From the sounds of it, a lack of opinions isn't the problem: just an unwillingness to express those opinions in a reasonable way. But I'll say no more, as I don't want to be accused of trying to impose universal morality on the thread.
Keep Five Points as an existing neighbourhood
- Thread starter Morwen Edhelwen
- Start date
Actually I was referring to the idea of Five Points being rebuilt in the future as background to a science fiction story.
I think the problem is fourfold: that city planners have a fixation on order, that the land is fairly unstable due to the damming of the Collect, that (bracing for incoming flames) there's not much of architectural merit in the neighbourhood, and that in any case the US is less nostalgic about these matters than the British. As such, the temptation will always be to wipe out everything there and start again, rationalising the streets when you do so. At the risk of stating the obvious, you only need to lose one road and it isn't the Five Points any more.
Having it rebuilt with a POD from today is maybe slightly easier to justify, given that it depends on futurity. The trouble is that to connect up two more roads to the three which exist there now would require demolishing some major civic buildings to the south and/or the park to the north, not to mention building roads in a modern city which is moving away from the car. It's not impossible to do, but might involve one or more large explosions. Of course, you could just move a few hundred feet down the road and call the intersection of Mort Street, Worth Street and Park Row the New Five Points.
The nicest way to express your opinion is to seat it in its context:
"Given that I believe that the liberal state manages, as the least worst vehicle, conflicting human desires; that the state's clearance of XXX slum was motivated by liberty, fraternity, egality."
or
"In the context of the Australian urban land market, profit is the most obvious and recurrent motive in Australian slum clearances. We should thus question the Aboriginal Housing Corporation's planned redevelopment of The Block."
or
"Man's nature being weakness, a stronger authority acting in resolving the moral quagmire of five points was necessary, and any heavy handedness is regrettable but ultimately necessary for the regulation of moral order."
Each of which (not surprisingly) when properly voiced gives us alt-hist speculations.
Five Points could have been cleared for civic purpose, but with the original architecture retained through the hiring of a liberal architect who values existing land uses.
Five Points could have been cleared for profit, but with an instant clearance and condemnation, but with a slow rebuild, site by site by competing capitals which would therefore retain existing land and street forms.
Five Points could have been cleared for purely moral purposes, but Glebed, with the glebing church imposing new land uses in a slow fashion (due to church budgets, always small), and this slow rebuilding resulting in the maintenance of the prior land and street forms.
* * *
Explained and explored opinions are of great use.
yours,
Sam R.
Found the intersection on the map and thought the two streets around that intersection- Oliver Street and East Broadway could make up the last two points.
There is a difference between improving the fortunes of an impoverished community, and forcing that community elsewhere.
I went to the Five Points once, and it was unrecognizable. Though New York changes quite a bit, the city now changes less than the old city used to. The existing buildings are massive high-rises (I think housing?) that are clearly quite wealthy, and a municipal building that serves the borough of Manhattan. One approach to consider would be an alternate history backstory even if the story takes place in the future, because I think the window to recreate the Five Points has passed.
The clear trend to butterfly away would be the Urban Renewal ascendence of the mid-twentieth century. It is wrapped up a lot in modernism as an ideology and an architectural school, and I suspect the privileging of engineers and technocrats in the Second World War also contributed. The original plans for interstate highway systems were to include rail corridors, and split into boulevards when they entered the city center; it was not until engineers--Robert Moses being the ur-example--took control of implementation and focused almost exclusively on traffic flow that the concept of a highway serving the city was abandoned. Instead, the city was something that needed to be wiped clean to let the highway pass through (or the community center, or the housing project, or the office block). Thus, mass evictions and slum clearances wiped clean much of the slate that cities had been built on. Lower Manhattan would have been cut through by a ten-lane, four-interchange expressway through Greenwich Village, Soho, Little Italy, and Washington Square were it not for the community organizing efforts of Jane Jacobs and her neighbors.
This was part of a broader trend of hollowing out American cities and pouring investment and incentives into suburbs and sprawl. This is why American cities became so dysfunctional in the 1970s and 1980s. Gentrification is essentially a return of those suburbanites, or their children, back into the cities now that city life is in demand once more. The hostility towards it is provoked by the fact that the people who have actually been living in those neighborhoods this whole time are being passed over and forced out after generations of neglect and hostility. "Who told you to buy a brownstone in my neighborhood on my side of the street?!"
How to butterfly away this trend of urban renewal and suburbanization is a huge question that I don't have an answer for, though it's a favorite topic of mine. What we are looking for, I think, is a continuation of the tradition of Daniel Burnham's City Beautiful, and the old tradition of civic design. We would need to butterfly away the death of the streetcar and passenger rail (and save Penn Station!) to create fewer incentives for suburbanization, and we would need to stave off the temptation to undertake massive megaprojects in favor of what Jane Jacobs called "close-grained diversity," or small lots of mixed incomes and uses.
It's a tall order, but that's the kind of world that might have restored the Five Points sometime in the twentieth century. Perhaps the name will come back someday--goodness knows we're fascinated by the place--but I suspect that the built form that the Five Points was will never return. Creating a Five Points that could exist, because it was rebuilt sometime in a different past, would not only mean the creation of that neighborhood, but of an entirely new city. In this city, the New York of memory, or parts of it, would still exist, alongside the wonders of a future we'll never see.
Thanks for the explanation. So what you're saying is that without an alternate historical explanation, Five Points would have different streets making up the intersection (probably the Mott Street-Park Row one mentioned) and look totally different?
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I was horrified by the first few posts in this thread-- but maybe it was partly my fault.
The area is pretty touristy-Columbus Park is right there and it's close to both Chinatown and Little Italy. IIRC (It's been awhile since I was in that neck of the woods) there's some plaques and signage about the historical relevance of the area.
To actually put a five way intersection there you'd have to re-jigger a pretty significant chunk of Lower Manhattan, so that's probably not going to happen.
Also remember that NYC never went through the urban hollowing to the same degree as other cities-and at this point, as a result, most of Manhattan and stretches of Brooklyn are getting to the point even relatively well-to-do middle class sorts can't afford to live there.
To actually put a five way intersection there you'd have to re-jigger a pretty significant chunk of Lower Manhattan, so that's probably not going to happen.
Also remember that NYC never went through the urban hollowing to the same degree as other cities-and at this point, as a result, most of Manhattan and stretches of Brooklyn are getting to the point even relatively well-to-do middle class sorts can't afford to live there.
Well, I mean, it already does. Two of the five streets are gone, and the other three all have different names. There are honking big buildings that are used for major government business where they used to run. So, I'm suggesting that for the Five Points to plausibly exist as the Five Points anytime in the future, we probably need the timeline to diverge sometime in the past, rather than carry forward from our present course. Of course, it depends on the thematic direction you want to take your story, I wouldn't presume to tell you how to build your world. Still, that's what I would do if I was going to write a story set in the Five Points of the future.
I don't know how old those buildings are--they look 1st half 20th century to me--but the PoD would need to be before they were built.
The other possibility is to butterfly away the original clearance of the Five Points itself, but that's a lot more butterflies to work through. You will find, also, that there are many more resources about mid-20th century slum clearance and urban renewal efforts than there are about the same trends in the 19th century. But who knows! There are probably great history books out there about the neighborhood.
Urban renewal is actively politically contested at the moment. Unlike many other areas of active contest, it is an area of active and relatively vicious class-warfare. The politics of class-warfare tend to have a brutality not seen in other politics. The simplest example would be Paris' avenues military function against Parisiennes. I don't believe it was your fault, your original post didn't intervene into the contemporary political contest at all.
yours,
Sam R.
My neighborhood is being gentrified. The actual residents of my neighborhood that made it into the haven the bohos and hipsters love, which were the preclude to yuppies, don't get anything by gentrification, but simply replaced by other people. We, along with the crime, get pushed somewhere else for the powers to be to forget about. The cost is all the good things about a community that people spent the better part of a century building in spite of poverty, gangs, and racism. Such things as clinics, local businesses, and a sense of identity and history. It would be one thing if these neighborhoods like mine died because the residents largely made enough to move someplace better because they achieved something, but this is not the case.
But how about we focus on the question rather than debating something that would be done in Chat.
Is anybody else seeing the irony of opponents of gentrification pushing their way into the thread and trying to take it over?
Just to clarify the OP, is your novel set in the Five Points during its actual period of historical existence or in a re-created/never destroyed Five Points at some point in the future? It just occurred to me that the latter would be an interesting setting for some sort of cyberpunk work: you wouldn't even really need to rebuild the streets or change the current land usage to keep the historical allusion.
Just to clarify the OP, is your novel set in the Five Points during its actual period of historical existence or in a re-created/never destroyed Five Points at some point in the future? It just occurred to me that the latter would be an interesting setting for some sort of cyberpunk work: you wouldn't even really need to rebuild the streets or change the current land usage to keep the historical allusion.
Found this: http://www.amazon.com/Five-Points-Nineteenth-Century-Neighborhood-Elections/dp/0684859955.
Another poster gave their opinion, that
Am I right that if this happened, it would mean:
1) a neighbourhood called Five Points could exist in that area of Manhattan sometime in the future, but
2) it wouldn't be the same place we've been talking about?
@rob: It's a kind of recreation. It's more of "a neighbourhood in the basic area of the Victorian-era "Five Points", with the same name and reputation as a rookery, but with different streets making up the Points intersection. The plot is inspired by "Oliver Twist" and the story is steampunk.
The protagonist's a young boy nicknamed Dodger and is basically a half Black version of the Artful Dodger (inspired partially by Lionel Bart's take on the character*). There are lots of mentions of baby farming, prostitution and the fencing of stolen goods.
*Bart's musical has a slightly lighter tone but still keeps a lot of the spirit of the novel. And there's "You've Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two". Seriously that song is kind of vaudeville-ish, and Ron Moody sounds kind of like Al Jolson. I think that style of singing was very poplar from the 1920s onwards for actors in musical theatre- clear diction, vocal tricks. BTW, no-one sings that song, or "I'd Do Anything" or "As Long As He Needs Me" in my novel. "All My Trials", "Alexander's Ragtime Band", and "Give My Regards To Broadway" turn up*
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