Generación / generation

By: Ashwini Thirukkonda

“Profane,” in the traditional Latin sense, is defined as the space before the temple. In a vaguely Eastern conception of temples, this could involve a large gathering space for festivals, manicured shrubbery and water fixtures, and perhaps a place to take off one’s shoes. New York City’s conception of the profane (insofar as we categorize this place as a temple to commerce, capitalism, and now a temple to oligarchy, what have you) could be encapsulated by, say, a flat, black veranda in front of a Canadian distilling conglomerate’s high rise on Park Avenue (coincidentally also the model plaza for the 1961 tax-incentive zoning law around “Privately Owned Public Spaces” — still in place today). It would logically follow that these pre-spaces — their “profanity” — is “that which is not sacred.” To define terms, I’ll establish at the start that what is not sacred leaves room for the monstrous.

The definition of the profane is a fact I learned by force. I had blithely remarked to an architect (turned Department of Buildings regulator turned American Institute for Architects tour guide) that the word “profanity” must be tongue in cheek — I hadn’t yet recognized this divergence in polarity between a traditional Latin and more colloquial connotative experience of a temple’s entryway and courtyard. The latter purports to be more inherently sacred, I pointed out, under early afternoon July rain. The architect turned regulator turned tour guide was, admittedly, already a bit frustrated with my series of attempted quips, fact sharing, questions, and wise cracks. He snapped: “Profanity isn’t just foul language! It represents that which is not sacred writ large.” Standing between the distilling company headquarters (entirely emptied out with identical black swivel chairs in each window office), half-constructed Citadel headquarters, and the Park Avenue racket club, he turned to the group and said – “This is New York City. Real estate development is a contact sport.”

In my defense, I am neither an architect nor an urban planner. I’m an engineer, albeit loosely — I build data infrastructure for renewable funds and electrical engineers to modernize the power grid. But in regards to the municipal profane, I’m interested in the context of our built environment as it relates to extremely practical, personal and at times political matters, such as, how can I safely and quickly transport myself to the bar? (Citibike). What can I talk about while we’re walking from bar A to bar B? (Words that exist in one language but not in another). While we’re traveling back to the apartment from the bar, what series of facts could I recite to entertain my progressively bored looking date? I recite a few era-defining zoning laws, call him methodological in his commitment to an absurd thought experiment from earlier in the night, and straighten my shirt a little bit. This seems to do the trick.

There’s a lull in the conversation as the train rattles through the slow-down bend immediately off the bridge, what I imagine to be the opposite of a spacecraft’s gravity slingshot. We’re still a grab-bag of stops away from the platform of descent, watching the refractory glass of sugar and fiber refineries turned office conglomerates and reflective glass of high rises give way to the red-brick compounds of Marcy and Bushwick Houses, interspersed with the familiar wide, elegantly curving covered metal balconies of the Hasidim. If the parts of the city that I and my peers tend to recreate and fraternize in is the profane, the unsacred; is this by design or something more entropic? This leads to a mulling over the following vague, ill-defined tenets of municipal organization as it involves a familiar cultural profane. Does density determine social opportunity? How does transportation determine social networks? If private housing determines intimacy, how exactly does zoning determine romantic possibility? What responsibility does architecture have to social behavior, and what responsibility do economics have to cultural continuity?

In an amateur attempt at field work — or at least an innocent realization of hobby that can now be analyzed as raw empirical data — I attended various architecture walking tours around the city this past summer, often while hungover, extensively documented a series of housewarmings and gatherings from a housing availability and built environment lens, often while drunk, and bar-hopped, often pleasantly buzzed. A few of the neighborhoods I toured and investigated hinted at some potential answers to my perturbations.

Lower Manhattan’s irregular streets – a patchwork of small, older grids set at different angles – create a different pedestrian experience from the standardized uptown grid. In parts of Greenwich Village, for example, streets change transitable direction on a whim, intersections have unconventional shapes, and mainland-Dutch inspired stoops erected to protect against a buildup of horse manure and floodwater contribute to a palpable sense of occasion and discovery (often literally, with the pre-eminence of “stooping” culture). Uptown’s grid makes movement more predictable and legible: you can locate an address, estimate travel distance, and navigate without knowing the neighborhood fluently. The 1811 Commissioners’ Plan laid out a new grid across largely undeveloped land farther north, with street dimensions far exceeding those of Lower Manhattan. Notably, urban planners of the time rejected an ‘axial design’ – a city arranged with grand avenues radiating out of important points, like palaces, monuments, seats of government, vis à vis Paris or L’Enfant’s Washington D.C. – in favor of an orthogonal plan. Streets meet at right angles, every block is roughly the same metrically, no center and no hierarchy. Upper Manhattan’s wide streets technically predate the invention of the car by over a century, offering access to parcels of land for sale at the time and extensive commercial access – easier to build, easier to sell, easier to expand. While the orthogonal grid lacked hierarchy and sought to democratize real estate by way of capital, it also lacked public squares, parks, etc – a city with no designed “space before the temple” may have engendered cultural onus wherever people could claim it: stoops, sidewalks, plazas bought with zoning bonuses.

The urban planners of New York City in the 1800s likely envisioned lower Manhattan as “profane” to the more affluent, residential, and civilized upper swaths of the city. It was far less pre-planned, in the sense that it molded itself to an already existent succession of Dutch and British colonial settlement patterns, including colonial streets, property boundaries, trade hubs, and systematized waterfront access. Take James Delancey, governor under British rule and namesake of the famous thoroughfare “Delancey Street” in the Lower East Side: his father was a member of the French nobility and his mother was a part of the Dutch contingent that originally settled Manhattan. The neighborhood used to be Delancey’s farm; Orchard Street was the site of his orchard (sweet cherries). Today, it is one of many “open” streets that, since COVID-era policy reformulation, allow for couples to slip out of the Metrograph cinema and onto either Orchard, Rivington, Broome or Ludlow to swirl natural wine around on slightly slanted metal tables. I say this with no condescension, as I too reveled in sampling orange wine and rosé on balmier evenings. I even fell out with a friend at one of these metal tables over the summer, such is the profane and at times monstrous nature of these irregular streets. In times like those, one must look up at the old and pre-law tenements standing guard over the tables. “Tenere” means to hold and not own. What used to be the densest slum at a point in human history, full of garment factories and tailors by day, with 20-odd residents sleeping on piles of half finished shirt-waists and on the fire escapes at night, is now the site of a milieu of petty melodramas. It is naive to assume this hasn’t always been the case.

A few streets down is Bar 169, previously called “The Bloody Bucket” in the 1940s and 50s, due to the bloody and brutal skirmishes sailors used to find themselves a part of in front of the bar. Decades later, Bar 169 was the old haunt of the nascent indie rock group “The Strokes.” You can almost imagine frontman Julian Casablancas singing a demo tape version of “Someday” and “Last Nite” in front of a still-standing sign on the wall that reads “watch out for loose women.” (Sources say he is still watching out). Bar 169 is sandwiched next to the so-called Forward Building, Beaux-Arts and cathedral-like and site of one of the country’s first socialist newspapers, the Forward (hence its eponymous name). Down the street stands Jarmulowsky Bank, one of the other stately buildings in the Lower East Side, but only 10 feet taller than the Forward building. This was of course, by design. Back in the days when Canal street was a literal canal of slaughterhouse, tannery, and human runoff — I imagine it to have been oozing, steaming, like a magma flow of animal parts — rich, or nouveau-rich Eastern European immigrants played out their political and philosophical disputes with building height wars. Today, the Forward Building (now a series of condos) neighbors the headquarters of the Democratic Socialists of America (a small, recently flooded basement office), whereas Jarmulowsky Bank (renovated into a hotel) watches dutifully over Dimes Square.

Proximal to this is Allen street, which housed opium dens, hop dens, and an overland train bridge, the latter of which was operational from the late 1800s to its demolition in 1942. Prostitutes would advertise themselves in red-lit windows visible from the train cars, handkerchief girls would drop their evidence of private enterprise on the pavement below while the pops of turf wars echoed in and around the metal beams. A handful of blocks away was the site of a strike of 20,000 seamstresses (Lafayette and East 8th), led by Clara Lemlich, who was arrested 17 times. “If I turn traitor to the cause, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.” Pickle sellers, prostitutes, and those that would seek to clothe them have made way for furniture showroom-style bakeries, a solid Birria spot, and Shakespeare in the parking lot.

Long before 2024’s “City of Yes” and 2020’s “Open Streets: Restaurants” (which curiously, only recently established permanent sidewalk setups and seasonal roadway setups — the pandemic-era open streets were temporary) existed the 1926 Cabaret Law, requiring any business selling food or drink to obtain a cabaret license before hosting music, singing, or dancing. While it was ostensibly aimed at speakeasies, its enforcement was predictably discriminatory: first against largely Black jazz venues, then through “cabaret cards” for mid-century musicians, and later as part of Giuliani’s “broken windows” policing. This, in turn, created a distinct social geography — in the 1990s, the cabaret law was revised to ban clubs from opening in residential areas without a permit, forcing them to cluster in manufacturing zones. Thus ensued a thigmotaxis of the cultural profane, dancing at the fringes (warehouses in Williamsburg and Bushwick) where dancing was legal, or at least tolerated. As of June 2024, ‘City of Yes for Economic Opportunity’ made dancing legal in every commercially zoned eating and drinking business, as long as crowds stay within venue capacity. The effects on how and where ‘scenes’ form are still playing out.

Municipal dancing laws are compounded by state-level drinking laws: under the 500-foot rule, anyone opening a liquor-serving venue within 500 feet of three or more existing ones must hold a hearing and demonstrate the new venue’s service as of the public interest. An oft-joked about staple of East Williamsburg’s bar scene is a collection of “liquor-serving venues” whose names sound like a series of ambivalent postcards: “Good Thanks,” “Please Tell Me,” “As You Like,” “Kinda Nice.” One begins to wonder if this nomenclature is symptomatic of the outsize leverage that the 500-foot rule hands residents and community boards over gathering spaces of 20-somethings. In practice, this law engenders a certain recurring cycle of an established strip, a series of complaints, followed by freezes or venues that are pushed out. The makeshift garage band practice space / open mic bar directly under my apartment (and behind, or potentially in the spare room of the neighboring Papa John’s) seems to quite neatly and loudly circumvent the 500-foot rule.

Theoretically (and, in fact, globally), a certain critical mass of people is needed to have a meaningful underground scene. Specifically, a critical mass of interested people that can afford to invest their time and resources, as well as a network of venues that have sufficient institutional support to remain relatively shielded from commercial pressures. This is usually why supposedly underground electronic music meshes uncannily well with real estate operations and gentrification despite outwards pretenses of being “for the people.” As a real estate developer, a classic move is letting a pseudo-underground venue operate at a loss for three to four years in or on a building you’re trying to gentrify, then shelving (or listing) it.

Broadly related is the “SoHo Effect” – in the early 1960s, artists were living illegally in SoHo’s manufacturing district – specifically in an abundance of cast-iron industrial lofts. These were the remnants of moribund textile and dry goods (followed by rag recycling and textile waste) warehouses and factories which had given the neighborhood its moniker of “Hell’s Hundred Acres” for the near constant hazard of fire. Following World War II, a wave of deindustrialization rendered SoHo’s multi-level, floor to ceiling windowed, oil-stained buildings, designed to mimic renaissance-era palazzos in pour-mold iron, empty and exceedingly squattable. This came to represent a literal representation of the municipal profane; that is, the space in front of the temple: unsanctified, outside the official order, with room for the monstrous (parties, drugs, art, the scene). In a rather dizzying section of residential code, this avant-garde use would have been permitted under the 1916 code (which allowed for parallel living and working in a commercial or industrial space) but was banned in the 1961 rewrite, which rigidly separated residential and industrial zones). The city turned in 1971, creating a live-work category under the JLWQA allowing artists to legally live and work in those buildings. The state went further in 1982, creating a Loft Board to bring more than 7,000 illegal loft units into compliance.

The result is a pattern that young people still enable (including me, unwittingly, circa early 2024, in a bedroom coded for use as a utility closet). Landlords still pass upgrade costs on to tenants and planners use the “SoHo Effect” as shorthand for industrial districts gentrifying with local artists as the vehicle. Cheap, loosely regulated spaces draw in young creatives, legalization and rezoning raise values, and the scene moves to the next stop on the train. In this case, the L train: the migration from SoHo to the East Village, then Williamsburg, Bushwick, Ridgewood, and beyond. Statistically, following the ‘arrival of the scene’ and the subsequent May 2005 Greenpoint–Williamsburg rezoning, subway ridership jumped 72% at Bedford Avenue and 81% at Lorimer Street between 1998 and 2006. The do-it-yourself, unofficial spaces that carried youth culture through the ensuing decades were set upon by city officials with housing and zoning violations, pushing much of the cultural profane towards ticketed, permitted, semi-official venues. This is a recognizable patchwork of social integration today — smaller artists can be found at The Broadway, Hart Bar, Freda, and Windjammer, to name a few. Personally, Hart Bar’s draw lies in an Egyptian cook who is liberal with compliments and DJs who play French rap and neo-disco. (My friend did get a wallet lifted there though.)

Sometimes, the semi-official venue is a poorly ventilated three-bedroom apartment off the First Avenue L-train. One must imagine, while craning your head out the window of said Stuy Town apartment to gasp at the crisp and cold (fresh. smooth. real. it’s all here) 11th floor air before plunging back into the huddled masses, that the World War II veterans who were the original intended residents of the multi-use development were largely doing the same. To this, a 1950’s Housing Maintenance Code provision (27-2004) mandates that more than three unrelated people may not share a dwelling unit as a common household — a rule that traces back to when the city wanted boarding-house brownstones converted back into family homes. In response to being informed of this regulatory quirk, the friend whose name is on the lease of said Stuy Town three-bed solemnly claims he and his two roommates are now “related by blood” and may constitute a symbolic violation of this provision. Almost half of New Yorkers live with one or multiple roommates today (40%, up from 32% in 2000) and few apartments are designed with common space or hosting in mind, although City of Yes offered an incrementalist solution to this, relegalizing small and shared housing models with common facilities and encouraging buildings with more studios and one-bedrooms. I myself have graduated from high-rise neck-craning and whispered midnight phone calls to cross-country lovers (due to exceedingly thin gentrifier tower walls) to a sturdier and more spacious rent stabilized unit (still off a train line, but graduated from the L to the J), and sometimes sleep with headphones in to stave off the clatter of wooden rail slats and screeching metal on modestly hotter metal. On weekends when the train doesn’t run – first for a power-washed refacing of lead paint down the length of Broadway’s overland train bridge, now for rail replacements and ‘track switch repairs’ – my friends ride-share car, ride-share bike, and even run to me; and I to them.

In endeavoring to answer the question I posed at the start of this exercise – is the city’s profane by design or something more entropic – I wonder if the question is flipped. Perhaps the city doesn’t design the profane as much as it chases it – the warehouses, art, the scene come first; subway ridership and rezoning follows. Facilitation of cultural organization tends to follow patterns of domestication and monetization, a SoHo effect on a policy scale. Still, though, I hope that I and any potential readers can find solace in incremental, albeit slow loosening and expansion of pro-social infrastructure. Building from City of Yes housing and economic policy and Open Streets, a redesign of a car-free Grand Army Plaza, round-the-clock lit soccer fields and soccer streets for the World Cup (and beyond), opening civic buildings, scaffolding removal, etc constitute a more realized, systemic effort towards reclamation of public spaces and “the profane” for the everyman and everywoman, a preliminary attempt to push back on structural and procedural decay. While the municipal profane may represent an indefatigable (and even reprehensible) chaos, seams where work meets the biological and social realities of living, there remains an undeniable magic to brushing past and bursting through the density of it all. Historic, regulatory, cultural, what have you. If the municipal profane is the space before the temple, the municipal sublime might be the moments where that space becomes sacred anyway. Perhaps we will bear witness to a gradual decentralization and democratization of the spaces ahead of and around ‘metropolitan temples’ within our lifetimes. Maybe it’s too early to tell.