Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJune 30th, 2016
While New York’s daily newspapers were struggling — and failing — to understand what was happening in the neighborhoods around Sheridan Square (above), the latest issue of New York magazine hit the stands with an article noticing the Upper West Side’s “renaissance,” brought on by a new band of urban settlers moving into the very rough neighborhood, attracted there by cheap rents and readily available housing:
“I was ready for war,” one recent brownstone buyer said. “You know, German shepherd, barbed wire, burglar alarms, punji sticks, the works. But we were delighted to find that with a little caution it could be a relaxed place to live.” … Business, of course, has joined and helped to stimulate the movement to the West Side. Flower vendors who set up their cardboard cartons at the top of the neighborhood’s subway stairs claim business is booming. “Only a year ago,” Monroe, a West 86th Street vendor, said between sales, “flowers couldn’t live on the West Side.”
High end stores, restaurants, theaters were returning to the Upper West Side amidst a $700 million building boom. But the transition from a down-in-the-heels neighborhood to a sought-after address was far from complete:
The same kind of young, successful and relatively affluent middle-class families that moved to the suburbs 20 years ago and to the East Side 10 years ago are moving to the West Side today, and while the neighborhood still has an ample supply of teenage muggers, parading homosexuals and old men who wear overcoats in July, the over-all mood of the area seems to have changed.
This article was published just two days after the Stonewall Rebellion first broke out just four short miles to the south in Greenwich Village. In fact, the neighborhoods around Christopher Street were still experiencing sporadic violence and police confrontations when this issue of New York hit the newsstands. To be fair, this article was likely weeks in the making, and the magazine had probably already gone to press before police started their raid on the Stonewall Inn. But even the city’s dailies were missing the significance of what was going on right under their noses. It’s not surprising then that New York magazine would see “parading homosexuals” elsewhere as a threat to another neighborhood’s struggle for respectability.
[Source: Nicholas Pileggi. “Renaissance of the Upper West Side.” New York (June 30, 1969): 28-39. Available online via Google Books here.]
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Hunter
June 30th, 2016
I am reminded of the “renaissance” of North Halsted Street in Chicago a number of years ago: what had been a rather seedy, down-at-the-heels neighborhood attracted gays, who started buying two-flats and fixing them up; new businesses opened, including a number of gay bars, and young single women started moving in because it was safe at night — lots of people on the streets.
Suddenly, the streets were crowded with baby carriages and straight couples — and singles — attracted by the hip atmosphere, the shopping, and the night life.
And sure enough, at a town meeting, a woman stood up and voiced her concern about all the gays in the neighborhood, worried about what it would do to the value of her property.
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