The Loss of the Old New York of the Nineties – the 1990s

Reliably, every decade or so, some writer bemoans the loss of their city – the shops, the bars, the old haunts – displaced by whatever excess is sweeping away the past.   Usually new money and vacuous people.  Robson Street serves as the the purpose in Vancouver. (Can anyone even remember Robsonstrasse anymore?  Thank God for Herzog.)

Here’s the latest in the genre from New York:

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It’s Taylor Swift’s City Now.

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Smith’s, a 60-year-old bar a block from Times Square, became the latest city institution to announce that it was closing.

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The last three graphs:

In Chelsea, gay culture has been the subject of demolition over the past 18 months or so with Raw Hide and Splash, the classic bars, and Camouflage, the men’s clothing store that had been around since the ’70s, having closed. All over the country, the trending of gay life toward convention and domesticity has shifted the tenor of night life, and there are both a sense of loss and one of complacency around the change. Several blocks south of Chelsea, on Christopher Street in the West Village, the legendary gay bar Boots & Saddle closed not long ago and has struggled to find a new location.

“If this happened 10 years ago there would have been an uproar from the local gay community,” Corey Johnson, the neighborhood’s openly gay city councilman, told me. “But things aren’t organized around ‘let’s save our local gay bar’ anymore,” he said. “They’re organized around ‘let’s have the best schools for our kids.’ ”

Developers are crass; urban planning has seemed virtually nonexistent; New York feels ever more like Singapore meets St. Louis. Who wants to live in a place where the bank-to-person ratio is veering toward one-to-one? As you’re complaining, it may be worth remembering that once, long ago, you used to be a lot more fun.