descend from Marlo's. One cousin might follow in Marlo's footsteps, though less viciously and less effectively, she should be tall. A second cousin should do something really different, maybe a garage ekranoplan or autogyro.
All pigeoner factions have mixed feelings about the falconer and his dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, since the pigeons who succumb are mostly lowlife street pigeons, the homing pigeons go almost entirely untouched and actually do better for themselves since there are fewer pizza-rat style pigeons taking up the picturesque spots (these spots inhabitied by serene homing pigeons being photographed by maybe Newton Thomas Sigel). Karyn Kusama, Jason Reitman for part of the rotating ensemble of directors.
64: I assume this is the commentary CCarp was referring to. Also, she noted a critical typo in that commentary later in her twitter stream:
UGH CRUCIAL EDIT/TYPO: "Which helped me to *not* think of these women as gross, or a social problem"
Pigeon coops are ubiquitous in Roc North. For the expanded universe, you know.
They're probably delicious, if there's an extra one.
Everything's delicious, if you deep-fry it enough.
The continued unpalatability of deep-fry baskets suggests there are limits.
That means you didn't try hard hard enough.
This thread (and the associated article, which is interesting) is reminding me that I still have to write a stinging letter to the Nashville hotel that not only has conference rooms named after Confederate generals (which *might* be just barely understandable) but also posts accompanying hagiographic biographies that euphemistically note that said general "resigned his commission" from West Point to "join the South." HE COMMITTED TREASON IN DEFENSE OF SLAVERY, YOU NITWITS.
I really have to write that letter.
Every time I stay at a hotel, they're pretty aggressive about getting you to fill out a survey on your experience. Why not just mention it there? Give them a lower rating and say why.
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It's not in print yet, but there's been a bill submitted in the CA Leg upgrading police standards for use of deadly force from their current slough!
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Because my company held the event there. I can't associate them with my complaint. I've waited a few months and if I send it as a random letter, they may go back and check their records to see if I really stayed at the hotel, but I'm sure they won't bother to go back and see what my organizational affiliation is.
Just start the letter with, "These opinions are my own, not those of my employer, XXX, who is fine with celebrating treason in defense of slavery."
I am an old myslef, but have you thought about tweeting first? I'd guess that whoever answers letters has less direct access to management than whoever triages tweets.
92 is a great idea, and I think my few thousand Twitter followers would actually be helpful. Unfortunately it's linked to my work identity. Boo.
I can't believe that opposing Confederates has suddenly turned into a partisan issue. I feel as though a couple of years ago I could have made this complaint and nobody would have thought my company was making a partisan stand (maybe that we were Yankees, but we're OK with that label).
Stubborn Democrats keep supporting Lincoln.
Apparently there are corporate Twitter-account management services that allow you to prioritize tweets addressing by the sender's number of followers! I don't know if these are in active use.
As a minor quibble with the article, this:
It's a familiar cycle for so many cities: The people who stuck with the city during the '70s and '80s, often people of color and/or the working class, are pushed out by incoming artists and creatives whose incomes necessitate finding cheaper housing.is a truism that isn't really true. I should dig up the link, but I saw just the other day a study showing that, looking at cities and neighborhoods since 2000, arts are not really associated with gentrification: gentrifying neighborhoods* have less arts (by various measures) than middle class or affluent ones.
I don't take it as gospel, but IMO it's pretty damning when something that everyone knows is true doesn't show up in the data at all. A null result, sure, but this showed basically an inverse relationship between arts and gentrification.
*and I thought their classification of neighborhoods into 5 categories--IIRC affluent, middle class, gentrifying, at risk of gentrification, no risk--was pretty well done
That aside, 1 was my primary reaction to the article.
I always thought that the artists were among those who got pushed out by gentrification.
The line is that artists are the "shock troops" of gentrification, making poor, black neighborhoods safe for middle class whites who will then drive out both blacks and artists.
I think it's basically the creation myth of Soho NYC turned into an addle-brained "strategy for revitalization" that doesn't really work.
I actually live a couple blocks from an arts district in a semi-shady neighborhood, but it's been there for 20 years, and it's literally the least gentrified neighborhood for 3 miles in any direction.
100 sounds correct. Every declining city invites artists downtown to do art in places where no longer does any profit-driven entity want to pay for, or pay rent on, its real estate. Then maybe 1 out of 50 such neighborhoods ends up gentrifying.
83 -- It goes out to subscribers as an email. My guess is that it's a triage question: is it worth everyone on the list getting a whole new article, or even just a correction email, for everything?
97, 100 -- Send her an email, and see if you can get her interested in Seattle as a test case. (I have no idea whether the artist shock troop thing is said to exist in Seattle but, like NickS, I'd read a well written article about how Seattle has changed over the last 25 years.)
The proposal also would establish that a homicide by an officer is "not justified if the officer's gross negligence contributed to making the force 'necessary,'" according to the proposal.
!
There sure do seem to be plenty of articles complaining about how much Seattle has changed, but I find that almost every one of them makes me hate the author.
Seattle was nice. A little sunny, but still nice.
There sure do seem to be plenty of articles complaining about how much Seattle has changed,
I thought The Hustle was an interesting perspective on a previous generation of changes in Seattle.
Nashville might be full of drunk white people, but it's not going to slide into the Pacific Ocean within our lifetime like Seattle.
100 is really interesting because they tell the same story about several bits of London over the last 100 years: Chelsea, Hampstead, Notting Hill, Shoreditch, Islington...
though that might not apply because the artists weren't officially invited to set up in any of those places. they just turned up.
Obviously artists can't gin up capital on their own and to be financially successful visual artists are basically entirely dependent on rich people. But artists, who obviously start out mostly poor, traditionally have been very resourceful at finding cheap places to live near the rich people who are the market for their products.
So the "artists create gentrification" gets the causation basically exactly wrong. It's not that artists set up and then attract rich people into neighborhoods far from where rich people would ordinarily go. Instead, it's that artists need cheap space near rich people, and the rich people (who want to make money) then find bargains in the spaces where the artists were precisely because the artists were good bargin hunters for cheap spaces near rich people. If you separate out rtiats far from rich people, your "arts district" in Bakersfield or Lancaster PA or whatever isn't going to do much of anything.
The artists=gentrification thing took a particularly ugly turn here when a bunch of ignoramus "activists" in a poor traditionally Latino neighborhood decided to protest art galleries (as opposed to, say, dumb zoning laws or particular developers or whatever) for high rents and neighborhood change.
tl;dr Soho NYC or Shoreditch London are not reasonable models of artists attracting capital, they are models of capital attracting artists.
I should say "much of anything to spur capital investment." If you just want a nicer neighborhood with some support for (local) artists, go for it Bakersfield.
110-111: AFAIK similar things apply in Mossburg. The patrons tend to corporate rather than individual, and they sometimes move back into rundown areas for relatively cheap office space. So it's more (fixed) capital attracts (liquid) capital attracts art.
110: interesting. So basically gentrification is just what happens when you have cheap properties next to rich people, and artists are an early-stage symptom rather than a cause?
73-6. Semi-OT, in the ruins of Herculaneum, now a suburb of Naples, pizza rat pigeons are an ongoing problem because their shit rots the ancient buildings. So they keep a pair of hawks or falcons (who knows?) which they bring out every half hour or so to kill anything that moves. It seems to minimise the problem quite well.
107. I thought Seattle was going to be drowned by a gigantic tidal wave. Or was that Portland? Hmm. No, Portland was going to be destroyed by Mt. Hood. Maybe the tidal wave, too? The destruction of the West Coast is over-determined.
114: Artists are the burning sensation when you pee, not the bacillus.
Anyway, I have mixed thoughts on both art and gentrification. However, I think the later is going to depend more on job growth than the former.
119: Yes, the relationship is inverse for the arts. If kids can't find a job, some decide they might as well become artists.
Better that than "content provider."
Citylab story about study (usual caveats about journalism and studies) on artists and gentrification. https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/03/do-art-scenes-really-lead-to-gentrification/556208/
Better that than "content provider".
Or, in podcasting parlance, 'tent slinger.
Let me be the first to suggest "pitching 'tents" as the way to refer to offering story ideas to a platform.
If you sling enough 'tent do you get to be a 'tentpole?
Something that confuses the way people talk about gentrification is that a lot of the patterns were described as a way to gentrify high crime areas, which isn't nearly as applicable as it used to be in the lower crime world we're living in now. Like, artists (and in NY, the stereotype was gay men as well -- middle-class people living in households without women or children and more tolerant of crime as a result) would move into 'scary' neighborhoods for the cheap space (often in attractive old buildings), and then they'd become enough of the population of the neighborhood that crime would drop, and then other middle-class-to-rich people would move in. Same thing with anchor buildings -- there'd be a big building or a group of buildings that would have enough middle-class residents that the streets would feel safer around them, and then other middle-class people would move into that safe-feeling zone and spread from there.
Now, at least in NY, there's almost noplace left that anyone who wasn't a panicky idiot would be scared to move into, so that pattern of highly risk-tolerant people moving into a poor neighborhood first isn't nearly so much of a thing anymore, but people still talk about it as if it was. The same for little neighborhood amenities -- they might raise rents and attract people because they're nice, still, but I think they used to have a much bigger effect for gentrification, because they were a visible signal of safety.
This city has decided to promote the arts as an engine of economic growth. I have concerns with the viability of such a plan.
126: If I follow your argument, you're saying artists and gay men need to mug people. Which seems self-evident after seeing it explained clearly.
The safety dynamic is also a thing in Mossburg (though real, not just paranoiac). But there also it's corporate or government money establishing secure campuses and then banding together to pay extra taxes for additional street security and cleaning.
In the vein of 126 and 128: protesting against gentrification is all very well, but, if we accept it's a bad thing, how can it actually be stopped? It sounds like it has a lot of economic momentum behind it, as Halford lays out.
Terrorism seems to work. Some of the most robustly ungentrified areas in the UK are places like the Shankhill Road. And they also have strong, vibrant, cohesive communities who have lived there for generations.
126. When I heard that Bed-Stuy was now a hot area to find apartments in, I felt both surprised and old.
On the one hand, I feel like I should have some negative opinions about gentrification from having watched a lot of it happen in Pittsburgh with the result that poorer people have been forced out of the city and into the suburbs. On the other hand, some people here are so deeply committed to making buildings ugly that they will put vinyl siding on anything that doesn't move unless the kind of people who gentrify places don't organize to stop them.
(On preview, kind of what 130 says, but I get to insult locals.)
131: A child born today will never understand Billy Joel lyrics in context.
The safety issue isn't, or wasn't, delusional in the US. That's why the rents are cheap in the first place. People are very pragmatic about urban real estate.
That's what the vinyl-siding people say. Apparently, it saves money in the long run.
Vinyl siding is an improvement over the fake-brick pattern asphalt siding of my youth.
Insulbrick? Nine times out of ten, that's under the vinyl. Some of it has asbestos.
I lived through the opposite of gentrification and it was fucking awful*. Which leads me to assume that gentrification isn't something automatically to be opposed, but something to be managed so it doesn't fuck over poor people.
*I'm not complaining about it, that was just the consequence of white privilege washing away. But I think it needs to be remembered that slums are objectively shitty places to leave for everyone.
s/b live. Great places to leave.
Like, artists (and in NY, the stereotype was gay men as well -- middle-class people living in households without women or children and more tolerant of crime as a result) would move into 'scary' neighborhoods for the cheap space
That's definitely what seemed to happen in the Short North, here in Columbus.
Then they closed Tapatio, so what's the point of trying?
141: So many restaurants have come and gone! There's no place to park and no one can afford the rent, but new businesses keep on appearing.
Is it now gentrified from Lane Avenue to Downtown? When I was there, the Short North was gentrified (or going that way) but north of the Short North there was the Death Kroger and then some student slums/dive bars.
143: There's an area around that Kroger (which has been totally revamped) which is still a little iffy, but pretty much, yes.
130.2 is spot on. My son lived for a while on the cutting edge of gentrification in Belfast, and it turns out that gentrification is amazingly easy to resist if your neighbourhood is run by paramilitary gangsters.
On the other hand I am surprised that no one has linked to the conspicuously failed efforts to gentrify English seaside towns by encouraging bachelor/ette tourism.
147: You know Big Bear went out of business in 2004, right?
Obviously. He just said it broke his dreams.
It still lives in my grocery fan fiction.
Let me get this right: you had grocery shops called Big Bear as well as Giant Eagle?
I don't know if they were ever in the same place at the same time. Giant Eagle bought Big Bear.
True story: Giant Eagle's house brand of liver pâté was called "Prometheus."
The safety issue isn't, or wasn't, delusional in the US.
It wasn't delusional in NYC say, up through the nineties? But it has been a non-issue pretty much every place in the city for at least fifteen years or so. I can't speak first-hand for conditions everyplace, but the crime drop is national, so I bet it's a non-issue more places than not now (maybe bits of Chicago and Baltimore as exceptions?).
On the other hand, some people here are so deeply committed to making buildings ugly...
The subject of one of H.L. Mencken's more famous essays.
That's great and I never saw it before. East Liberty is something I can see from my window (and is honestly much better these days). The trip to Greensburg is one I took over the weekend.
On the other hand I am surprised that no one has linked to the conspicuously failed efforts to gentrify English seaside towns by encouraging bachelor/ette tourism.
The problem with your bachelor/ette tourism, in the places where it's called "stag and hen dos", is travel is too cheap and the distances are too short, so the yobs and chavs can all do it as well as the nice wealthy people who waste money. Here if you don't have money you don't bother, or you do it locally.
Is Morrissey need money? Because "Everyday is like Sunday" branding could make that work.
156 seems to be edging in the direction of George Orwell on the goose-step: "It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is 'Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me', like the bully who makes faces at his victim."
Honestly, I don't think that's it. People are very obviously hurt and offended when you point out that some houses are eyesores, even if you are not talking to the owner.
158 is accurate: there are people who fly to other countries for their stag and hen parties. Prague has suffered very badly as a result; Tallinn is suffering still. But those are all within a couple of hours' flight, and pretty cheap if you book far in advance.
One of my favorite turns of phrase in 156 is his description of the effect of one particularly ugly building as "that of a Presbyterian grinning."
I don't know what he has against Presbyterians beyond the obvious, but their churches in the city are usually pretty good aesthetically.
Anyway, my guess is that he starts with East Liberty not just because that's where he got on the train, but because the central areas of Pittsburgh have lots of good housing and very nice public/commercial buildings.
My neighborhood never gentrified because it's always been middle class. However, I think it might be hipsterizing. Anyway, I just got a "did anybody lose a chicken" notice.
Is that a coyote alert or what?
I don't think so. I think they just figured the chicken must have gotten out and the owner would want it back and too many people have chickens now for people to know which house it belonged to.
This sounds like neither gentrification nor hipsterfication.
I buy my eggs from the Giant Eagle, like a normal person.
110 last: That Boyle Heights Anti Artwashing group has to be one of the dumbest, most counterproductive movements ever.
Yes. As if artists aren't smelly enough already.
And what would you buy from the Big Bear?
Temple Bar in Dublin resembles several of these situations: when I was a student, it was an area with cheap short-term commercial rents, because CIE/Dublin Bus owned large chunks of it and were going to turn it all into a bus depot some day. Mostly I recall second-hand clothes shops and what was Dublin's only comics/sci-fi bookshop, but apparently a lot of artists had located there too. When the country stopped being quite so broke a few years later the government decided to turn into a "cultural quarter" instead. It does a roaring tourist trade aimed both at "Irish roots" visitors and "stags and hens" visitors.
Sadly the cherished tradition of laughing at tourists trying to get a drink on Good Friday is no more, as for the first time since about 1905 the pubs are no longer restricted from opening on that day.
It wasn't a very residential district in the first place so the usual gentrification evils mostly didn't apply - the culture was trowelled on a bit indiscriminately though and some of the few residents did find its new incarnation a bit loud and unpleasant.
You left out the most important part. Where'd the put the bus depot instead?
I think they gave up on the idea of having one giant depot and just kept the various satellite ones they already had.
The truth is sometimes anticlimactic.
the culture was trowelled on a bit indiscriminately
The concentration of nighttime drunkenness, and daytime playings of "Whiskey in the Jar," were really something.
The city-planning stuff was similar in SoHo in NYC (and Melrose Avenue in LA) -- areas not far from rich people, slated for destruction through urban renewal/freeway buliding, that became home to artists because property values were cheap and then cool expensive areas once the urban renewal planning for destruction went away -- precisely because, as the artists had found, they were cheap neighborhoods near lots of urban amenities.
Again, it really shows how stupid the "artists cause gentrification" line of thought is, as opposed to "artists are sometimes leading indicators of an area where gentrification might happen, because artists seek out cheap neighborhoods near capital."
maybe bits of Chicago and Baltimore as exceptions?
Chicago crime is so ghettoized, concentrated, and segregated and the city so big that I doubt the crime will stop the gentrification of the (non-South Side) parts of the city, but Baltimore seems like it could be a controlled experiment in what happens to gentrification if you let crime levels that had decreased rise again and abandon proactive policing. It certainly seems anecdotally that there was Baltimore gentrification trending in around 2010 that stopped or reversed after 2015, but that's impressionistic from 3,000 miles away and could be 100% wrong.
Having spent an entire almost 24 hour period in Chicago, I don't think it felt dangerous. The only problems were that it was cold as fuck (somehow 40 degrees in Chicago is colder than 20 degrees in Pittsburgh) and there were huge numbers of beggars, some perfectly nice but others either aggressive or behaving as if in a state of active psychosis.
Lots of Chicago is OK, but there's a steady trickle of violent crime in the Loop and a few other nice neighborhoods.
In February, Police Commander Paul Bauer got shot in the loop by a felon wearing body armor. I think last year, one of the west side gangs started using an AK for drive-bys, with subsequent matching escalation from a couple of others.
I was in the Loop the whole time, I think. That's where they put the art and the show tunes.
Why an AK? It must be so much easier to get NATO ammunition in Chicago.
Right? It's like a hipster driveby.
Can you gentrify a place by just making poor people less poor and save everybody from having to move?
Peter Nickeas writes about Chicago crime.
People in Pittsburgh forget what a stupid name "Giant Eagle" is.
The first time I drove there, we had been going through central Pennsylvania noticing all the businesses, parks, etc. called Eagle This and Eagle That, including a lot of things called Bald Eagle This and Bald Eagle That in the State College area. We were actually pointing out every time the word Eagle was used, it was such a trope.
Then approaching Pittsburgh, you see the first sign with huge letters, no indication at first of what sort of business it is, simply saying GIANT EAGLE. Wow! We're in the big leagues now!
I find Giant Eagle less weird than Eat 'n' Park, which seemed to get the order of what you want to do exactly backward.
I said that until people starting taking long detours to avoid driving by one when I was in the car.
OMG, apparently there's now an upgraded hipster Eat'n Park called "Hello Bistro."
Yes. Also, a fancier place in Oakland called The Porch. Meetups have happened there.
Also, Six Penn Kitchen, downtown. There was a meetup there, but it is now closed.
Should have known this blog was in the pocket of Eat 'n' Park. How else do you explain all of this motherfucking Pittsburgh?
It's like Russian interference on Facebook except it turns out you're all just a super-elaborate scheme to attract educated coastals to upscale Eat 'n' Park restaurant properties. This whole blog is built on lies!!!
If Rudy Giuliani and Judith Nathan can't make it, then marriage won't work for any one thus bachelor(ette) parties are a fraud.
Why an AK? It must be so much easier to get NATO ammunition in Chicago.
Probably not, actually. SKS carbines are terribly common in the US, imported from the former WP nations as cheap hunting and target rifles, and they use the same round as the AK. I'd assume that means that both 5.56mm NATO and 7.62mm short are pretty widely available.
Goddamn unpatriotic target shooters.
I'm out of touch with the current world 'o shooting. Back in my day, nothing was metric except handguns (9mm).
I'm utterly astonished that I've never seen reference to, let alone read, the essay linked in 156. The East Liberty station was in walking distance of my house, and the first few miles of Mencken's route are now the East Busway. He's not entirely wrong.
We took a quick trip to peeptown last week, and the most interesting thing was how different the housing stock is to Pittsburgh's: Many, many more small, attractive brick workers' houses, and an almost complete absence of what we call "Pittsburgh foursquares" even though we know (or thought) them to be ubiquitous in northern towns of the industrial era. I'd love to read a history of the city's development that explains the housing stock/architectural style.
Anyway, my guess is that he starts with East Liberty not just because that's where he got on the train, but because the central areas of Pittsburgh have lots of good housing and very nice public/commercial buildings.
Although I'm not sure you could see any of the city's nice housing from the Pennsy tracks; they're mostly too sunken. But it's certainly the case that, aside from North Point Breeze*, you move pretty quickly into the sort of ugliness he describes once you go east of East Liberty.
*where George Westinghouse's estate, no less, adjoined the tracks
209: Just the bit closest to Route 30. I wasn't sure, but I checked out the main drag on Streetview, and it's definitely not familiar.
I wasn't sure where the tracks ran in 1927. I only know approximately where the station used to be because of expensive hot dogs.
Actually, given the state of the overpasses right now, I should probably figure the track must have been in the same place for over 90 years.
Def. seemed like more beggars in Cbus than Pburgh.
Also, weirdly enough, fewer buckeyes (botanically speaking).
214: Bingo.
So the highest profile gentrification situation right now is the one involving our park (discussed here long ago*). The housing activists are being annoying in general**, but they've lost their fucking minds, because they put up flyers with a photo of one of the developers (who's a legit shitty person) with his personal contact info and text calling him a "parasite". One guess as to his religion/ethnicity.
It's fucking insane that nobody in this group (which is fairly well organized; it's not just a handful of bitter ex-tenants) would know better. And of course utterly destructive.
*actually I guess 1-2 years isn't long by unfogged standards
**most infuriatingly, the involvement of our park began when the tenants, in closed-door meetings with the Mayor and the developer who was evicting them, agreed to sell the park to the developer in exchange for a delay in demolition and some relocation cash. Their mantra is now that they weren't involved in the closed-door meetings that resolved a lawsuit between the city and developer. Fuckers, you sold out our park in closed-door meetings, and then showed up at Planning Commission to testify in favor of the developer. Don't you fucking dare to act like you've been disenfranchised.
One guess as to his religion/ethnicity.
Grinning Presbyterian?
Somebody is putting up weird, lefty (or incomprehensible), cheap signs all over Oakland. Just standard copier paper glued to traffic light control boxes and such. My favorite is "Refuse work. Be useless. Arm Joy." I'm 1 and 3, Anonymous Gluer.
On topic because of East Liberty: It doesn't really take many mice to make enough droppings that they are too many to count easily.