ABSTRACT
When Mayor Ed Koch took office in 1978, the municipality was facing an inevitable dilemma with the city’s prospering nightlife: how to balance the flourishing nightlife, which contributed to enhancing the city’s image and to boosting its tourism revenues and real-estate values, with the snowballing rallying cries from gentries clamored for the enhancement of quality of life. The political choice was to tighten law enforcement and possibly change regulative rules so as to keep the clubland of the city in line with the quality of life demands of upper-middle class residential property owners. This chapter elaborates on this process of “gentrification with and against nightlife” (see also Hae 2011b). The detailing of this process will demonstrate that gentrification is a complicated process with contingent and contradictory turns that are shaped by multi-faceted struggles over what counts as legitimate urban space, culture and values.
