I AM THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Around 1972, I met a few people who had studios in the New York City area that was, not much later, going to be known as So-Ho. By the late seventies the artists and writers and actors that had turned the old mostly garment industry factories’ neighborhood into a workshop and residential area were gone; displaced by the artsy rich and decadent “liberal crowd” who loves to hang out with artists while pushing them out from their studios and attics, forcing the new generation of writers and artists and musicians to find new neighborhoods.

By the eighties, disco music moved to the working class outer and suburban ghettos; and, for the Manhattan art-oriented crowds, 1950’s existentialism was institutionalized, becoming vintage, to live the past in the present. The perception of history and place had moved into a different period: a retrospective at the artsy cult cinema par excellence, the Film Forum, of 1950-60’s existentialist films by the likes of John Cassavettes and Jean Luc Godard were the hit; the place to be seen on any weekend night. Breathess characters were the role models for the post-disco generation, wanting to live non orthodox existences. 

The younger artists and musicians that could not afford the lofts south of Houston moved to the East Village and decided to wear black. The love and flower power of the previous generation was gone and the new one rehashed the old fifties, early sixties individualist discourses, and went mourning, with Basquiat and Nina Hagen as their best representatives. Aids was gradually evolving; death became the “leitmotif”. 

Jean Seberg’s short hair, black tight pants, and the sort of free and not very social conscious character was copied by the kids moving into the East Village, the new frontier, displacing the workers, proletariat families that had made the Lower East Side their residential neighborhood for decades. Converse tennis were a piece to be worn, the brand. Black jeans and tight black t-shirts were everywhere -downtown, mostly-.

Not much later, Calvin Klein and others culturally appropriated the trend; including the use of drugged looking skinny models. Williamsburg became a suburb of the East Village and existentialism went the way of Madison Avenue. But why, close to four decades, two generations later, are they still wearing black? Are they aware of what is happening to their neighborhoods?