Scale, Culture, and Real Estate: The Reproduction of Lowliness in Great Jones Street

Abstract

Written during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, Edward Sanders’s “The Age” formulates the obligation to investigate a decade’s paralyzed yet momentous history sandwiched between the political and social upheavals of the 1960s, and the quiescently dominant economic prosperity of the 1980s. The historical relationship between the three decades appears to be the loss of political radicalism and its steady incorporation into the mainstream economic, cultural, and political regime through the instant gratifications of narcotic substances, hedonistic pleasures, and lavish consumerism. For Sanders, the social and political liberation that took place (both literally and metaphorically) in the urban agora during the 1960s was replaced by the drug-induced experience of excess in the private sphere during the 1970s, and would take similar forms of apolitical and compliant self-satisfaction through the chain of commodities during the 1980s. “Yesterday: the freeing of verse / Today: pot / Tomorrow: free food in the supermarket.”¹ Undoubtedly, the 1970s in New York City were an eclectic mix between the past residues of dissent and radical change, a present state of chronic dereliction and social spleen, and the promise of betterment, mainly through privatized urban redevelopment and the marketing of lifestyles.

I was free but the city wasn’t. Walking was luxury. It meant time was on my side. The streets looked really good to me. They looked like art, marble and tar, money like flying paper, neon literature, nature pushing through the concrete … The city looked like a war zone. We dropped a bomb on ourselves. It can be a jungle and a paradise too. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference.

—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Downtown 81