Bourdieu Off‐Broadway: Managing Distinction on a Shopping Block in the East Village

Abstract

The economic and social vitality of East Ninth Street, in the East Village of Lower Manhattan, testifies to the area's long-standing reputation for cutting-edge culture and the street's astounding high density of unusual stores. Like a regional industrial district, the block between First and Second Avenues works as a specialized agglomeration of small producers, who are dependent on both supportive local suppliers and populations and customers from abroad, and who are linked in networks of mutually beneficial relations. This concentration succeeds not only because of the aesthetic distinction managed by store and building owners, but also because of the cultural diversity sought by a local yet cosmopolitan clientele, the material diversity of the old buildings, and the sociability of old and new residents. Far from destroying a community by commercial gentrification, East Ninth Street suggests that a retail concentration of designer stores may be a territory of innovation in the urban economy, producing both a marketable and a sociable neighborhood node.The East Village, in Lower Manhattan, is one of those former working-class neighborhoods that people seek out because of their concentration of art galleries, unusual shops, little bars and restaurants, and performance spaces. Unlike most other trendy neighborhoods, its reputation for being "on the edge" has lasted a long time-half a century. Whether its denizens have been bearded, tie-dyed, tattooed, or pierced, the East Village remains resolutely hip. In the 1950s, the area was the cradle of abstract expressionist art, Beat poetry, modern jazz, and off-Broadway experimental theater; in the 1960s, these embedded roots-along with low rents and a spirit of tolerance-drew migrants from a new counterculture, who set up thrift shops and music stores, and smoked marijuana in the parks and streets. In the early 1980s, alternative art galleries and artists' communes moved into the unused tenement storefronts, expressing in graffiti and other on-site work their visceral reaction to Reaganomics and gentrification, and creating the well-known slogan, painted on walls and lampposts, "Die Yuppie scum!" This movement swiftly passed from intense commercial success to exhaustion and, for some artists, a move away from the city or premature death from AIDS. Since then, however, the area has continued to figure prominently in the media, remaining popular among young residents of the city and * Correspondence should be addressed to

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