Crosswalk :: v2.1 :: Trickle Down... Rise Up! :: There's This Thing Going On. It Sucks.

Part I :: Trickle Down…
Issue 1
Volume 2

There's This Thing Going On. It Sucks.

by Mike Taylor

It’s the flames that expose all the stories of which we were unaware. From the street, it’s all soot and debris, new condo owners shaking their heads at us while we drink on the fire escape. With the facade forcibly removed, you can see the bowling alley and the dance studio, the wall length of mirrors crashing to the street like hail. A film studio bought the signs advertising booze and peanuts from when the building housed a liquor store, long after it housed a church, then a school. Where institutions intersected, we’ll now glimpse the signs as symbols of urban decay foregrounded by bit players and hack dialog in bad movies.

The Providence we now inhabit will persevere like celluloid memory, but never again lived reality. We’ll supply the background to someone else’s movie. Cheap video for the disposable class. Workers and artists both become “workers” and “artists” within the fluid language of deplorable euphemism dictated by developers and real estate lawyers. Everyone’s an underling in the new city. The food chain is established and the only static fact is that the underclass is always the main course.
Amidst the gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes on the occasion of Jane Jacobs’ death, another life and death lived and died. The idea of “Great American Cities” hopped in the back seat of Profitable American Opportunities, a cynical nod to the nagging fear that maybe Americans do just want Wal Mart and parking lot ease. From Central Florida’s Disney playsets to San Francisco dot-com-bust, and all the Austins and Biloxis in between, the advertiser’s conquest of “cool” translates to the more nefarious conquest of “liberal”. The New Urbanist lexicon of “pedestrian friendly” and “creative reuse” is a ruse, because they do NOT care about quality of life for anyone except the highest bidder, they do not and do not EVEN KNOW HOW to care about the character of a city, and developers CERTAINLY do not care about art and artists.

Well, anymore than I care about art and artists. I, as an ostensible “artist” (on average, about 40% of my meager income is generated by art sales; I could just as truthfully call myself an odd jobber) am tired of being used as a signifier, a soothing balm to the dead branch of old capital. Whenever the yawning protest of affordable housing advocates or unionists percolates against the endless procession of publicly funded New Urban tax vampires, the artist is dragged out into the public arena; the pallid corpse to slake the how and why of the doubtful public. It’s simply unrealistic to believe that market interests really want to fill their new developments with diverse populations and uses. The bottom line, though sometimes fungible, is NEVER outright contradictory. Education and interaction= democratization, decentralization, and static, often problematic levels of diversity. That’s why 60’s era public housing developments all faced inwards: to facilitate the drug trade and let violence flourish amidst the underclass. Now we get condos with police substations BUILT INTO them. This is textbook classism!

But it’s all trickle down economics. The same fallacy that got Reagan elected into a second, very sad and embarrassing term, is now being turned inside out and reinflated to a kickass nu-rock soundtrack to smooth the transition from post-industrial husk to creative, vital neighborhood. But the paint will dry transparent, and no amount of self-satisfaction can make the fence any whiter. When the condos are done, the hotels full of fat sunburned conventioneers, the train tracks to Boston clogged with bedroom commuters, Providence will have pulled a slow one. It doesn’t have to be fast when the rhetoric is castor-oil slick: the rich will harness the cache of stereotypes and the egos of young creative types to continue the work begun by the interstate, housing projects and White Flight: condense the poor population, slowly eliminate services so they can be accused of lack of ambition, and the problem will take care of itself. Social liberals adopt economic conservatism when catered to, and soon the Renaissance will be realizkkked.