The responses I've received over the High Line column, both over the digital transom and in real life, have been less than positive. It makes sense. I'm a crank. I've seen my adopted city get turned into a place where I never would have moved if I was young today.
Most of the criticism I received was from other transplants. I even was taken to task by someone from Eugene, Oregon for using Portland as a pejorative. Then I received a rather persuasive rebuttal from long time pal and author, Arthur Nersesian.
Arthur is a native of Manhattan and author of ten books, all set in New York. You can check him and his work out at his website, here. We agree on very many things about what has and is happening to New York. But his rebuttal made me pause and re-think my position on the High Line. I don't agree 100% with what he has to say, but he raises some salient points, as always.
When I first met Arthur 25 years ago, he lived around the corner from me in the East Village and was an aspiring novelist, working feverishly on his first book. He wanted me to read it, but I begged off thinking, “What if it sucks?” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. While the rest of us were out carousing at after-hours bars, Arthur was writing away in his brother’s law office in the Empire State Building.
That manuscript turned out to be, “The Fuck Up,” the first of his 10 books.
Arthur has carved out a niche for himself and garnered praise as well as a devoted following for his novels. The NY Times called him the “last of the bohemians,” I call him the last of the misfits. I don’t mean that as a cut, but as a compliment.
We manage to get together only once or twice a year for breakfast to catch up. During our last breakfast in the East Village, Art remarked that the neighborhood has become “the Lower East Side of the Upper West Side.” A very apt description. He saw the demise of the sense of identity and community as a direct result of “Sightseers.” He didn't mean tourists, but those who come to the city for a year or two and then move on. They are the “termites of the city,” eating away at the identity of the neighborhood and driving up rents with their revolving door tenancies.
So, here is Arthur Nersesian's rebuttal:
I remember the old High line from years gone by. It was a neglected trestle that looked like a dinosaur from another age. But what history are you talking about? No battles were fought, no great men, no historical acts. No nothing.
It was a disintegrating piece of infrastructure, like an above ground sewer that one could only look up at since you couldn't climb up on it -- and these guys actually preserved that aspect of it. In fact they added to it, putting in a beautiful, wild garden with different plants and flowers, unusual art pieces, water sculpture and great perspectives of both the city and the Jersey... all for free! (The Brooklyn and Bronx Botanical Gardens charge admission)
Between walking through a running garden in a city that sorely lacks green -- and, by the way, where else can you find anything like it, big points for originality -- versus walking along rusty old rails that most halfwits would probably trip over, I'll take the garden any day.
As a life long New Yorker struggling to make ends meet, the real issues are the economic implications. I don't love tourists and usually hate the rich. But I'd prefer them over there. After all, that is the edge of town, once populated by tranny hookers, leather bars, garages, and old warehouses. Not exactly a struggling blue collar or artistic community.
And to be fair, a decade before the High Line opened, Yuppies took over the Meatpacking section and SoHo migrated north, opening up the strip up for the haute crowd, so this High Line really is just the icing on the cake. I miss old New York and would go back there in a heartbeat, but the past is gone, and isn't it time to look for some goddamn silver linings in all these dark clouds?
Ladies and gentlemen, my pal and prolific author, Arthur Nersesian.
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