The Meat-Packing District
In the last 15 years Manhattan's Meat-Packing District was transformed from a gritty neighborhood of 250 slaughterhouses (serviced once by the high-line freight rail) into the most fashionable part of the City. Some streets, where the meat hooks still hang above sidewalks, are as visually visceral as they were a century ago. But now, immediately adjacent to these relics, one finds not the tenements and half-way houses of the workers - nor their taverns - but the high-end designer boutiques and night-clubs of the global elite. By day you'll smell a thick cloud of perfume and cologne where once the odor of hogs blood and shit stained your clothes. By night the former slaughterhouses are filled not with the squeals of livestock and machinery, but the panting and screeching of the young and restless urban pioneers. The meat hooks remain, but the meat has been packaged. The imagery of industry has been divorced from the sensory experiences that it used to accompany. It's safe for the elite to consume and for the masses to aspire. The children of those who left the smells and sounds and uncomfortable intimacies of the City return now for the impression of authenticity within the shell of a former reality.
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| W. 13th & Washington St. |
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| Carlos Miele Store, W. 14th Street |
What, exactly, makes this place any more real than a suburban lifestyle center?
As someone who long considered rust and grittiness as a characteristic of authenticity and who perceived obsessive cleanliness and purity as pretensions of lily white suburbs, it was indeed striking to encounter contemporary New York. Much of the city is uglier, trashier and in many ways more run-down and disheveled than my town (Chicago). Yet New York is unequivocally wealthier, more insecure and more pretentious than any major city in America. It is an utterly unique cacophony of wealth, anxiety and decay - simultaneously glamorously confident while unkempt and depressed.
New York's physical decay feels like yet another pretension - yet another fashion statement. It's particularly attractive to those who grew up in beige cul-de-sacs, mini-vans and manicured lawns (where history supposedly ended in 1999).
Instead of destitution New York emanates a decadence of opulence - as if the entire city were too ambitious - counting money and admiring itself to notice that it hasn't done its laundry in two months, that its trash is overflowing and that there's nothing left in the 'fridge' except some tattered threads that look vaguely like the red meat that it used to eat.
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