Notes from a native Chelsea son

Eric Darton

By Nicole Davis

When Wal-Mart’s Chief Executive H. Lee Scott announced recently that he had discounted Manhattan as a viable home for one of his big-box stores, many New Yorkers let out a collective sigh of relief. Not only is the mega-retailer notorious for its paltry wages and benefits, it signifies suburbia, the antithesis of New York City. But as the authors of a new anthology titled The Suburbanization of New York argue, distinguishing the world’s greatest city from its bedroom towns is becoming increasingly difficult as chain stores, real estate developers and quality-of-life laws have helped to whitewash the very diversity, openness and unpredictability that makes New York, New York.

Eric Darton, a native New Yorker and longtime Chelsea resident, is one of 15 writers who contributed to the book, published by Princeton Architectural Press last month. An avuncular, infectiously enthusiastic man, Darton also wrote Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center—three years before the towers fell. Though Darton became one of the media’s de facto spokespeople for WTC history after 9/11, his book was in part a critique of the strong-arm tactics developers used to uproot a historic business district and plant in its place two titanic structures that would permanently change the city’s skyline, and psyche.

Darton was well equipped then, to write about another city-altering structure for The Suburbanization of New York: the Time Warner Center. In his essay for the anthology, he writes, “In the time span between the building of the World Trade and Time Warner centers, all pretenses of planning in the interest of a wider public good, however compromised, had given way to who could get away with what and make it stick.” This subtle shift, from New York as a place of constant development to a city obsessed with real estate returns, was one of the many things we talked about during a recent interview at Le Grainne Café on Ninth Ave. at W. 21st St., Darton’s regular neighborhood hangout.

How long have you lived in Chelsea?

I have been in Chelsea since 1962. Yeah — stunning. My mother was an original tenant at Penn South and I was with her at the time we moved in. I was 12.

How has the neighborhood changed in that time? Has it become as “suburbanized” as other areas of New York mentioned in the book, like the East Village or Harlem?

Suburbanization is symptomatic of globalization, and that really is what the book is about. There are many places where, if you were blindfolded and dropped into the center city, you wouldn’t know where you were. You could be in Bangkok, you could be in Paris, you could be in Jakarta, you could be in New York. And that is much more a function of globalism than suburbanization.

I witnessed the changes in Chelsea over a long period of time, and I think one of the things that’s interesting about Chelsea is that it’s been protected in some ways from the worst ravages of globalization by the fact that it’s so fragmented. There are blocks of public housing, blocks of upper middle to upper class housing, there’s Penn South. And then there are the townhouses. It’s like this mosaic that can’t quite be mushed into something. In order to do that globalization thing, you have to mush it all together, and Chelsea is not that mushable, because a lot of the stuff that’s here ain’t goin’ anywhere. Not fast, anyway. And in a lot of cases, there’s a lot of people here who aren’t eager to leave Chelsea because in Manhattan, this is just about the last real diverse community. And people really prize that.

I’m not saying that this community isn’t under assault from all sorts of sources. I mean the sheer amount of supposedly luxury stuff that’s been built, it will and continue to have a deleterious effect, not just on Chelsea but on the life of the city, because many of the people who build these buildings pay virtually no taxes. I mean it’s bad on a lot of levels. But we still [knocks on wood] are managing to hold the line. And it’s not just that we’re managing to hold the line, it’s that Chelsea itself is so weird, that it’s been helpful.

But it has changed. It was a predominantly Latino community once upon a time. I still wave to some of the old superintendents, but all the people who used to live in their buildings are gone. But then the whole thing of New York is that it’s all about displacement. I mean, where I live in Penn South — they bulldozed a perfectly good, useful, working class community to build that.

So development and displacement is just part of New York’s natural life cycle?

I don’t know how natural it is. But as long as we have this notion that the fundamental wealth of the city is in its real estate rather than its people, stuff like that’s going to happen. The very place where we’re sitting was built, as far as I know, by Clement Clark Moore, who divided his extensive land holdings in Chelsea, including what is now General Theological Seminary, into lots in the mid-19th century. Transforming the value of land by making what’s built on it more profitable — like the conversion of houses into hotels in Monopoly — has been part of the fabric of New York City forever and ever. It’s like one of my lines in the book I recently finished, Notes of a New York Son: “New York is a symphony played in the key of real estate.”

Only now it’s like background music to us. In your essay for The Suburbanization of New York you distinguish between the building of the World Trade Center, which people fought, and the Time Warner Center, which was accepted without public protest. How did we become apathetic to all this rampant development?

The public protest around the World Trade Center was very different, because a community was being displaced. And even though it was a business community in decline, it was actually a fairly well-organized community with an intended purpose. And no such thing happened with the Time Warner Center. But one of the big changes that I think took place over time was that the idea of a public good became almost a utopian notion. The World Trade Center was a distorted reflection of the idea of a public good. Whereas by the time the Time Warner Center came along, that wasn’t even on the table, it was more like how much? It was a completely different set of values.

A great deal of that change has to do with the subtle shifts within the balance of the city’s economy. The city, when I was growing up in it, used to be a place where things were researched, manufactured, and transported. The port was not just a maritime culture or an economic engine, it created a sense of the city as a place that both gave and received real things that people exchanged. And the actuality of that has really changed. New York has become a center for the extraction of wealth and servicing those people who are extracting the wealth. When a city becomes that, it becomes a monoculture, and a monoculture usually doesn’t have a pretty long lifespan. Unless it mutates into something more robust.

So what can we do to hold on to the “old” New York?

I think it will depend a lot on what happens with the real estate market, because there are many signs that we’re in for some serious contractions. And very often awareness is economically based. You can kind of cruise along in a particular mode until you have to change that mode.

I think what’s interesting about the Suburbanization book is that the couple of events we’ve done so far have really shown me that this book has hit a nerve. People appear to be very concerned about losing whatever it was that they came to New York for. And it isn’t just a sense of the authentic or the sense of community. It’s something much bigger than that. It’s a sense of purpose and a sense that your life has some meaning in relationship to other people. And when that starts slipping, I don’t know.

But I think we need to change our narrative. You know, you lose your job, you change your narrative, you get sick, you change your narrative… And part of New York changing its narrative is asking ourselves ‘what are we doing? What kind of city, seven generations down the line, do we want this to be?’ Hopefully we’ll get uncomfortable enough to make some kind of a creative leap in our own imaginations.