They Turned My Block into a Hotel

David Peel — Street Corner Rant

You know what's on Avenue A now? A hotel. A BOUTIQUE hotel. You know what used to be there? People. Actual human beings living their actual lives. Musicians, painters, junkies, runaways, poets, lunatics, and the occasional saint. Now it's a hotel where somebody from Connecticut pays three hundred dollars a night to sleep where we used to live for a hundred a month.

The Christodora building on Avenue B — that used to be a community center. A COMMUNITY CENTER. Then it went condo in the eighties and we rioted. Tompkins Square Park, 1988, the cops came in with badges taped over so you couldn't get their numbers. We fought back. We lost. The building went for millions. Now it's got a doorman who wouldn't let the old me past the lobby.

I used to walk from my place to CBGB in twelve minutes. Past the bodegas that sold loose cigarettes and coffee for a quarter. Past the guys playing dominoes on milk crates. Past the murals that changed every month because somebody always had a new thing to say and a wall to say it on.

Try walking that route now. The bodegas are juice bars. The milk crates are gone — they put spikes on the ledges so nobody can sit down. The murals got painted over with some developer's logo. And CBGB, man, CBGB is a John Varvatos store selling four hundred dollar leather jackets to people who never heard the Ramones.

They didn't bulldoze the neighborhood. That would have been too honest. What they did was worse — they kept the buildings, raised the rent, and waited. One by one, the artists left. The musicians left. The weirdos left. Priced out, pushed out, replaced by people who moved here BECAUSE it used to be dangerous and interesting and now they've made it safe and boring and they don't even see the irony.

You want to know why there's no new punk rock? Because there's no cheap apartments. It's that simple. Every great music scene in history started in a place where you could live for almost nothing. Liverpool, the Bowery, Haight-Ashbury, Detroit — wherever the rent was cheap, the music was loud. When the rent goes up, the music goes away. Not because the musicians got soft. Because they got evicted.

My block is a hotel now. The tourists sleep in beds where the songs were born. They'll never know what was there before. They'll never hear the sound of somebody's first band rehearsing through the floor at two in the morning. They'll never smell the pot smoke drifting up the fire escape while somebody read poetry out the window to nobody and everybody.

That was New York. The real one. It lived on Avenue A and they turned it into a reservation.

See also: Rent Is the New Cops — they priced out the musicians. CBGB Is a Clothing Store — the Bowery got the same treatment. They Made the Village Expensive — the letter to Lennon about what happened. Washington Square — the park outlasted the block. The Landlord — the landlord evicted the neighborhood.

David Peel

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