December 30 , 2007

We thought this was an interesting article on the topic of the disappearance of public spaces. It's about Boston, and about gay bars, but its implications for San Francisco and all alternative spaces struck home for us...

LAST CALL
Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
The Boston Globe
By Robert David Sullivan
Full article

THE FIRST THING I ever did to identify myself as a gay man - before coming out to a friend or relative, before putting a rainbow-flag pin on my jacket - was to walk into a gay bar. This was not so unusual in the early 1990s, when few gay men identified as such before they left high school. Some of us needed to walk around the block four or five times before finally pushing open a dimly lit, unmarked door.

At the time, there were plenty of dimly lit doors in Boston. The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.

Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.

The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."

In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.

This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.

Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.

For many closeted gays, bars were the only places where they could safely be themselves. They were also a nexus for political organizing and charitable work, they promoted safer-sex education after the onset of AIDS, and they served as a welcome mat for gay newcomers to a city.

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When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties. But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.

One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.

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Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.

Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.

Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.

This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function."

If a place like the South End accommodates fewer and fewer of these reasons for a person to be there, says LaFarge, it not longer meets the definition of a successful urban neighborhood.

Gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco are reportedly undergoing the same transformation as in the South End, but there is at least one exception to this trend. In Philadelphia, the city has encouraged the development of its "Gayborhood," a nine-block part of downtown, by adding rainbow flags to street signs, and the city's tourism board has an aggressive campaign targeted at gay travelers. Jeff Guaracino of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. says that the Gayborhood provides "a very good economic return for the city. Businesses are making a profit there."

Making a profit, of course, isn't always the same as serving a community's needs. Gay bars seem to be doing well in resort areas such as Palm Springs and Provincetown, but they're more vacation party spots than true third spaces for locals.

The fate of the Jewish delicatessen in New York is a reminder that "theme park" gay bars would be no substitute for what we've lost in Boston. Thousands of delis have disappeared from New York since the 1930s. Many of the dozen or so survivors seem to be thriving, but the tourist-oriented Carnegie and Stage delis, with their long lines and rapid turnover of tables, don't bear much resemblance to the classic model. At a panel discussion called "Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli," held this summer and reported on by The New York Times, food historian Joel Denker described the delis of the '50s and '60s as having "this sort of yeasty combination of intellectuals, writers, and leftists, sitting together over tea and cottage cheese and fruit, talking about the issues of the day."

Sitting and talking for hours at a time. Sadly, that's not considered an efficient use of space during today's supposed revival of city life. Boston's gay community is adapting to its scaled-down bar scene, but there's still a sense of something missing. There are probably more spiritual groups, youth programs, and health resources than ever in the gay community, but none of them really fit the definition of a third space where one can drop in and hang out. "There was a whole group of friends who I would only ever see at the Napoleon Club," says Rick Park, a Boston-based actor, "and when it closed, they all disappeared."

Read the full article on The Boston Globe site.

Posted by Dia Vergados

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