Focusing on the consequences of social and cultural displacement from commercial gentrification, this article examines the perspective of "early gentrifiers" decades after they moved into the neighborhood. Based on ethnographic data collected on the Lower East Side-a gentrified neighborhood with new bars-this article analyzes how new nightlife triggered early gentrifiers to weave a "nostalgia narrative" from their experiences. They use this narrative to construct a new local identity as the neighborhood's symbolic "owners," which helps them in their collective action against bars. Their narrative, however, contains internal contradictions that reveal several issues with their new identity. I argue that a cultural analysis of early gentrifiers reveals significant social configurations in gentrified neighborhoods and informs us of the relationship between ideology and action.

This article examines the diverse ways in which people experience being strangers in public space. Based primarily on the journal entries of teenagers in New York City on their trips, we show the different ways in which riders experience being a rider amid diversity and norm violations. Some teenagers see being a rider as an engaging role, some as a detached role, and others as a precarious role. All the teenagers use folk theories to navigate the social world, but how they use them varies depending on how they experience being a rider. Finally, riding in groups shifts their experiences and interpretations in complex ways that make riding more enjoyable, but filled with additional emotional tensions. Building from previous theories and studies on strangers and public spaces, this article contributes to longstanding debates in sociology over how people interact with others in urban environments.

Focusing on the differences between the devices and dispositions of cocktail and neighborhood bartenders, this article examines how service industry jobs become cultural intermediaries. Unlike other types of bartenders, cocktail bartenders engage in forms of professionalization to make legitimacy claims and use interactive service work to add value to their products. They possess autonomy and exclusivity over their work in the sense that they control the conditions of entry and legitimacy for a niche within the drinks industry. The conditions that construct this niche are the same that allow bartenders to emerge as cultural intermediaries. They simultaneously bridge and extend the divide between production and consumption. A comparison between the attitudes (dispositions) and practices (devices) that bartenders use to add value to their products and services illuminates the distinctions between positions in this service profession and reveals the selective manner in which cultural intermediaries emerge in contemporary service industries.

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