Dear John — They Made the Village Expensive

Letters to John, No. 2

Dear John. It's David.

You wouldn't recognize the neighborhood. I mean that literally. You could walk down Bleecker Street tomorrow and not know where you are.

Remember the Bitter End? Still there, somehow. But the bar next door is gone. The record shop across the street is gone. The falafel place where we ate at three in the morning — gone. There's a frozen yogurt place now. Eight dollars for a cup of yogurt, John. Eight dollars.

The building where we recorded Have a Marijuana is a bank. An actual bank. They tore out the walls where we made noise and put in ATM machines. I walked past it last week and almost threw up.

CBGB is a clothing store. A fancy one. Two thousand dollar leather jackets where Joey Ramone used to play in a fifty-cent t-shirt. They kept the graffiti on the walls because graffiti is decorative now. Our rebellion is their wallpaper.

A studio apartment on Avenue B is thirty-five hundred a month. Who's making art at that price? You're not making art, you're making rent. You come home too tired to pick up a guitar.

You and Yoko had that apartment on Bank Street, remember? Before the Dakota. Before everything. You told me the Village was the only place in America that felt like Liverpool. Rough, cheap, full of people who didn't fit anywhere else. That's what made it work.

They didn't knock it down, John. That's the trick. They left the buildings standing and just made it so nobody like us can afford to live in them. The Village is still there. The village is gone.

Miss you, man.

See also: Rent Is the New Cops — they priced out the musicians. CBGB Is a Clothing Store — the Bowery. They Turned My Block into a Hotel — Avenue A. Washington Square — the one corner they couldn't gentrify. Up Against the Wall Street — the wall that built the condos.

David Peel Letters to John — No. 2

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