About a week ago I found myself in Long Island City. I was in New York City as I am from time to time and a madman (one of only two men to hold me at knife point in my own home) convinced me to hop on the subway and scoot over there. “I’m warning you, you need to go in with no expectations. It’s very boring.”. He had been mentioning it on and off for weeks, a forest of neolib comblocks regurgitated on the East River, built over the remains of what once was a functioning industrial economy.
“You’ll notice there aren’t many people around on the streets, I was there in the fall and it was like after the end times, literally nobody around.”. The day I visited it was a bright sunny day and there were people around, but not many. For someone used to the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn or Manhattan, or hell Queens, Long Island City felt depopulated. And there was indeed a forest of neoliberal bloc housing we weaved ourselves between. The lack of people was unsettling, as if these towers were already a half abandoned ruin.
Empty is the word I would use to describe it. I’ve spent some time in communist and former communist cities, and the combloc meme is real, but even there you have splashes of color, some hand painted flowers on the concrete or a little playground nestled in a courtyard between towers. Here though, it feels even more centrally planned. Because it’s nominally affluent, and much like HOAs in the suburbs, any individuality that isn’t market approved is just nonexistent. It’s not that people secretly want to ‘express themselves’. It’s that self expression in their minds means terrifyingly eager monotony. The End of History means the endless expansion of individual greed and endless contraction of individual choice. You have to express yourself correctly to get that Ivy League class slot, or that internship, or that finance or software job or that apartment in Long Island City. Why leave your rental for anything when you can just go down to the lobby and buy food at the Whole Foods on the ground floor, or call door dash and have somebody bring you a loaded fish and chips from an upscale chain place. If you must go out you can find a bar well stocked with imitation exposed brick and LED Edison bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Like many progressive spaces, the area was notable for the lack of black people, yet an abundance of Black Lives Matter signs.
“The thing that skeeves me out is that you have these massive towers, thousands of people living in them, and every one of the units is identical.” We walked into the lobby of one of the towers, my friend trying to find the one that a friend of his had lived in briefly. There were a bunch of old circuit breakers on the wall, salvage from the prior structure on the lot where the tower now sat that had been carefully placed behind glass. A silent monument to a vanished era far more interesting than the rest of the space that contained it. The room was dimly lit, with all the charm of a Hyatt hotel lobby. We quickly headed outside again, coming across some spray paint splotches on the end of a sidewalk bordering a train yard. They were inverted shadows, the paint left behind when someone had been spray painting objects that had since been removed. It was a bleak expression of creativity, the little white reverse shadows on the ground.
The whole area made me remember something I had realized sometime earlier, looking at photos of similar areas in London. This is what passes for luxury now. Small units with underfurnished interiors, put up quickly and then sold as luxury to a cosmopolitian mercantile class that somehow does not know enough to demand better. Back in the 19th century when New York City came into its own, luxury and affluence could actually buy you an enviable lifestyle. A nice brownstone, maybe one overlooking a Central Park if one was very fortunate or very ruthless, maybe a servant or two or a maid you could sleep with on the side. But now it’s just Tokyo style econoboxes but for four or five times the price. Luxury good today does not really mean an item of quality manufacture or a reflection of some innate rarity it just means the poors can’t afford it. High end fashion clothing is made in the same factories as the wal-mart stuff but it just costs more. Expensive mansions in Northern Virginia or Cupertino are just as shoddily built as some suburban condos but cost more. Cars all look the same, built with the same robots and workers, just the price tags are different. There are a lot of examples of this but Long Island City exemplified the trend in a way I hadn’t really experienced before. Luxury as price not luxury as anything material. The price itself fools the lizard brain into thinking they’re special, that they’ve achieved something but they don’t demand anything better. So they live in comblocs and wear fast fashion instead of hand tailored clothing, and eat from chains instead of having a live-in cook. Because the resources to sustain that sort of lifestyle don’t really exist anymore, so the wealthy have to content themselves with price differentiation.
A number of the towers had big banner signs advertising that they had rental space within. One had the heading ‘This is Living’ and my friend whipped out his phone to check the housing company’s web rental portal. We wanted to know how much a typical unit cost per month. The general consensus was somewhere north of 4000 bones.
After walking around for a few blocks we decided to head towards the East River. To do that we had to travel through a gentrifying warehouse district. Some very 1930’s and 1940’s era buildings here. Some old school garages with guys in coveralls working on cars out in the street and in the bays. It felt much more lived in, even with the occasional remodeled art gallery or bar. That sense of being a place where people live and work was noticeable. I hadn’t realized it before but back in the thick of LIC, there was this very powerful sense that people should not be there. That it was anathema to a healthy human existence and was not intended for people to call home. The warehouses seemed more human, more hospitable, in a way that made the towers seem all the more disquieting.
My friend and I ended up buying some dranks from a Duane Read near the waterfront, and then went to a park to enjoy the ambiance. The East River is lovely in late July, as the glittering towers on either side face off like titans eyeing each other, and the clouds travel on ahead. An interesting cultural experience to be sure, but then that’s what travel is all about isn’t it? “Dude it’s pretty funny, you came all this way and instead of doing typical New York things we just went and wandered around Long Island City.”