Conclusion: We're All Bohemians Now



"Money, once it eats up a place, very rarely spits it out again."
*     *     *

2006 - CBGBs closes.

2009 - Jim Carroll dies at his writing desk in Inwood.

2013 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts a gala entitled "Punk: Chaos to Couture." In May 2013, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art held a gala exhibition entitled "Punk: Chaos to Couture," which the museum promised would focus on "the relationship between the punk concept of 'do-it-yourself' and the couture concept of 'made to measure'" while organizing "materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style." The exhibition was dedicated to the fashion icons of punk as re-envisioned by some of the industry's leading designers. Celebrity guests, including Miley Cyrus and (inevitably) Madonna, arrived at the red carpet in expensively tailored approximations of past bohemian fashions. The exhibition's catalog featuring contributions by Richard Hell and John Lydon. Among the more notable exhibits on display was the re-created basement toilet of CBGBs, though the music venue itself had been closed for several years. The Met toilets were a considerably sanitized reproduction of the original, yet after visiting the gala, journalist Fintan O'Toole wrote:

It's all there: the dirty brown walls, the scrawled graffiti, the single roll of damp toilet paper tossed casually between the two sinks, the cigarette butts. And what's most impressive is that someone's gone to the trouble of staining the toilet bowls a delightful shade of, shall we say, ochre. Yes, splatter, incontinent ochre. It might even have been applied, we are to imagine, by a genuine God of Punk.

Real



Not


 This showcasing of "anti-establishment style" was co-sponsored by the fashion magazine Vogue and chaired by Beyonce, and the poster for the event prominently featured a photograph of the late Sid Vicious, who, before his posthumous reinvention as a style icon, was perhaps most famous for (probably) stabbing his girlfriend to death in the Chelsea Hotel. Women's Wear Daily called the exhibition "at once enlightening and fascinating." When the establishment becomes this comfortable with the rebellion, it's safe to say the rebellion is over.

Meanwhile, the canonization of Jane Jacobs continues apace.
     Increasingly, for those occupying a mid-level position on the spectrum of contemporary urban gentrification - somewhere between the original tenement poor and today's investment banker - Jacobs has taken on an increasingly iconic position as the Mother Courage of urban pioneerism. This wasn't always the case. Despite her intractable (and, for her opponent anyway) career-ending battles with New York's city planner Robert Moses, Jacobs doesn't rate a mention in Robert Caro's otherwise monumental Moses biography The Power Broker. Ultimately, Jacobs's work is better at diagnosing the problems of of contemporary development and social patterns than is ever was in offering much of a solution. To position Jacobs uncritically as a saintly champion of the self-selectively aesthetic "bohemian class" - a group...


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