Where in the World is Jane Jacobs?

From an e-mail exchange with a friend regarding the development of the Lower East Side since the early 1980s. Re-printed here without anyone's permission:

That's absolutely true. The difference to me is that all of that [housing projects, old school barber shops, Puerto Rican kids hanging out on the street, community gardens with black ladies lovingly tending the flower beds, synagogues, bums, junkies, knish joints, wholesale fabric shops, even some orthodox Jews] was there 25 years ago, but being white in the LES signified something very different back then than what being white represents now.

I wouldn't say that the change was a matter of going from better to worse, necessarily, or even of authenticity versus forgery. But it parallels the overall development of Manhattan since the late 1980s, at least. White migrants, to grossly generalize, used to come to New York (especially the Village and LES) as an aesthetic or social repudiation of the suburban experience, concomitant to an openness to all kinds of reinvention using the material most at hand: the abandoned debris of urban decay.

Maybe nothing illustrates this better than the community gardens, which not only transformed rubble into the resurrection of urban life, but also created a commons, a basis for cross-cultural, cross-generational unity.

It's easy for me to idealize the time before Real Estate, but it's not nearly so easy for me to imagine that the inhabitants of new condo developments on Rivington Street would even understand that vision, especially now years after Giuliani's purge of community gardens in the heat of a commercially driven urban renewal. Recent arrivals to the LES enjoy the idea of the Lower East Side, but perhaps would shrink in horror from the raw ingredients that went into the creation of that idea. These people, too, are suburban migrants, but they are not the refugees of a generation ago, and for that reason alone, their experience of the LES will be markedly different, and perhaps more informed by the new New York, the city-as-mall-and-food-court.

I know, I'm being unfair. There's still a lot of rawness around. But it feels pickled, kept in a jar, a wildlife refuge where young white people can "safari" without ever having to get their hands dirty.