Nostalgias of the modern

The menu lists ‘steak au poivre’ ($18) and ‘tenement mac and cheese’ ($12). ¹ The restaurant is called ‘Tenement’ (Figure 4.1). ² It is located in the Lower East Side of New York. The name, Lower East Side, refers to a distinctive neighbourhood history of nineteenth-century tenements that housed immigrants, to the labour struggles and rent struggles that once animated the area, and more generally to a working-class milieu. ³ The Lower East Side is the past; its symbolic elements, such as the tenements, are today its tradition. The Lower East Side is now the East Village, a renaming that indicates the intense gentrification that has taken place here at various times but in most sustained fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. As brilliantly argued by Smith, this gentrification has actively capitalized on the theme of urban decay, turning dilapidation and poverty into a corporate fantasy. ⁴ The devalued terrain of the inner city has been reclaimed through techniques of ‘cultural boosterism’ ⁵ that transform the experiences of the inner city into iconography. As these icons such as the ‘tenement’ are consumed, so the inner city itself disappears. The opening of a high-priced restaurant called ‘Tenement’ inaugurates the end of the working-class tenements, or more specifically of the working-class residents of the tenements. The tenement itself is now a façade, housing rich consumers interested in an exotic cityscape. It is above all an aesthetic icon, dissociated from both the property systems and inhabitants that once gave meaning to its form. Elsewhere, I have called this separation of form and social practice the ideology of space. ⁶ Gentrification is a stark manifestation of the ideology of space, where what is revitalized is real-estate profit and not the lives or livelihoods of neighbourhood residents. ⁷ But the ideology of space involves much more than simply evictions or demolitions; it is often the recreation of space through the deployment of tradition, through the appropriation of the very icons whose material realities are being negated through such redevelopment. In the case of the Lower East Side, Mele thus argues that the aesthetic landscapes of gentrification gesture toward and even mimic the look and feel of the very social elements they threaten to displace. ⁸