AIDS and Cultural Memory in Alphabet City

This chapter relates to the unique history of the neighbourhood of Alphabet City and the Lower East Side of New York and the cultural history related to AIDS and AIDS deaths. Alphabet city is located in the East Village of Manhattan. He locality has a long history of cultural diversity due to its German, Polish, Hispanic and Jewish populations. The Lower East Side is a part of the Southeast Manhattan and like the Alphabet City, it too has a diverse history and culture. Prior to its gentrification beginning in the 2000s, the Lower East Side was a predominantly working class, immigrant neighbourhood (Hodges, 2010). Lower East Side saw a lot of immigrant population coming in from Europe in the 20th century, including Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, and Eastern European Jews (Hodges, 2010). The period starting with 1960s is generally seen to be one of decline of the Lower East Side because the area attracted hipsters and artists and queers and it is said that after the 1980s general stability came back to this area when middle class families and students moved here (Hodges, 2010). This perception points to the negative connotations attached to the pre-gentrification diversity of the Lower East Side. It may be noted that the 1980s is also the period when East Village saw the almost steady rate with which many artists died of AIDS (Hodges, 2010). The period also saw the familial neglect and political indifference to AIDS victims of the time and the cultural narrative drawn around AIDS and the experiences in the East Village by artists.

Against this background of the shifts in the cultural history of the places with the increased gentrification, one can understand how the places have been redefined post gentrification and how this has led to the loss of collective memory on how the places and its people were in the period prior to the gentrification. Many of the victims of AIDS in the places that have now been gentrified died in neglect and their history of neglect is also a part of the history of the places where their friends from the artist communities organised some kind of political movement around the disease and the apathy to its victims, both from families and the government. Artists like Schulman (2013) were at the forefront of these movements at the time and therefore, they do remember the people and the places that are lost in the process of gentrification. Schulman (2013) has called the AIDS experience as an “American experience” to draw attention to the important place that the disease occupies in the cultural and physical space that is America (p. 69). However, she also points out the fact of how the process of gentrification has led to the loss of memory of this experience as well as of the people who died of AIDS (Schulman, 2013).

Gentrification has been defined as a “concrete replacement process” (Schulman, 2013, p. 14). In a purely physical sense, gentrification has been defined as “a process of renewal in inner-city neighbourhoods, where houses in previously undesirable and often run-down neighbourhoods are purchased and renovated by upwardly mobile professionals” (Power, 2015, p. 94). In this sense, the physical gentrification relates to the changes that happen physically in the neighbourhoods. Gentrification can also happen in the sense of the erasure of memories. Therefore, in another place, gentrification is defined as the “erasure of history” and “cultural amnesia” (Abraham, 2015). This cultural amnesia relates to the creation of an alternate history of a place and its people so that younger generations who have not seen the process of gentrification, that is, replacement of history, will not be able to see that part of the history of the place and instead of knowing about the place and its culture as it was prior to the replacement process, they will only know the “totalitarian, capitalistic drool that's going on out there” (Abraham, 2015). Penny Arcade says that the process of gentrification leads not only to the erasure of history but also the elimination of alternatives (Abraham, 2015).

Gentrification of mind is defined as “an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change” (Schulman, 2013). Gentrification in the physical sense is explained as an urban phenomenon which sees removal of communities of diverse classes, races, ethnicities, and worldviews, which leads to the ultimate destruction of culture and relationships and the change in the cities (Schulman, 2013). Gentrification as a spiritual phenomenon, or gentrification of mind is an internal process, where those who are marginalised and underrepresented are made to forget even the reality of their own situation (Schulman, 2013, p. 14). In other words, there is a change on the consciousness that is brought on by the processes of spiritual gentrification which sees the memories of those who are underrepresented being affected by the homogenisation of cities, the latter being a specific result of gentrification. On the other hand, the “individualisation of perception” is the antithesis to the gentrification process, where instead of removal of diversity in everything including thought, there is a growth of individual and diverse worldviews, practices, and experiences.

Schulman (2013) argues that there is a gentrification not only of the place but also of the mind which has led to the erasure of the memories related to places and its peoples prior to gentrification. This has led to the erasure of the memories of those pre-gentrification inhabitants like queers, drag queens, AIDS victims, who are simply not represented in the collective consciousness of the current generations occupying the same spaces; they are therefore erased. Schulman (2013) begins the first chapter of her book The Gentrification of Mind with the following quote from Milan Kundera:

“The first step in liquidating people…. is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster” (p. 1).

Schulman (2013) delves deep into the erosion of cultural history in the context of AIDS. Through the ACT UP Oral History Project, she sought to bring to light the lived experiences of those who have AIDS or lost someone to it as a response against the gentrification of the history of AIDS as something that people in America were initially repulsed by and then somehow came around to accepting those who were afflicted with AIDS (Schulman, 2013). This is in contrast with the memories of those who have lived through a time when AIDS victims and deaths were largely ignored. Schulman (2013) compares the public memory of AIDS deaths with the deaths in 9/11, saying that the deaths of 81,542 New Yorkers who suffered from AIDS, were ignored because they were despised and abandoned and did not have rights or representation. Schulman (2013) calls the mourning over AIDS deaths “the disallowed grief of 20 years” (p. 46). Those who died of AIDS were not the “acceptable dead” like those who died during 9/11 terror attacks and were thought to be worthy of national mourning (Schulman, 2013, p. 46). She says that “one person’s death is negligible if he or she was poor a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital” (Schulman, 2013, p. 46).

An interview with Penny Arcade offers insight into the one-woman show that she has led for about five decades related to the oral history project and Lower East Side Biographies (Abraham, 2015). Penny’s testimonies of the period when the Lower East Side had not been gentrified leads to the understanding of a place where people were diverse, yet open to each other (she was taken in when homeless by a 27 year old gay man), and there was more connection between the artists who subscribed to different genres (Abraham, 2015). There was also surprisingly lesser censorship than there is today. This is attested to by Penny Arcade in the following statement:

"We're living now in a time when people are very afraid to say their opinion, a time of great consensus, of crowd-think; you can't talk about anything without people getting upset with you. The censorship is actually in the culture now. It's not coming just from the government, or from the Church, or from some group of maniac right-wing Tories, it's in the drinking water! It's college students themselves who are calling for trigger warnings for anything that contains violence, or racism, or rape, or colonialism. So please don't tell me that censorship is over, there's more censorship now than there was 20 years ago" (Abraham, 2015).

As Penny points out that there is now more cultural censorship than there was before, one may argue that this is one of the consequences of gentrification and homogenisation. With gentrification what has happened is that there is replacement of the more diverse culture of the past and instead of dissent and rebellion, the more culturally appropriate form of behaviour and conduct is in the assent with the wider narrative. This would mean that instead of driving positive attention to the queer, and to the strange or diverse, there is negative connotation that is attached to such differences, which come across as a need to maintain a cultural homogeneity. This is the gentrification of the mind that Schulman (2013) writes about where she says that gentrification relates to the psychological assimilation to the mainstream, where more and more individuals think alike and stay with the mainstream narrative and the alternative way of thinking is erased. Schulman (2013) relates this to the erasure of the public memory related to a whole generation of artists who died of AIDS in the 1980s. Schulman writes about these forgotten and erased individual lives by quoting from Penny Arcade’s play Invitation to the Beginning of the End of the World, in which the mother of a fictional drag queen protests against the ignorance of the East Side yuppies who don't know who her son was, even when they lived in the same localities and occupied the same places; saying about those who died of AIDS that there is “little documentation of what they did. In a sense they only live on in the memories of the living” (Schulman, 2013, p. 84).

The gentrification of the mind project becomes easier because of the physical gentrification of places that see erstwhile spaces where people could commune regardless of the age differences, being taken over by capitalist projects which ultimately segregate people: younger people drink their coffee at Starbucks, and shop at Topshop. Gone are the public squares or open markets where people of different ages could spend time together. This leads to the quickening of the erasure of memories as the younger people have no one to tell them how a place once was and what its people and cultures were like. Penny Arcade says that in until the mid-1980s, people of all ages could meet each other every week, but we are now living in the “mono-generational era” where we do not have the same kind of inter-generational experience anymore (Abraham, 2015). For the younger post gentrification generations of places like Alphabet City and Lower East Side, this means that they are not aware of how the places have transformed and they do not have anyone to tell them of these transformations. In other words, as Penny says: “It's hard enough to be a young person trying to find your way in the world and in culture, without having any landmarks – because if everything is going to be a Starbucks, if everything is going to be a high street brand like Topshop, then, where is the alternative?” (Abraham, 2015).

That the Lower East Side has changed in a way that it responds more to capitalist forces is clear when the changes are considered in the more global context (Belkind, 2009). In the Lower East Side, the global factors such as content industries, and the Internet led to dramatic changes in the place (Belkind, 2009). However, there is also a turn to the past and homage to the cultural history which speaks to the alternative to the global by reinforcing the traditional through a recent trend of “commercial camouflage” in the opening of hidden shops, and restaurants that are representative of the “defunct facades, signage, and other physical traces of the neighborhood's working-class and immigrant past” (Belkind, 2009). This phenomenon is seen in different parts of the world where gentrification may have happened to inner city areas through globalised processes but at the same time local communities may interact with global processes in a way that instead of a global homogenised culture, there is an impact of local cultures as well. Power has noted with reference to this that while globalised technologies “such as the Internet are also widely used to connect people within neighbourhoods, for example, through Facebook groups that encourage locally based activism or provide a network for residents to communicate and share resources” (p. 93). In this way, the relationship between local cultures and global processes may be much more complex.

Belkind (2009) argues that ‘urban camouflage’ has been used by a variety of players from squatters to global retailers as a strategy to reinvent and restructure Lower East Side. This also represents the myriad of interests and conflicts that speak to how the place should be represented. Abu-Lughod (1995) writes about the contestations that may arise with respect to control over spaces in the inner city areas and how these contestations are played out between the ethnicities, subcultures, and classes that make the populations of these places. She argues that instead of an urban village with shared values, inner cities have become spaces of shared physical presence but disjointed emotional connect (Abu-Lughod, 1995). Thus, there was a heated political struggle between populations in the East Village on New York's Lower East Side for more than two decades, which saw contestations for control between established and new immigrants, hippies, squatters, and yuppies, developers, community activists, drug dealers, artists, the homeless, and the police. In an earlier article, Abu-Lughod (1994) had written about the ways in which the conflicts between the different communities in the East Village played out and how individuals were affected by these conflicts.

The conflicts and contestations between those who drove gentrification and those who opposed it, is also a part of the history of the Lower East Side (Hodges, 2010). Today, East Village is one of the most gentrified neighbourhoods of Manhattan, but it was not always so. One of the important aspects about gentrification in this part of Manhattan is the AIDS crisis and the role that it played in the gentrification process. It has been claimed that “cities and neighborhoods with high AIDS rates have experienced profound gentrification” (Schulman, 2013, p. 23). Interestingly, the gentrification process in New York began before the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in 1981; this process began in 1970s when New York faced bankruptcy and one of the solutions to get more money into the city was through development of housing for the wealthy who would pay more tax to the city. In 1981, when the AIDS epidemic broke out, the gentrification process of the Lower East Side was already underway. One testimony clearly notes that the East Village was already being transformed through real estate conversion when the AIDS epidemic became a major issue and the spiralling deaths of artists in the area led to the houses being turned over to real estate market. The gentrification project received a push from the deaths of the owners of the apartments from AIDS epidemic and ultimately this led to the transformation of the neighbourhood when the apartments were bought over by those who were more aligned to the gentrification project. This is testified to in the following observation:

“The replacement tenants had a culture of real privilege that they carried with them. I know that’s a word that is ban- died about, and can be applied too easily in many arenas. But what I mean in the case of the gentrifiers is that they were “privileged” in that they did not have to be aware of their power or of the ways in which it was constructed…That “those people” lost their homes and died is pretended away, and reality is replaced with a false story in which the gentrifiers have no structure to impose their privilege. They just naturally and neutrally earned and deserved it” (Schulman, 2013, pp. 26-27).

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