It's Beginning to look a lot like...something

"You're going to love New York at Christmas!"

This was the refrain I heard over and over again in taking the contract I have now. And for a long time I was kind of 'meh' on that aspect. The city looked nice enough, sure, but nothing spectacular. 

That is until today when I went to the Frick Reference Library for research and then walked down Lexington Ave to exchange a sweater. (Side note: Banana Republic, your stuff this season boxy and huge. I'm not an XS in this or any other universe).

As I meandered down the street, new purchase in hand, the snow was falling, the still-up holidays lights were twinkling, and the displays were both elaborate and delicate. Capitalism was on its best behavior AND IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. 

Department store displays are a thing this time of the year. Here and everywhere. Though this kind of tradition seems to fit well with New York Architecture. The clean lines and almost endlessness of, especially Mid-town, brings the eye naturally to this level. (Because god-forbid you make eye contact with someone on the street). Eitherway, it seems plate glass essentially invented window shopping, and by the 1860s New York had caught the fever. 

By 1900, window displays were the most beautiful bare-knuckle boxing match you could get walking down the street. Each one had to outdo the other. The best part, from a design point of view, is that there is absolutely no pressure to be timeless. They can be saccharine or gimmicky, abstract or obscure. Indeed the ones I saw barely had any merchandise on display at all. It's an event, a public one, one that brings people to the store which is 90% of the work. 

One could follow the tradition globally, from Selfridges, to the affect of display on Bon Marche to what it looks like in places like India or China. In either case, holiday window displays are a crafted, paper-leather art that is, if nothing else, attractive. Even if it promotes, not really avarice, but a light kind of wanting.

Walking around today also reminded me that New York, as a city, is changing rapidly. 

I was recently heartbroken over the loss of the Five Pointz street art in Queens. It was an exterior gallery the likes of which had never been before. But it's been torn down in favor of two milquetoast condo towers. It would seem this is the kind of display which does not last. One that doesn't own anything. Buying property in New York is "a good investment" again. Which means the dirtier, grittier, and frankly more interesting places are going the way of the pee-soaked dodo. 

Right now I'm living on the Lower East Side, which encourages me to have a complicated relationship with gentrification. I can deride it's social impacts, selfish neo-liberal agenda, and subsequent racial homogeneity all day long, don't get me started. However there's that a part of me that also really likes fancy donut shops, artisanal cocktails, nice woodwork at a brunch table and antropologie. It's a conundrum. 

So really it boils down to this: at some point New York had to make a choice. Was it going to be the city of Storefronts or Display Windows? 

One option offers the blaring neon that shoots out into the dark street like a prayer to an unfeeling god. The hymn humming "Sadie's Discount Liquors". The other is bright, confident and staged. Heralding the kind of place that would never accept someone like Sadie or her wholesale booze. 

I like Sadie. But more and more it seems the moneyed of New York don't. It's not unreasonable, it's just disappointing.