‘WILDING’ IN THE WEST VILLAGE: Queer Space, Racism and Jane Jacobs Hagiography

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCHDOI1011111468-242712188

265

copy 2015 urban research publications limited

mdash lsquoWILDINGrsquo IN THE WEST VILLAGE Queer Space Racism and Jane Jacobs Hagiography

johan andersson

AbstractIn urban studies New Yorkrsquos West Village is famous for two principal reasons

as the paradigmatic ideal neighborhood in Jane Jacobsrsquo influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities and as the site of one of the 1960srsquo great urban uprisings the Stonewall riot in 1969 Todayndashndashlargely because of the mixed-use urban qualities celebrated by Jacobsndashndashthe West Village is one of New Yorkrsquos most desirable residential areas yet it also remains an essential part of the cityrsquos queer geography In this article I analyze the persistent demo nization of the arearsquos queer youth of color by local neighborhood groups to argue that Jacobsrsquo celebrated notion of natural surveillance (or what she called lsquoeyes on the streetrsquo) is fundamentally unsuited for a fluid queer space like the contemporary West Village First I historicize the current neighborhood tensions in the context of ra cialized media report ing of homophobic hate crime Second the discourses deployed in contemporary media of lsquowildrsquo youth terrorizing the Village are examined Finally with reference to the forced closure of the African American bar Chi Chiz I illustrate how the symbolic nightlife economy remains a key target in the cityrsquos regulation of queer space

IntroductionDespite recent discussions of the demise of the North American gayborhood

(Doan and Higgins 2011 Lewis 2013 Brown 2014 Ghaziani 2014 Mattson 2014 Nash and Gorman-Murray 2014 Kanai and Kenttamaa-Squires 2015) Christopher Street in New Yorkrsquos West Village shows no sign of diminishing appeal The continued attrac-tion of the area depends on a number of factors such as a dense network of lsquoqueer infra struc turersquo including bars shops and a lsquotown hallrsquo (ie the LGBT Community Center on W13th) history (as the site of the Stonewall riot in 1969 and the subsequent birth of the gay liberation movement) and above all public space in the form of sidewalks and waterfront piers which in the summer months enable those under the legal drinking age of 21 to congregate in the area Yet while its popularity remains intact sloganesque perceptions of the West Village as a lsquorainbow communityrsquo conceal real tensions and spatial divisions that have come to blight the historical lsquolive-and-let-liversquo reputation of the area Since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s the piers which used to be public sex environments have been re-appropriated as social spaces by predominantly black and Latino queer youth from across the metropolitan region while over the same period the local residential economy has undergone rapid gentrification Thus the broader social polarization and increased wealth disparities which have characterized New Yorkrsquos neoliberal restructuring since the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991 Harvey 2005 Wyly et al 2010) are played out on the streets of the West Village in very tangible fashion At weekends and in the evenings the area is charac ter-ized by a sharp divide between the almost exclusively white and wealthy commercial residential realms and the public spaces predominantly used by black and Latino queer youth

I would like to thank Dan Callwood and Nicholas de Genova for commenting on an earlier version of this article as well as the perceptive audiences at CRASSH University of Cambridge QueerKingrsquos Kingrsquos College London Humboldt University Berlin and Temple University Philadelphia where I have presented the material Irsquom also grateful to Jon Reades who produced the maps (data from BYTES of the BIG APPLEtrade courtesy of the New York City Department of City Planning)

JW-IJUR140012indd 265 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 266

In this article I will analyze the tensions this divide has given rise to with specific emphasis on the problematic discourses of queer youth of color as lsquowildrsquo and

lsquodisorderlyrsquo in the local media and campaigning material distributed by neighborhood groups Moreover I will illustrate how these tropes have informed the heavy-handed law enforcement in the area with police harassment of African American gay bars and frequent arrests of transwomen on prostitution-related charges The targeting of trans youth of color is especially ironic given the increased recognition of the pivotal role played by young transwomen such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson in the Stonewall uprising In contrast with the historical revisionism of the past decadesndashndashepitomized by George Segalrsquos quite literally whitewashed Stonewall memorial Gay Liberation (1980ndash92) in Christopher Parkndashndasheyewitness accounts have recently stressed that Stonewall was largely a racial minority uprising with a significant transgender contingent1 The city has also recognized this and in 2005 the ChristopherHudson street corner was renamed lsquoRivera Wayrsquo in honor of Sylvia Rivera while a 2009 marketing campaign called lsquoRainbow Pilgrimagersquo sought to attract LGBTQ tourists to New York during the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall (Chan 2009) Yet as I will illustrate these attempts to capitalize on the radical legacy of StonewallndashndashNatalie Oswinrsquos (2005) apt phrase lsquovalue-added queernessrsquo comes to mindndashndashhave taken place

1 Although there is no visual documentation of the actual demonstrations the pictures that came to define the event (Fred W McDarrahrsquos photos taken immediately after the riots and printed in the Village Voice) centered on a group of multiracial queer youths (Meyer 2006) As George Rede (2009) who covered the event for the Village Voice and helped McDarrah arrange the famous images later argued it is a myth that Stonewall was an uprising by the lsquogay communityrsquo as a whole since the rioters lsquowere mostly teenagers from Queens Long Island and New Jersey with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Sidersquo Similarly novelist and Stonewall eyewitness Edmund White (2009 51) noted that lsquoit wasnrsquot all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the ldquoA-trainersrdquo)rsquo Since then a degree of historical revisionism has set in which is arguably epitomized by George Segalrsquos Stonewall memorial Gay Liberation (1980ndash92) in Christopher Park which was commissioned 11 years after the uprising and installed 12 years after it was commissioned in 1992 As Margo Hobbs Thompson (2012 804ndash6) recently noted the lsquofigures white middle-class and thirty-something do not represent the composition of the crowd who resisted the police raid at the Stonewall Innrsquo

Gramercy

Chelsea

West Village

Greenwich VillageEast Village

Soho

Little Italy

Financial District

0 2000 4000ft

figure 1 Location of the West Village in Manhattan

JW-IJUR140012indd 266 290515 553 PM

lsquoWILDINGrsquo IN THE WEST VILLAGE 267

while forms of police harassment very similar to those which triggered the initial uprising have remained an ongoing issue2

A few important accounts of the tensions on Christopher Street already exist (Warner 1999 Manalansan 2005ndashndashfor a theoretical discussion of these see Floyd 2009) yet the story needs to be updated for two principal reasons First while these earlier analyses correctly view the contestation over the arearsquos public space through the lens of gentrification this framing inadvertently places the racism and nimbyism squarely in the neoliberal present Building on work by Christina Hanhardt (2008) on gay safe street patrols in the 1980s I want to contextualize the contemporary racism with both historical and recent examples of racialized reporting on homophobic hate crime in New Yorkrsquos media Furthermore I want to highlight that the current nimbyism has strong roots in the pre-gentrified West Village celebrated in Jane Jacobsrsquo (1961) influ ential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities which I will engage with throughout Jacobsrsquo critique of urban renewal was gradually canonized and remains required reading on university courses and among the general public Both urban design manifesto and an intricate ethnographic analysis of urban street life the book has reached a global audience but has arguably never been as influential in New Yorkrsquos policy circles as during Michael Bloombergrsquos time as mayor (2002ndash13)

This then leads to the second reason for looking again at the ongoing tensions in the Village which is the shifting urban and political context (including the condi tions for queer organizing) under Bloomberg for whom this article can be read as an epi taph While the openly moralistic Rudy Giuliani administration (1994ndash2001) gener ated a surge in critical urban writing (Dangerous Bedfellows 1996 Smith 1996 Berlant and Warner 1998 Delany 1999 Papayanis 2000 Shepard and Hayduk 2002) the aca-demic response to the continued efforts to sanitize urban space under Bloomberg has been more muted This arguably reflects the administrationrsquos less confrontational tac-tics which unlike the antagonizing rhetoric of Giulianirsquos zoning amendment (explic-itly naming those activities it aimed to stop) have used the seemingly lsquoneutralrsquo notion of lsquonuisancersquondashndashclearly a relational and embodied category (Valverde 2011 294)ndashndashin nui sance abatement lawsuits to diffuse criticism of bias In fact this emphasis on lsquoneu-tralityrsquo was a hallmark of Bloombergrsquos mayoralty with its continued efforts to portray itself as lsquopost-partisanshiprsquo and lsquopost-politicalrsquo yet behind the rhetorical mask as Julian Brash (2011 16 original emphasis) has pointed out Bloombergrsquos administration was

lsquoideological class-based and deeply politicalrsquo A crucial part of Bloombergrsquos class-based reconfiguring of the city included

the quiet enforcement of aesthetic standards behind an objectivist language which fre quently borrowed explicitly from Jacobsrsquo mixed-use urban ideal Bloombergrsquos supremely powerful planning commissioner Amanda M Burden liked to compare her ambitions with those of the cityrsquos mid-twentieth-century lsquomaster builderrsquo Robert Moses but preferred (in her own words) to be judged lsquoby Jane Jacobsrsquos standardsrsquo (Satow 2012) As Evelyn Ruppert (2006 166) has argued Jacobs has lsquoacquired so much symbolic power that professionals need only cite a connection to her ideas in order to increase the authority of their practicesrsquo and (specifically in New York) Brash (2011 178) even suggests that lsquoJacobs-esque urbanismrsquo under Bloombergrsquos administration lsquohardened into a new planning orthodoxyrsquo While Death and Life continues to be inspirational in many ways its particular usefulness for contemporary politicians has to be understood in relation to some specific historical developments in New York When Jacobs was writ-ing downtown Manhattan was under threat from some of Mosesrsquo least sensitive urban renewal projects (which among other things would have built motorways through Washington Square Park) and she has with some justification come to personify the

2 As I have discussed in a different context (Andersson 2012) generalized heritage discourse can be deployed to displace queer cultures yet the paradox in the West Village is that queer heritage is used in parallel with concerted efforts to evict the contemporary incarnation of that very heritage

JW-IJUR140012indd 267 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 268

ultimately successful resistance to these The titles of books such as Anthony Flintrsquos (2009) Wrestling with Moses How Jane Jacobs Took On New Yorkrsquos Master Builder and Transformed the American City and Roberta Brandes Gratzrsquos (2010) The Battle for Gotham New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs give an indication of her grassroots credentials while reinforcing the firmly established binary opposition between Moses and Jacobs which continues to shape debates about urban policy in New York to this day3

Moreover following the cityrsquos high crime rates in the period between the 1970s and 1990s mayors of all political persuasions have had to combine varying degrees of commitment to New Yorkrsquos celebrated liberalism while at the same time being seen to be tough on law and order4 Again Jacobsrsquo dual emphasis on community empowerment and informal crime prevention has proved an indispensible tool and it is on these aspects in particular of her book that I will focus my critique Finally Death and Life has been use-ful for politicians urban design professionals and the liberal elite because these groups can appropriate the inclusive tone of the book while adopting its heavily aestheticized understanding of the city Clearly Death and Lifersquos key weakness lies in its economi-cally underdeveloped analysis where in the urban design lingo the book partly gave rise to a slum area next to the railroad tracks and one of the cityrsquos best addresses (Central Park West) are both examples of exactly the same problem lsquothe curse of border vacuumsrsquo (Jacobs 1961 271ndash80) Admittedly radical writers like Samuel Delany (1999 127 original emphasis) have also viewed the emphasis on lsquocontactrsquo in Death and Life as a template for an inclusive queer politics but even his positive appropriation had to concede that lsquoAstute as her analysis is Jacobs still confuses contact with community Urban contact is often at its most spectacularly beneficial when it occurs between members of different communitiesrsquo

Indeed Jacobs (1961 68ndash9) tends to equate community with residents as in the celebrated analysis of lsquoeyes on the streetrsquo where she refers to them as the lsquonatural proprietors of the streetrsquo and thus naturalizes and conflates property with propriety Similarly there is a tendency to attribute disturbing behavior to dwellers from outside the neighborhoodndashndashlsquoDrunk hellip Crazy hellip A wild kid from the suburbsrsquo (ibid 69) as she and her neighbors conclude one night when they spot a rowdy teenagerndashndashforeboding the contemporary media discourses of lsquogay youth gone wildrsquo (Poster and Goldman 2005) which I will analyze and link with the racialized language surrounding the notorious

lsquowildingrsquo episode in Central Park in 1989 (when five teenagers were wrongly convicted of rape) By drawing attention to the pervasiveness of these lsquowildrsquo and animalizing tropes which have also been deployed by journalists neighborhood organizers and the police in the West Village I hope to illustrate how Jacobsrsquo notion of lsquoeyes on the streetrsquo (which

3 In the public perception of Jacobs and Moses as antithetical strands of urbanism in New York Jacobs has clearly fared better with regard to questions of lsquoinclusivityrsquo and lsquodiversityrsquo while since the 1970s Mosesrsquo reputation has been damaged not merely because his modernist ideals have gone out of fashion but also because Robert Carorsquos (1974) The Power Broker so devastatingly laid bare the environmental racism of some of his infrastructure projects Notoriously the improvement schemes on Manhattanrsquos West Side in the 1930s consistently stopped at 125th Street in Harlem where the railroads were no longer covered Riverside Park simply ended (only to reappear again at 145th) and the Henry Hudson Parkwaymdashlavishly decorated along the more affluent parts of the Upper West Sidemdashwas elevated lsquointo the airmdashon a gaunt steel viaductrsquo (ibid 558) The contemporary weekend flow of young people from uptown to the piers in the West Village is above all about seeking out safe queer space yet cannot be completely separated from this degradation of the local waterfront in Harlem In spite of his tainted legacy however a balanced assessment of Moses must also recognize that the public housing constructed under himmdashmuch derided on design grounds by Jacobsmdashtoday constitutes one of the last buffers against the wholesale gentrification of Manhattan and parts of the outer boroughs In fact even an idiosyncratic reactionary like the cityrsquos former housing commissioner Roger Starr (1985 35)mdashinfamous for his 1970s proposal to withdraw services from decaying neighborhoods in a policy called lsquoplanned shrinkagersquomdashnoted relatively early that the implementation of Jacobsrsquo urban ideals exclusively through private reconstruction would lsquocause immense hardship for relocated peoplersquo

4 While the landslide election of left-leaning Democrat Bill de Blasio in 2013 (after his mayoral campaign centered on the need to reform lsquostop and friskrsquo) initially suggested a broader shift in favor of less biased and more transparent policing the re-appointment of Police Commissioner Brattonmdashthe architect of lsquobroken windowsrsquo policing and the vast increase in lsquostop and friskrsquo under the Giuliani administrationmdashhas again raised the Janus-faced specter of liberal rhetoric on the one hand and authoritarian policing on the other

JW-IJUR140012indd 268 290515 553 PM


clearly was an important aspect of her critique of modernist planning) is fundamentally unsuited to a queer space such as contemporary Christopher Street where it too easily lends itself to racial profiling and confusing misreadings of transgender identities

In the context of geographical critiques of the conflation between queer space (which deconstructs binaries between gay and straight and male and female) and gay space (which exists in opposition to heteronormativity but nevertheless reiterates the dichotomy) (Browne 2006 Oswin 2008) the West Village may seem like the ultimate example of gay space through its historical association with the identity politics that queer theory initially set out to critique I would argue however that more than in any of the cityrsquos other gayborhoodsndashndashChelsea Hellrsquos Kitchen Jackson Heights or indeed the more self-consciously queer symbolic economies of the East Village and Williamsburgndashndashthe eclectic mix of people gender ambiguity of many of its transgender users and the destabilizing effect of lsquothe down lowrsquo fashion make Christopher Street the most fluid queer space in New York In fact it is exactly this lsquohard to categorizersquo fluidity that demands regulation in the eyes of the self-appointed neighborhood patrols police officers planners and journalists who persistently misread the presence of queer youth of color as threatening

Before examining the lsquowildrsquo discourses deployed to demonize this group in the local media and campaigning material during the past decade I will begin by looking at the racialization of homophobic hate crime in New York In particular I will focus on the so-called Ramrod killings in 1980ndashndashthe single most devastating attack on the West Villagersquos gay communityndashndashas an archetype for subsequent reporting on homophobic hate crime An analysis of the particular media trope of the perpetrator of such attacks as a sexually repressed black man can help us to contextualize contemporary notions of black gay men as lsquoimpostorsrsquo in the white-dominated gayborhood (Nero 2005) and contribute further to debates about queer racism (Nast 2002) Finally in the last section I will use transcripts from New York Statersquos Liquor Authority proceedings against the African American gay bar Chi Chiz on Christopher Street to discuss how the problematic discourses of black and Latino queers as lsquoout of placersquo in the Village feature in this official context too The forced closure of Chi Chiz in 2011 more than 40 years after Stonewall illustrates that the minority gay bar remains a key site for the cityrsquos regulation of queer space

The Ramrod killings and the racialization of hate crimeIn an attempt to historicize the current tensions between queer black youth

and the largely white residential community in the West Village Hanhardt (2008) has examined the relationship between Kelling and Wilsonrsquos (1982) influential lsquobroken windowsrsquo theory (which argues that violence is likely to follow from disorderly street iconographies) and gay and feminist anti-violence movements in the 1980s While

lsquobroken windowsrsquo policing in New York is primarily associated with the right-wing administration of Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton during the 1990s the intellectual lineage of this type of lsquocrime preventionrsquo is not as separate from the supposedly more liberal tradition associated with Jane Jacobs as one might think Although Kelling and Wilsonrsquos lsquobroken windowsrsquo essay never cites Death and Life recent work in criminology has detected lsquouncanny resemblances between the two textsrsquo not least regarding the approach to informal social control (Ranasinghe 2012 67) Moreover the particular micro-geography of Greenwich Village has played a promi-nent role in the development and application of these theories first as the paradig-matic model neighborhood in Jacobsrsquo Death and Life and subsequently as lsquoOne of the first places where Kellingrsquos theories would be translated into policy hellip where quality- of-life violations were often interpreted as particularly threatening to the neighbor-hoodrsquos gay communityrsquo (Hanhardt 2008 69)

JW-IJUR140012indd 269 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 270

Hanhardt goes on to suggest that when gay-safe street patrols on Manhattanrsquos West Side pre-emptively tried to stop queer-bashing by lobbying for an increased police presence members would occasionally use coded language and pinpoint African American and Puerto Rican public housing projects in Chelsea as the source of the threat contributing to class-based and racialized understandings of homophobic violence While such forms of inadvertent demonization add to a broader understand -ing of the racialization of hate crime they do not fully explain why queer youth of color on Christopher Street today are viewed as a threat to other queers (unless of course these young people are frequently misread as straight) In order to provide some tenta-t ive suggestions I want to look briefly at one episode of homophobic hate crime which can shed some light on how these racialized imaginings have taken shape through par-ticular tropes in the media

On 10 November 1980 a man called Ronald K Crumpley went on a shooting spree in the West Village it ended outside the Ramrod Bar on West Street with two patrons shot dead and six wounded The scale of this incident forced New Yorkrsquos mainstream media to report for the first time on homophobic hate crimendashndasha topic until then completely ignored by newspapers such as The New York Times which even in this instance adopted a neutral detached tone (in line with its editorial refusal to use the word lsquogayrsquo instead of lsquohomosexualrsquo until 1987) and as Ransdell Pierson (1982 32) noted in an early review of gay-related press coverage lsquonever sought any personal reac-tion from the cityrsquos shaken gay communityrsquo Reactions from the community were instead published in tabloids such as the New York Post which also included investigative features on Crumpley that attributed his motive to repressed sexuality This coverage merged the prominent cultural discourse of self-loathing gay-on-gay violence with the logic of homosexuality as contagious suggesting that Crumpley had been lsquotouchedrsquo emotionally and sexually by the presence of queers (Holman and Crowley 1980)

Earlier that same year the very same themes of contagion and gay-on-gay violence had provoked an outcry in relation to William Friedkinrsquos (1980) controversial film Cruising which coincidentally set some of its scenes in the Ramrod Bar While some customers featured as extras politicized gay groups organized against the film disrupting its on-location filming and arguing that the exploitative violent plot could potentially lead to more violence against gays As Guy Davidson (2005 49) has per-ceptively argued lsquothe anti-Cruising protests with their antiporn logic also relied on the trope of contagion identifying the film as a pernicious act of violence that viewers might ldquocatchrdquo and act on The idea of contagion thus structures both the film itself and the protests that opposed itrsquo Interestingly Hanhardt (2008 69) specifically links this anti-porn logic which informed feminist lsquoTake Back the Nightrsquo marches and gay-safe street patrols in Greenwich Village with the lsquobroken windowsrsquo theory since both equate representations of violence (or disorder) with violence itself Moreover with regard to urban space this equationndashndashor rather conflationndashndashis not limited to a disorderly physical environment but clearly extends to what Kelling and Wilson (1982 1) refer to as lsquodisreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable peoplersquo deemed to embody the kind of erratic violent threat personified by Crumpley

Subsequent discussions of Cruising and the Ramrod killings have focused on whether Crumpley had seen the film or not and have tended to locate his homophobia in his religious upbringing When linking Cruising directly to the Ramrod killings film historian Vito Russo (1987 238) simply refers to the murderer as lsquoa ministerrsquos sonrsquo while Paul Burston (1996 90) who on the contrary argues that there lsquowas nothing to suggest that the gunman had ever heard of Cruisingrsquo similarly mentions lsquoreligious conditioningrsquo as a potential motive What they both leave outndashndashpossibly misguided by a politically correct lsquocolor-blindnessrsquondashndashis that Crumpley was not only described as lsquoa ministerrsquos sonrsquo in the media at the time but specifically as the son of a lsquoHarlem ministerrsquo The coverage in the New York Post centered on interviews with the father and pictures of Crumpleyrsquos

JW-IJUR140012indd 270 290515 553 PM


wife and child outside a Harlem tenement which very clearly placed the serial shooter in an African American milieu Furthermore the New York Post had tracked down a male hustler who alleged to have had a sexual relationship with Crumpley whom he described as lsquoa closet bisexual who hates effeminate faggots [but] said he liked me because I was white and I didnrsquot look like all the other fagsrsquo (Oliver 1980) Thus what emerged out of the New York Postrsquos reporting was the easily identifiable figure of the self-loathing bisexual or homosexual man and a potent mix of race religion and re-pressed sexuality

While it would be an exaggeration to argue that one eventndashndashalbeit a seminal one in the history of violence against New Yorkrsquos gay communityndashndashhas colored the per-ception of homophobic hate crime ever since the Ramrod killings provided an arche-typal narrative which has over the years occasionally been reactivated in media stories with thematic resemblances In January 1982 not long after reporting on Crumpleyrsquos court case had ended another African American man from Harlemndashndash21-year-old David Bullock whom the media described as a lsquohomosexual prostitutersquondashndashwas arrested and charged with the murders of six men while The New York Times reported that the police had identified lsquoldquoa common threadrdquo in the six murders ldquospecifically the sexual preference of some of the victims and similarities in the manner of deathrdquorsquo (Buder 1982) Thus again the lsquomurderer-in-the-midstrsquo motif was given a distinctly racialized geog ra-phy with the threat to Manhattanrsquos gay community emerging from Harlem much like contemporary media discourses persistently link disorder and threatening behavior in the Village with so called lsquotransient usersrsquo from uptown the outer boroughs and New Jersey

In the geographical imagination these parts of the metropolitan region are largely defined by their African American and Latino demographics and widely per-ceived as hotbeds of homophobia In recent years the most publicized episode of homophobic violence in New York (at least until Mark Carson was shot dead in an unprovoked attack in the Village in the summer of 2013) involved the abduction and torture of three men (assumed to be gay) in Morris Heights in the Bronx in October 2010 The extensive press coverage of this incident described in gory detail how a gang of nine young men (sometimes referred to as the Latin King Goonies) shouted homophobic abuse while subjecting the victims to torture (including beatings ciga-rette burns and anal penetration with wooden objects) While there is no suggestion that the gang members led double lives like Crumpley the graphic emphasis on rit-ualistic violence in the reporting nevertheless destabilized the heterosexuality of the gang since even the most horrific form of ritualistic rape on some level implicates the perpetrators as penetrators Indeed as both Jasbir Puar (2004 531) and Judith Butler (2007 963) have noted in relation to Abu Ghraib photographs of US soldiers using objects to anally penetrate Iraqi prisoners clearly implicate the servicemen themselves in homoerotic behavior

While the familiar trope of the violent homophobe as a closeted homosexual is not race-specific what emerges from one of the dominant strands of reporting on anti-gay crime in New Yorkndashndashfrom the Ramrod killings to the Morris Heights episodendashndashis nevertheless a cumulative image of the perpetrator of homophobic hate-crime as a dark-skinned man of unstable sexuality Paradoxically progressive queer lsquooutingsrsquo of some of the most explicitly homophobic writers of the black nationalist movementndashndashsee for example Joseacute Esteban Muntildeoz (2009 85ndash6) on discussions of LeRoi JonesAmiri Barakarsquos bisexuality and E Patrick Johnsonrsquos (2003 48) queering of Eldridge Cleaverndashndashsubliminally feeds similar notions of unstable black sexuality By highlighting that those writers who denounced homosexuality in the most violent verbal terms were perhaps engaged in same-sex erotic relationships themselves the problematic concept of lsquothe down lowrsquo is reinforced and extended in time beyond its contemporary usage The notion of lsquothe down lowrsquondashndashthe supposedly widespread practice among black lsquostraightrsquo

JW-IJUR140012indd 271 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 272

men to have sex with other menndashndashhas no empirical basis and misleadingly racializes the closet yet has taken on a life of its own both as a self-proclaimed identity and as a broader cultural trope (Boykin 2005) Thus if the black homophobe in a twisted logic is queer the black queer may also turn out to be a violent homophobe This notion of gay-on-gay violence features in some of the campaigning discourses against queer youth of color on Christopher Street together with the more widespread racist trope of lsquowildrsquo youth running amok in the Village

lsquoGay youth gone wildrsquoThe convenient explanation for the marginalization of non-white queers within

the gay community has typically been to refer to its heavy reliance on commercial culture which it is argued reinforces existing class-based exclusions (Warner 1993 xvii) While it is no doubt true that the intersecting inequalities of class and race in society at large have been reproduced within gay culture sociological work on middle-class black gay men in New York City still found that in spite of having economic access to the cityrsquos gay scene lsquoBlack gay men experienced racism Eurocentric aesthetic standards and new forms of marginalityrsquo (Green 2007 767) Specifically in the context of residential gayborhoods Charles Nero (2005 243ndash4) notes further how lsquothe fairly widespread controlling image of black gay men as impostors hellip legitimates the sense of fear that leads whites to prefer to live in racially homogenous neighborhoodsrsquo It is perhaps this image of the impostorndashndashepitomized by somebody like Crumpley who frequented gay bars and had sex with men but who nevertheless turned out to be a violent threatndashndashthat continues to inform the hostility directed at queer youths of color on Christopher Street Thus lsquothugrsquo fashion and expressions of lsquothe down lowrsquo which on occasions may be a social necessity (not least when travelling to and from the Village) but in other instances can be viewed more affirmatively as a deliberate resistance to the aesthetic ideals of the white-dominated gay ghetto are not necessarily misread as straight rather they are understood as queer but still deemed threatening to other queers

Arguably the white gay community has struggled to come to terms with this type of racism not least because it has invested so heavily in lsquolike racersquo rhetorical strategies which compare its own plight with that of racial minorities and above all with African Americans (Halley 2008) In this context internal critiques of inequali-ties within the gay community have been seen as disloyal to the cause (Manalansan 2005 143) At the same time the current tensions in the West Village cannot be solely attributed to its white gay residents in the past two decades the neighborhood has been transformed largely by straight yuppification The most aggressive neighbor-hood groups lobbying for the displacement of queer youth of colorndashndashthe Greenwich Village Blocks Association and the Christopher Street Patrol (both of which are led by the vocal campaigner David Poster who is president of the latter and vice-president of the former)ndashndashare not gay organizations even if they may have gay members In their disdain for lsquobridge-and-tunnelrsquo people these groups have advocated the weekend closure of the PATH station (Anderson 2009) which connects Christopher Street directly with New Jersey and successfully lobbied the police to shut down gay bars catering to an African American clientele

Campaigning material distributed by the Greenwich Village Blocks Association and local media coverage have at times drawn on animalizing and lsquowildrsquo tropes reminiscent of the language used in relation to the so-called lsquowildingrsquo episode in 1989 when five teenagers were convicted of the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in Central Park In the media hysteria at the time this attack become emblematic of a new phenomenonndashndashlsquowildingrsquondashndashwhich according to The New York Times was lsquoa slang term usually pronounced wilrsquoing that refers to the practice of marauding in bands to terrorize strangers and to swagger and bullyrsquo (Kaufman 1989) In 2002 a convicted

JW-IJUR140012indd 272 290515 553 PM


rapist and murderer already serving a life sentence confessed to the Central Park assault (to which he could be linked with DNA evidence) and the convictions of the five teenagers (now grown men) were overturned It is still not entirely clear whether the term lsquowildingrsquondashndashwhich quickly entered the urban lexiconndashndashever existed as slang or if it emerged out of misinterpretations of the initial suspect statements and then took on its own life in the media (Burns 2011 70 212) In an analysis of the press coverage surrounding these events Jeremi Duru (2004 1348) has shown how lsquoThe term ldquowildingrdquo aside the youths were alternately referred to as ldquowolf packsrdquo ldquorat packsrdquo ldquosavagesrdquo and

ldquoanimalsrdquorsquondashndashan imagery tied up with lsquothe myth of the Bestial Black Man a myth deeply embedded in American culture that black men are animalistic sexually unrestrained inherently criminal and ultimately bent on rapersquo (ibid 1320) Highlighting similarities with the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama (where 9 teenage boys were wrongly accused of rape) Duru places the media discourses and demands to reinstate the death penalty after the lsquowildingrsquo episode in the context of a longer history of white mob justice and lynching

While the Greenwich Village Blocks Associationrsquos newsletters do not mention race or sexuality explicitly (only euphemistically referring to lsquounfortunate backgroundsrsquo or mockingly quoting the gay activist argument that lsquoThese kids come here because they feel safe herersquo) descriptions of the lsquowild enjoymentrsquo of lsquofrenzied and aggressive hellip screaming excited young peoplersquo are clearly racialized and perhaps more surprisingly often gendered as female In one of his reports for the newsletter Poster (2011 3) notes how lsquomostly females who seemed to be in their teens and twenties were yelling and cheering in a frenzyrsquo This imageryndashndashessentially that of blood-soaked savagery (lsquosmall groups breaking out in fights creating a bloody melee [who] appeared to love the action which was spiralling all over the pierrsquo)ndashndashis then typically spiced up with Posterrsquos own hyperbolic rhetorical questions lsquoDoes somebody have to die before those with the ability to do something about this problem take some meaningful actionrsquo In addition to the not-so-subtly coded lesbian violence portrayed in these accounts reports in the local media of how black youths have invaded white gay bars and lsquoknocked over chairs ripped items from the walls and pushed patronsrsquo (Swalec 2011) again reinforce the notion of these queer kids as a threat to other queers

The Greenwich Village Blocks Associationrsquos newsletters are only distributed in the neighborhood (and online) but similar discourses especially of lesbian black women featured in the cityrsquos media after a violent incident in 2007 when newspapers conjured up vivid images of lsquobloodthirsty young lesbiansrsquo lsquoa seething Sapphic septet from Newark NJrsquo (Italiano 2007) and a lsquowolf pack of lesbiansrsquo (Ross and Goldiner 2007) To understand the gendering of these familiar tropes which Russo (1987 255) once referred to as lsquothe perennial lesbian vampire routinersquo Lisa Dugganrsquos (2000 3) book Sapphic Slashers Sex Violence and American Modernity is informative because although she does not compare or empirically link lynching with the media discourse of the violent lesbian she rather more subtly illustrates how lsquoThe black beast rapist and the homicidal lesbian both appeared in new cultural narratives at the end of the nineteenth century as threats to white masculinity and to the stability of the white home as fulcrum of political and economic hierarchiesrsquo And indeed it is the white home and by extension the gentrified neighborhood and its associated forms of con-sumption under threat in many of the contemporary media and newsletter accounts In his tireless campaign writing Poster has a particular fondness for describing vivid street scenes of the arearsquos yuppified restaurants and their customers being harassed by unruly black youths On one occasion he describes lsquoa wild group of youthsrsquo banging on the door of an lsquoupscale restaurantrsquo (Poster 2011 3) while in an earlier instance a similar group of lsquodisruptive youthsrsquo apparently grabbed lsquoanything and everything from the outside tables [to] fight while terrified patrons ran inside covered in food and winersquo (Poster and Goldman 2005) As symbolically illustrative as these street vignettes are

JW-IJUR140012indd 273 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 274

of class tensions in the gentrified neighborhood they should not be taken at face value as eyewitness reports Poster always arrives too late to witness these restaurant scenes himself and relies exclusively on hearsay (as I will discuss later this is also the case in proceedings against the bar Chi Chiz where witnesses from the NYPD have never seen anything themselves but rely on what others have told them)

The descriptions of lsquowild youthrsquo in both Posterrsquos campaign writing and sensa-tionalist features in the tabloid media operate as discursive displacements whereby one of the demonized grouprsquos main characteristicsndashndashnamely that they are children and teenagersndashndashis rhetorically concealed by the animalizing language In his influential polemic No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive Lee Edelman (2004) argues that the universal politics of lsquoreproductive futurismrsquo places the image of lsquothe Childrsquo and queerness in sharp opposition to each other Indeed queer youth pose a disruptive problem in such dominant discourse where lsquothe Childrsquo is typically juxtapositioned with lsquothe homosexualrsquondashndashthe former needing protection from the latter As Edelman (ibid 19) puts it lsquothe cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls since queerness for contemporary culture hellip is understood as bringing chil-dren and childhood to an endrsquo Consequently and partly through the animalizing tropes which deflect attention from the young age of the streetrsquos weekend population childhood ends abruptly on Christopher where hanging out is to openly express onersquos queerness Even when the animalization is seemingly benignndashndashas in a recent article in The New York Times which referred to the transgender girls on Christopher as lsquobrightly colored hellip flocks of exoticndashndashif risqueacutendashndashparakeetsrsquo (Maslin Nir 2012)ndashndashthe exoticism dehumanizes and in spite of the parakeetrsquos cutesy connotations ultimately categorizes these lsquorisqueacutersquo kids (with their perceived capacity to seduce other kids into the queer world) as predators rather than prey Birds (as symbolic bearers of queerness) Edelman (2004 116) notes may be lsquocaged in the ghettos that make them available for ethnographic displayrsquo but lsquoinveterate bird-watchers always discern the tell-tale mark that brands each one a chicken-hawk first and lastrsquo5

Beyond this symbolic level the persistent linking of black queer youth with animals draws uncomfortable attention to the overlapping methodological trajectories of urban ethnography and zoology in the twentieth century John B Calhounrsquos ex peri-ments with rats and mice between the 1940s and 1960s formed the basis for Edward T Hallrsquos (1966 157) proxemics theories which he used to critique the high population densities and design features of urban renewal programs in places like Harlem This research in turn influenced Jane Jacobsrsquo mentor William H Whytersquos Project for Public Spaces the main findings of which were published in City Rediscovering the Center where in a methodological note Whyte (1988 5) refers to these studies of animals but concludes that they were too far lsquoremoved from the ultimate reality being studied That reality was people in everyday situationsrsquo Yet changing the object of study from animal to human does not fundamentally alter the naiumlve positivism of Whytersquos observational approach which never adequately addresses its own positionality and class biases Amanda Burden (Bloombergrsquos planning commissioner) was a researcher on Whytersquos Project for Public Spaces and as a former environmental science student initially

lsquothought about working at the zoo actually studying animals because Irsquom a passionate bird-watcherrsquo (Gardner 2002) In her role as planning commissioner she stayed true to the observational methodology and gained a reputation (among her critics) for walking around neighborhoods to lsquoimpose her own aesthetic sensibilityrsquo (Cardwell 2007) which borrows heavily from Jacobs

5 Another example of the animalization of transwomen occurs in the episode lsquoCock-a-Doodle-Dorsquo of the HBO sitcom Sex and the City where the storyline of Carrie being kept awake by cockerels outside her window is analogized with a parallel storyline of Samantha having transgender sex-workers beneath her window in the Meatpacking District

JW-IJUR140012indd 274 290515 553 PM


While Burdenrsquos promotion of Jacobs-esque urban ideals were cloaked in com-mon sense language her public stance in favor of gentrification (see Satow 2012)ndashndashmuch like Whytersquos (1988 325ndash30) manifesto-like chapter lsquoThe case for gentrificationrsquondashndashsuggests that the Bloomberg administrationrsquos post-political faux objectivity had a great deal in common with the lsquoobjectivismrsquo espoused by Ayn Rand (1964 110) for whom private property rights were an objective truth Indeed it is the firm belief in private property and objective disembodied observations that links the deductive ethnographic approach of Jacobs Whyte and Burden with the nimbyistic refusal of residentsrsquo groups in the West Village to recognize the relational character of lsquonuisancersquo While Jacobsrsquo (1961 69) labeling of the outsider as lsquoDrunk hellip Crazy hellip A wild kid from the suburbsrsquo is not necessarily racialized it equates lsquowildnessrsquo with a spatial pathology (lsquosuburbsrsquo) which in her Manhattan-centric 1960s vocabulary overlaps with those parts of the metropolitan region (Jersey and the outer boroughs) now seen as the source of weekend invasions of lsquogay youth gone wildrsquo (Poster and Goldman 2005) Yet Jacobsrsquo status as a beacon of inclusive urbanism remains intact largely because her self-assured lsquocommonsensersquo language is seen as emblematic of an ordinary residentndashndashlsquoa ldquogreat amateurrdquo with no professional credentialsrsquo (Ruppert 2006 165)ndashndashstanding up to power While her analysis of the city is infinitely more nuanced and likeable in its overall inclusive ethos than the campaigning rhetoric of a contemporary neighborhood organizer like Poster they are united in their roles as local guardians of the West Village Apparently Poster also thinks of himself as an ethnographer and when he appeared as a witness in proceedings against the African American bar Chi Chiz (to which I shall shortly turn) he described his activities in the neighborhood in the following terms lsquoSo in essence thatrsquos basically what I do is watch the streetsrsquo6

Yet if Poster is Jacobsrsquo lsquoeyes on the streetrsquo in practice he is a salutory example of the distortions that nimbyistic anxiety can lend such observation as already revealed in Death and Lifersquos discussion of neighborhood surveillance In a passage clearly intended as a positive example of neighborly spirit Jacobs (1961 48ndash9) discusses how a man who is seen to approach a crying girl on her street is immediately assumed to be a pedophile and rounded up by her neighbors As it turns out Jacobs admits (although she does not dwell on it further) the man is the father of the girl which at least in the eyes of the neighbors exonerates him As much as this episode illustrates a commendable civic attitude among residents to look after children on their street the profiling of the outsider as a sexual deviant resonates with contemporary tendencies to persistently attach disorderly labels to the arearsquos queer youth of color Jacobs may have written against the oppressiveness of top-down modernist urban planning but the small-scale surveillance of her neighborhood ideal was fraught with its own form of authoritarianism Clearly the counterweight to self-appointed neighborhood patrols should be the police and legal system yet as the harassment and closure of the African American gay bar Chi Chiz on Christopher Street in 2011 illustrate the same forms of prejudiced profiling influence law enforcement in the area

Chi Chiz and the sidewalkIn queer culture bars and nightclubs have a symbolic territorial status beyond

their immediate social function stemming from a long history of vandalism attacks and regulatory attempts to destroy this economy While the police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969 is seen as the culmination of this political history in New York state-led forms of harassment have continued and since the AIDS crisis disproportionately (but not exclusively) targeted sex businesses During the latter period of the Ed Koch administration (1978ndash89) the favored legal device was the 1985 State Health Code

6 State of New York Division of Alcohol Beverage Control In the matter of State of New York petitioner Vs Jones Enterprises Inc respondent Case No 63892 13 October 2010 p 128

JW-IJUR140012indd 275 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276

(which banned public sex in commercial premises) while under Giuliani the pre ferred strategy was zoning (which banned adult businesses from operating near churches and schools) together with expensive and bureaucratic cabaret licenses for dance clubs (Hae 2011)7 More recently under Bloombergndashndashand in line with the lsquopost-politicalrsquo image he initially tried to projectndashndashless openly moralistic mechanisms such as nui -sance abatement lawsuits minor licensing infringements and so-called lsquoMultiagency Responses to Community Hotspotsrsquo have been deployed to the same effect A brief look at the gay venues forced to shut down on Manhattanrsquos West Side over the last decade highlights that under Bloomberg it was no longer just sexually themed venues that were harassed out of business but also bars and clubs catering primarily for an African American and Latino crowd8 Thus the lsquovanillaizationrsquo of urban space (which has been well-documented since the Koch and Giuliani eras) should no longer merely be understood as a process of sexual purification but also as one of whitening reflecting demographic shifts and their associated aesthetic standards

To illustrate how such class- and race-specific aesthetic judgments (regarding the appropriate use of sidewalks and dress codes for example) inform the regulation of queer space in the West Village I will focus on the closure of the African American gay

7 While Giulianirsquos New York became a textbook example of sexual purificationmdashsupposedly emblematic of wider tendencies under neoliberalismmdashregulatory and rhetorical responses to public sex have in fact varied significantly between urban contexts In London in the same period public sex was commodified rather than marginalized (Andersson 2011)

8 In addition to a sustained campaign to close down Manhattanrsquos remaining adult video stores and the high-profile raid on the Eagle the same evening that the New York Senate passed the Marriage Equality Act (Hauser 2009) the African American bar Two Potato had its license withdrawn in 2004 after a neighborhood campaign by the Greenwich Village Blocks Association while in 2011 a similar campaign resulted in the closure of Chi Chiz In 2013 the New York State Liquor Authority tried to revoke the alcohol licence of Escuelita the last remaining queer black and Latino nightclub in Midtown while Splashndashndashwhich hosted the Wednesday night Ocean (again popular with black and Latino queer youth)ndashndashclosed after years of police harassment (including a badly timed raid during Pride weekend in 2006)

Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz

Rivera WayStonewall Inn

figure 2 Map with names of bars on Christopher Street

JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM


bar Chi Chiz the victim of a sustained campaign of police harassment and lobbying by Posterrsquos Greenwich Village Blocks Association In March 2010 the bar was raided by a dozen NYPD officers (one of whom witnesses claim shouted anti-gay epithets) and temporarily shut down Later that same year the city brought a nuisance abatement lawsuit against Chi Chiz while in a separate case the New York State Liquor Authority sought to revoke its license In August the nuisance abatement lawsuit was postponed but the Liquor Authorityrsquos proceedings against Chi Chiz went ahead in the autumn of 2010 and unable to cope with the loss of income its owners decided to permanently shut the bar in January 2011 The following discussion is based on the transcripts from the Liquor Authority case

Specifically the charges against Chi Chiz concerned four alleged drugs sales on the premises between July 2009 and January 2010 However an article in The Villager by journalist Duncan Osborne (2010) immediately cast doubt on the case reporting that these sales had been planted at Chi Chiz by undercover police who arranged to meet suspected drug dealers in other locations (such as Starbucks on 6th Avenue five blocks away) before actively directing the actual sales to the bar The transcripts arguably reinforce this impression since the undercover officer engaged in the sales was not present at the proceedings Instead the detective witness was part of the lsquofield teamrsquo and placed in a car on Hudson Street from where he could not see Chi Chiz or as he himself admitted hear anything on the transmitter (and so could not adequately respond when questioned as to whether the undercover police officer or drug dealer had suggested completing the drug deals inside the premises of Chi Chiz)9 While the suspicion of planted crimes may seem conspiratorial it must be seen in context we already know that the NYPD have conducted a series of false prostitution arrests in order for the city to pursue nuisance abatement lawsuits against adult video stores across Manhattan with a particular concentration along 8th Avenue (Osborne 2008) Furthermore thanks to the tireless campaigning and legal efforts of the lsquoStop the False Arrestsrsquo campaign that was set up in response to the false prostitution charges we also now know that some of the busts against these video stores were ordered by the Mayorrsquos Office (Osborne 2013) This political involvement in policing matters indicates that there were broader issues at stake concerning the Bloomberg administrationrsquos vision for Manhattan

Indeed it is clear in the transcripts from the proceedings against Chi Chiz (in which very little time is spent discussing the actual drug deals) that the broader issue con-cerns lsquoappropriatersquo use of the surrounding sidewalks Throughout the transcripts lsquodis-orderlinessrsquo10 is persistently linked to lsquotransient peoplersquo whom the commanding officer of the 6th Precinct defines as lsquopeople that donrsquot live in the arearsquo but who lsquoflockrsquo there thus subtly reiterating the animalization of the press discourses11 Yet the repeated refer-ences by police witnesses to lsquorowdy groupsrsquo and lsquodisorderly peoplersquo12 who are lsquobeing loud and boisterous attracting negative attention to the establishmentrsquo13 are hardly neutral assess ments but colored by particular subjectivities and notions of street etiquette When one police officer14 and later Poster15 describe how passers-by cross the street to avoid the crowd outside Chi Chiz they are not actually pointing out any wrongdoing on behalf of the customers but inadvertently highlighting a tendency among white people to per ceive black youths (especially in groups) as threatening (Anderson 2012) Moreover the references to overcrowded sidewalksndashndashwhat Rem Koolhaas (1978) celebrated as Manhattanrsquos lsquoculture of congestionrsquo in Delirious New Yorkndashndashimply that formal consensus on appropriate pedestrian densities exists when in fact notions

9 Case No 63892 (op cit) 23 September 2010 p 2410 Case No 63892 (op cit) 13 October 2010 p 1511 Ibid p 2012 Ibid p 8313 Ibid p 8714 Ibid p 3215 Ibid p 137

JW-IJUR140012indd 277 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 278

of crowdedness tend to be area-specific and part of ongoing quotidian negotiations Ultimately the absence of concrete examples of crime on the sidewalks outside Chi Chizndashndashmuch like the reliance on hearsay in Posterrsquos campaign writingndashndashreveals the fallacy of lsquobroken windowsrsquo policing and Jacobsrsquo lsquoeyes on the streetrsquo by illustrating how

lsquodisorderrsquo is problematically attached to particular groups of peopleIn what must be a gaffe one police witness in the proceedings even admits that

transgendered customersndashndashwhether engaged in criminal activities or notndashndashrepresent a problem for Chi Chiz lsquoNow not saying that theyrsquore committing crimes there but at the very minimum theyrsquore either patronizing or you know frequenting the area And that potentially could be problematic for a bar in my estimationrsquo16 This stigmatiza-tion based on gender identity is not limited to the bar but extends to the surrounding streets where transwomen are frequently arrested on prostitution-related charges Media discourses of the area as lsquoTimes Square Southrsquo (Worth 2002) however are clearly misleading the West Village is not a red-light district and while the former porn cinemas in Times Square facilitated inter-class queer encounters (Delany 1999) their surroundings were compromised by the lsquomale gaze turned aggressively nastyrsquo (Berman 2006 176) By contrast the queer fluidity of Christopher Street undermines dichotomous and gendered conventions about who can be looked at and if anything the oppressive gaze belongs to the police who engage in crude surveillance and pro-filing operations

The nature of the arrests made during such operations ranging from public lewdness to loitering for prostitution are problematic for several reasons First in research conducted by the Sex Workers Project widespread concerns regarding in-vas ive strip-searches were reported while 17 of sex workers had experienced sexual abuse (including rape) by the police (Ritchie 2009) Second many of the male-to- female trans individuals arrested were not sex workers but simply conforming to certain dress codes and performative appropriations of the sidewalks in the West Village Key ways in which police officers identify individuals who lsquoloiter for prostitu-tionrsquo include clothing and the pedestrian patterns of suspects repeatedly walking up and down the same street Yet when police officers refer to the arrests of lsquoscantily cladrsquo or lsquoprovocatively dressedrsquo individuals17 they may simply misread the hyper-feminine fashion (favored by some transwomen) and underestimate the performative character of Christopher Street to which queer youths from across the region come to see and be seen Indeed to lsquoloiterrsquo (or what would perhaps be referred to as flacircnerie if other demographics prevailed) is the whole point of Christopher Street which is not a thoroughfare taking pedestrians from A to B but a theatrical space to parade up and down As Richard Goldstein (2002 original emphasis) put it in the Village Voice

lsquoIt flames with the passion of people who donrsquot feel free to be themselves in their neighborhoods and who see this hallowed stretch of pavement as a place where they can representrsquo

Now to distinguish between the various types of representation that take place on Christopher Street (and they range from the theatrically camp to streetwise notions of lsquohomie-sexualrsquo) and any real sense of danger or threat is clearly not the strong point of lsquobroken windowsrsquo policing or Jacobsrsquo lsquoeyes on the streetrsquo What would Jacobs have made of the clientele outside a bar such as Chi Chiz She certainly celebrated crowded pavements as a form of natural surveillance and it has become de rigueur to invoke her name in the context of such debates When Rawhide one of Manhattanrsquos last remaining leather bars was forced out of business in 2013 (after its rent was nearly doubled) the then speaker of the New York City Council and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn

16 Ibid p 2617 Ibid p 90

JW-IJUR140012indd 278 290515 553 PM


suggested that lsquoA leather bar may or may not be the best example but it is the type of neighborhood experience we want to be able to have what Jane Jacobs called ldquothe eyes on the streetsrdquo all watching out for each otherrsquo (Van Meter 2013) However what Jacobsrsquo specific views on a place like Rawhidendashndashor indeed Chi Chizndashndashmight have been is open to debate on the one hand she argued that the night-time customers at the local Irish bar on her street contributed to the lsquopublic street-civilizing servicersquo (1961 51) but on the other hand she was strict about how much nightlife one of her neighboring streets could tolerate lsquoInto a district excellent at handling and protecting strangers they have concentrated too many strangers all in too irresponsible mood for any conceivable city society to handle naturallyrsquo (ibid 259)

While the balance between the interests of local residents and those of a cityrsquos broader population is always a delicate one the post-Stonewall West Village is symbol-ically a different world from the neighborhood described in Death and Life during the early 1960s Jacobs wrote against the urban renewal plans of Moses and the almost manifesto-like celebration of the tightly knit community of her neighborhood must be understood in a historical context where parts of the residential population were under real threat of displacement Today the people under threat of evictionndashndashand we need to re-emphasize the meaning of eviction beyond its predominantly residential connotationsndashndashare the queer youth who through their continuous appropriation of the West Villagersquos sidewalks and piers produce queer space Christopher Street is unique among the hundreds of streets in Manhattan and the thousands of streets in New York City as the only place where queer youth of color feel safe and sufficiently numerous to stake a claim as key users The persistent labeling of them as lsquotransient peoplersquo is invalidated by the fact that they (in contrast to many residents who simply move in and out of their homes) often spend many hours several nights per week on Christopher Street effectively making them the primary users of the neighborhoodrsquos public spaces History and this unique capacity to provide a sense of safety in numbers (however precarious) require that the normal balances between this group and the local residents cannot apply but should be shifted in favor of the use value it provides for some of the cityrsquos most marginalized inhabitants

ConclusionWhile earlier accounts of the tensions on Christopher Street have (at least in

tone) pessimistically described the eviction of queers of color as a fait accompli this group has proven more resilient to displacement and police harassment than many anticipated In the past it has been suggested that locally elected gay and lesbian officials such as former city council speaker Christine Quinn and state senator Thomas Duane have been reluctant to be pressurized by neighborhood organizations such as the Greenwich Village Blocks Association fearing a backlash from their own largely liberal and left-leaning constituencies (Worth 2002) Yet with the demographic transformations that have taken place in the West Village the local electoral dynamics are changing and as I have shown in this article nimbyistic initiatives without explicit political backing have nevertheless been successful in lobbying the police and licensing authorities To move beyond the equation between community and residents which characterizes both the logic of electoral districts and Jacobsrsquo paradigm of neighborhood organizing new forms of grassroots coalitions (Gandy 2012) have to be sufficiently intersectional to transcend both the narrow interests of property owners and the singular identity politics with which Christopher Street was historically associated

Arguably in the West Village a loosely formed alliance can be detected between progressive churches (see Andersson et al 2011 622ndash4) trans-advocacy groups (the Sylvia Rivera Law Project as well as the Audre Lorde Project) and minority racial queer organizations such as FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for

JW-IJUR140012indd 279 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 280

Community Empowerment) which informally provide some kind of representation for a constituency too young to vote and without any residential claim to the neighborhood The spatial tactics deployed by FIERCE in the queer reclaiming of Pier 46 after a refurbishment (widely interpreted as an attempt to design out queer youth of color) (see Patrick 2007 52ndash72) included the 2009 on-site public screening of Jennie Living-stonersquos (1990) film Paris is Burning which was partly shot on the piers and in the area around Christopher Street To conclude I want to revisit this film briefly to illustrate how above all young queers themselves occupy and appropriate public space in ways that redefine kinship and property through the metaphorical use of the term lsquohousersquo

While Paris is Burning (about the black drag-ball subculture of voguing) raised its own problematic questions about the white ethnographic gaze on black subculture (hooks 1992 151 Davis 1999) the filmrsquos subversive potential stemmed from its lsquoreformulation of kinship in particular the redefining of the ldquohouserdquo and its forms of collectivityrsquo (Butler 1993 28 original emphasis) As one character in the film says lsquoA house is a gay street gangrsquo and while in the immediate context of the film such a lsquohousersquo means a family-like collective of drag-ball performers the remark is made against the backdrop of a group of queer youth moving and dancing through urban space Perhaps a contemporary version of the ephemeral lsquosidewalk balletrsquo celebrated by Jacobs (1961 66) this constellation of bodies in a more literal sense also constitutes a protective lsquohousersquo for the lsquoqueer nomadsrsquo for whom the term lsquohomophobiarsquo has a double meaning as lsquofear of homersquo (Walker 2011 96) In one of the filmrsquos sequences drag queen Pepper LaBeija talks about the rejected runaway queer kids who come to her looking for a parent before we are introduced to two boys from Harlem and the Bronx (they claim to be 15 and 13 but look younger) who hang out on the streets of the Village We never hear the filmmakerrsquos question but judging by their answers they have been asked to explain what the gay community is lsquoThey treat each other like sisters hellip you know like I say

ldquoThatrsquos my sisterrdquorsquo the younger one says in reference to his friend And then lsquoJust like hellip a community hellip religious community they wanna pray together a lot right Well this gay community might wanna hellip be togetherrsquo

The innocence of this sequence provides a form of strategic sentimentalism which is seemingly at odds with the anti-social turn in queer theory epitomized by Edelmanrsquos (2004) influential rejection of the image of lsquothe Childrsquo Yet far from an embrace of lsquoreproductive futurismrsquo the gender-neutral sisterhood alluded to by these children points to a queer mode of sociality beyond the mimicking of the straight nuclear family Moreover this sisterhood of the street reminds us that it was violent exclusion from traditional familial kinship structures that facilitated social change in the first place Already ostracized by their families those who fought back at Stone-wall (and other less mythologized events) were often of transgender identities im-possible to conceal in the closet In a recent online book called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries Sylvia Rivera (2013 45) describes how in the last months of her life fellow Stonewall veteran Marsha P Johnson used to lsquogo down to the end of Christopher Street supposedly talking to her brother and wanting to go talk to her father in the waterrsquo What would todayrsquos gentrified gay community make of this homeless transwoman looking for her long-lost father in the river Too many perhaps would view her as an embarrassment to the assimilationist cause or even as a damper on local real estate values Yet it was exactly in the cracks of her broken kinship ties (and those of others like her) that gay liberation was born and in which new social constellations flourished In the era of same-sex marriagendashndashendorsed by Bloomberg (2013) with reference to the business case (lsquofreedom attracts talentrsquo)ndashndashthe celebration of such alternative modes of family and community are more important than ever because their vantage points which denaturalize kinship are also uniquely well-placed to denaturalize the connection between property and propriety

JW-IJUR140012indd 280 290515 553 PM


Johan Andersson Department of Geography Kingrsquos College London London WC2R 2LS UK johananderssonkclacuk

ReferencesAnderson E (2012) The cosmopolitan canopy race and

civility in everyday life WW Norton New YorkAnderson L (2009) Gay bars and neighbours say lsquoanything

goesrsquo has got to go The Villager 793 [WWW document] URL httpthevillagercomvillager321anythinggoeshtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Andersson J (2011) Vauxhallrsquos postindustrial pleasure gardens lsquodeath wishrsquo and hedonism in 21st century London Urban Studies 481 85ndash100

Andersson J (2012) Heritage discourse and the desexualisation of public space the lsquohistorical restorationsrsquo of Bloomsburyrsquos squares Antipode 444 1081ndash98

Andersson J R Vanderbeck G Valentine K Ward and J Sadgrove (2011) New York encounters religion sexuality and the city Environment and Planning A 433 618ndash33

Berlant L and M Warner (1998) Sex in public Critical Inquiry 242 547ndash66

Berman M (2006) On the town one hundred years of spectacle in Times Square Random House New York

Bloomberg M (2013) Gay marriage itrsquos only fair The Guardian 2 June [WWW document] http wwwtheguardiancomcommentisfree2013jun 02gay-marriage-democracy-equal-rights (accessed 17 April 2015)

Boykin K (2005) Beyond the down low sex lies and denial in black America Carroll amp Graf New York

Brash J (2011) Bloombergrsquos New York class and governance in the luxury city The University of Georgia Press Athens and London

Brown M (2014) Gender and sexuality II there goes the gayborhood Progress in Human Geography 383 457ndash65

Browne K (2006) Challenging queer geographies Antipode 385 885ndash93

Buder L (1982) Suspect is held in slayings of 6 in last 6 weeks The New York Times 15 January [WWW document] URL httpwwwnytimescom198201 15nyregionsuspect-is-held-in-slayings-of-6-in-last-6-weekshtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Burns S (2011) The Central Park five Vintage Books New York

Burston P (1996) Confessions of a gay film critic or how I learned to stop worrying and love cruising In M Simpson (ed) Anti-gay Freedom Editions London and New York

Butler J (1993) Critically queer GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11 17ndash32

Butler J (2007) Torture and the ethics of photography Society and Space 256 951ndash66

Cardwell D (2007) Once at Cotillions now reshaping the cityscape The New York Times 15 January [WWW document] URL wwwnytimescom20070115nyregion15amandahtmlpagewanted=allamp_r=0 (accessed 17 April 2015)

Caro RA (1974) The power broker Robert Moses and the fall of New York Vintage New York

Chan S (2009) Stonewall anniversary as gay tourism event The New York Times 7 April [WWW document] URL httpcityroomblogsnytimescom20090407from-stonewall-riots-to-rainbow-pilgrimage (accessed 17 April 2015)

Dangerous Bedfellows (1996) Policing public sex South End Press Boston MA

Davidson G (2005) rsquoContagious relationsrsquo simulation paranoia and the postmodern condition in William Friedkinrsquos Cruising and Felice Picanorsquos The Lure GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 111 23ndash64

Davis KC (1999) White filmmakers and minority subjects cinema veacuteriteacute and the politics of irony in lsquoHoop

Dreamsrsquo and lsquoParis is Burningrsquo South Atlantic Review 641 26ndash47

Delany S (1999) Times Square red Times Square blue New York University Press New York and London

Doan PL and H Higgins (2011) The demise of queer space Resurgent gentrification and the assimilation of LGBT neighborhoods Journal of Planning Education and Research 311 6ndash25

Duggan L (2000) Sapphic slashers sex violence and American modernity Durham University Press Durham NC and London

Duru JN (2004) The Central Park five the Scottsboro boys and the myth of the bestial black man Cardozo Law Review 254 1315ndash65

Edelman L (2004) No future queer theory and the death drive Durham University Press Durham NC and London

Flint A (2009) Wrestling with Moses how Jane Jacobs took On New Yorkrsquos master builder and transformed the American city Random House New York

Floyd K (2009) The reification of desire toward a queer Marxism University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis

Friedkin W (Dir) (1980) Cruising Warner Bros Burbank CAGandy M (2012) Queer ecology nature sexuality and

heterotopic alliances Environment and Planning D Society and Space 304 727ndash47

Gardner R Jr (2002) Social planner New York Magazine 13 May [WWW document] URL httpnymagcomnymetronewspoliticsnewyorkfeatures6005 (accessed 17 April 2015)

Ghaziani A (2014) There goes the gayborhood Princeton University Press Princeton NJ

Goldstein R (2002) Street hassle new skool versus old school in Greenwich Village The Village Voice 23 April [WWW document] URL httpwwwvillagevoicecom2002-04-23newsstreet-hassle (accessed 17 April 2015)

Gratz RB (2011) The battle for Gotham New York in the shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs Nation Books New York

Green AI (2007) On the horns of a dilemma institutional dimensions of the sexual career in a sample of middle-class urban black gay men Journal of Black Studies 375 753ndash74

Hae L (2011) Dilemmas of the nightlife fix post-industrialization and the gentrification of nightlife in New York City Urban Studies 4816 3449ndash65

Hall ET (1966) The hidden dimension manrsquos use of space in public and private The Bodley Head London Sydney and Toronto

Halley J (2008) lsquoLike racersquo arguments In J Butler J Guillory and K Thomas (eds) Whatrsquos left of theory new work on the politics of literary theory Routledge New York

Hanhardt CB (2008) Butterflies whistles and fists gay safe street patrols and the new gay ghetto 1976ndash1981 Radical History Review 100 (Winter) 60ndash85

Harvey D (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism Oxford University Press Oxford

Hauser C (2009) Among gay men arrests spark concern about being singled out The New York Times 15 February [WWW document] URL httpwwwnytimescom20090215nyregion15arrestshtmlpagewanted=all (accessed 17 April 2015)

Holman Jr P Crowley and K Crowley (1980) Pastorrsquos family torn apart by murderous nightmare New York Post 21 November

Hooks b (1992) Black looks race and representation South End Press Boston MA

Italiano L (2007) Attack of the killer lesbians New York Post 12 April [WWW document] URL httpnypostcom20070412attack-of-the-killer-lesbians (accessed 17 April 2015)

JW-IJUR140012indd 281 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 282

Jacobs J (1961) The death and life of great American cities The Modern Library New York

Johnson PE (2003) Appropriating blackness performance and the politics of authenticity Durham University Press Durham NC and London

Kanai JM and K Kenttamaa-Squires (2015) Remaking South Beach metropolitan gayborhood trajectories under homonormative entrepreneurialism Urban Geography 363 385ndash402

Kaufman MT (1989) Park suspects children of discipline The New York Times 26 April [WWW document] URL httpwwwnytimescom19890426nyregionpark-suspects-children-of-disciplinehtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Kelling GK and JQ Wilson (1982) Broken windows The Atlantic 1 March [WWW document] URLhttpwwwtheatlanticcommagazinearchive198203broken-windows304465 (accessed 17 April 2015)

Koolhaas R (1978) Delirious New York a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan The Monacelli Press New York

Lewis N (2013) Ottowarsquos lethe village creating a lsquogayborhoodrsquo amidst the death of the village Geoforum 49 (October) 233ndash42

Livingstone J (Dir) (1990) Paris is burning Miramax Santa Monica CA

Manalansan IV MF (2005) Race violence and neoliberal spatial politics in the global city Social Text 2334 141ndash55

Maslin Nir S (2012) For money or just to strut living out loud on a transgender stage The New York Times 24 July [WWW document] URL httpwwwnytimescom20120725nyregionin-west-village-living-out-loud-on-a-transgender-runwayhtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Mattson G (2014) Style and the value of gay nightlife homonormative placemaking in San Francisco Urban Studies doi 1011770042098014555630

Meyer R (2006) Gay power circa 1970 visual strategies for sexual revolution GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 123 441ndash64

Mollenkopf JH and M Castells (1991) Dual city restructuring New York Russell Sage Foundation New York

Muntildeoz JE (2009) Cruising utopia the then and there of queer futurity NYU Press New York and London

Nash CJ and A Gorman-Murray (2014) LGBT neighborhoods and lsquonew mobilitiesrsquo towards understanding transformations in sexual and gendered urban landscapes International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 383 756ndash72

Nast HJ (2002) Queer patriarchies queer racisms international Antipode 345 874ndash909

Nero CI (2005) Why are the gay ghettoes white In EP Johnson and MG Henderson (eds) Black queer studies a critical anthology Durham University Press Durham NC and London

Oliver C (1980) lsquoIt was me he wantedrsquo by man who missed a date with death New York Post 21 November

Osborne D (2008) Shuttering porn shops city fakes arrests Gay City News 3 December

Osborne D (2010) Chi Chiz drug case continues but it may be moot in the end The Villager 8019 [WWW document] URL httpthevillagercomvillager_389chichizhtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Osborne D (2013) City law department says mayorrsquos office ordered video store busts Gay City News 24 April [WWW document] URL httpgaycitynewsnyccity-law-department-says-mayors-office-ordered-video-store-busts (accessed 17 April 2015)

Oswin N (2005) Researching lsquogay Cape Townrsquo finding value-added queerness Social amp Cultural Geography 64 567ndash86

Oswin N (2008) Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality deconstructing queer space Progress in Human Geography 321 89ndash103

Papayanis MA (2000) Sex and the revanchist city zoning out pornography in New York Environment and Planning D Society and Space 183 341ndash53

Patrick D (2007) On edge environment and sexuality on the west side waterfront since 1969 Senior honors thesis Metropolitan Studies New York University

Pierson R (1982) Uptight on gay news can the straight press get the gay story straight Is anyone even trying Columbia Journalism Review (MarchApril) 25ndash33

Poster D (2011) Violence on the pier Greenwich Village Block Associations News 123

Poster D and E Goldman (2005) Gay youth gone wild something has to change The Villager 7918 21ndash27 September [WWW document] URL httpthevillagercomvillager_125gayyouthgonewildhtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Puar JK (2004) Abu Ghraib arguing against exceptionalism Feminist Studies 302 522ndash34

Ranasinghe P (2012) Jane Jacobsrsquo framing of public disorder and its relation to the lsquobroken windowsrsquo theory Theoretical Criminology 161 63ndash84

Rand A (1964) The virtue of selfishness Signet New YorkRede G (2009) The stonewall riots 40 years later an

eyewitness puts to rest a few myths Oregonlivecom 27 June [WWW document] URL httpwwworegonlivecomopinionindexssf200906the_stonewall_riots_40_years_lhtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Ritchie A (2009) Testimony of Andrea J Ritchie Director Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center [WWW document] URL httpsexworkersprojectorgdownloads200920090129-swp-ccrb-testimony-arpdf (accessed 17 April 2015)

Rivera S (2013) Queen in exile the forgotten ones Street transvestite action revolutionaries survival revolt and queer antagonist struggle [WWW document] URL httpuntorellipressnoblogsorgpost20130312street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries-survival-revolt-and-queer-antagonist-struggle (accessed 17 April 2015)

Ross B and D Goldiner (2007) Pack howlsndashndashjudge wonrsquot bend Daily News 15 June [WWW document] URL httpwwwnydailynewscomnewscrimepack-howls-judge-won-bend-article-1222283 (accessed 17 April 2015)

Ruppert ES (2006) The moral economy of cities shaping good citizens University of Toronto Press Toronto

Russo V (1987) The celluloid closet homosexuality in the movies Revised edition Harper amp Row Publishers New York

Satow J (2012) Amanda Burden wants to remake New York She has 19 months left The New York Times 18 May [WWW document] URL httpwwwnytimescom20120520nyregionamanda-burden-planning-commissioner-is-remaking-new-york-cityhtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Shepard B and R Hayduk (2002) From Act Up to the WTO urban protest and community building in the era of globalization Verso London and New York

Smith N (1996) The new urban frontier gentrification and the revanchist city Routledge New York and London

Starr R (1985) The rise and fall of New York Basic Books New York

Swalec A (2011) Riot in Greenwich Village Dunkinrsquo Donuts caught on video Greenwich Village and SoHo Newsletter 23 May [WWW document] URL httpwwwdnainfocomnew-york20110523greenwich-village-sohoriot-greenwich-village-dunkin-donuts-caught-on-video (accessed 17 April 2015)

Thompson MH (2012) Clones for a queer nation George Segalrsquos gay liberation and temporality Art History 354 796ndash815

Valverde M (2011) Seeing like a city the dialectic of modern and premodern ways of seeing in urban governance Law amp Society Review 452 277ndash312

Van Meter J (2013) Madam would-be mayor Nymagcom 27 January [WWW document] URL httpnymagcom

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newsfeatureschristine-quinn-2013-2 (accessed 17 April 2015)

Walker RL (2011) Toward a FIERCE nomadology contesting queer geographies on the Christopher Street pier PhaenEx 61 90ndash120

Warner M (1993) Fear of queer planet queer politics and social theory University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis and London

Warner M (1999) The trouble with normal sex politics and the ethics of queer life Harvard University Press Cambridge MA

White E (2009) City boy my life in New York during the 1960s and 1970s Bloomsbury London

Whyte WH (1988) City rediscovering the center Bantam Doubleday Dell New York

Worth RF (2002) Tolerance in village wears thin The New York Times 19 January [WWW document] URL httpwwwnytimescom20020119nyregion19VILLhtml (accessed 17 April 2015)

Wyly E K Newman A Schafran and E Lee (2010) Displacing New York Environment and Planning A 4211 2602ndash23

JW-IJUR140012indd 283 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 266

In this article I will analyze the tensions this divide has given rise to with specific emphasis on the problematic discourses of queer youth of color as lsquowildrsquo and

lsquodisorderlyrsquo in the local media and campaigning material distributed by neighborhood groups Moreover I will illustrate how these tropes have informed the heavy-handed law enforcement in the area with police harassment of African American gay bars and frequent arrests of transwomen on prostitution-related charges The targeting of trans youth of color is especially ironic given the increased recognition of the pivotal role played by young transwomen such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson in the Stonewall uprising In contrast with the historical revisionism of the past decadesndashndashepitomized by George Segalrsquos quite literally whitewashed Stonewall memorial Gay Liberation (1980ndash92) in Christopher Parkndashndasheyewitness accounts have recently stressed that Stonewall was largely a racial minority uprising with a significant transgender contingent1 The city has also recognized this and in 2005 the ChristopherHudson street corner was renamed lsquoRivera Wayrsquo in honor of Sylvia Rivera while a 2009 marketing campaign called lsquoRainbow Pilgrimagersquo sought to attract LGBTQ tourists to New York during the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall (Chan 2009) Yet as I will illustrate these attempts to capitalize on the radical legacy of StonewallndashndashNatalie Oswinrsquos (2005) apt phrase lsquovalue-added queernessrsquo comes to mindndashndashhave taken place

1 Although there is no visual documentation of the actual demonstrations the pictures that came to define the event (Fred W McDarrahrsquos photos taken immediately after the riots and printed in the Village Voice) centered on a group of multiracial queer youths (Meyer 2006) As George Rede (2009) who covered the event for the Village Voice and helped McDarrah arrange the famous images later argued it is a myth that Stonewall was an uprising by the lsquogay communityrsquo as a whole since the rioters lsquowere mostly teenagers from Queens Long Island and New Jersey with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Sidersquo Similarly novelist and Stonewall eyewitness Edmund White (2009 51) noted that lsquoit wasnrsquot all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the ldquoA-trainersrdquo)rsquo Since then a degree of historical revisionism has set in which is arguably epitomized by George Segalrsquos Stonewall memorial Gay Liberation (1980ndash92) in Christopher Park which was commissioned 11 years after the uprising and installed 12 years after it was commissioned in 1992 As Margo Hobbs Thompson (2012 804ndash6) recently noted the lsquofigures white middle-class and thirty-something do not represent the composition of the crowd who resisted the police raid at the Stonewall Innrsquo

Gramercy

Chelsea

West Village

Greenwich VillageEast Village

Soho

Little Italy

Financial District

0 2000 4000ft

figure 1 Location of the West Village in Manhattan

JW-IJUR140012indd 266 290515 553 PM








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ANDERSSON 274






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ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



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ANDERSSON 268







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ANDERSSON 274






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JW-IJUR140012indd 275 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






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ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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ANDERSSON 282














































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ANDERSSON 268







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JW-IJUR140012indd 269 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 270





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ANDERSSON 272






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ANDERSSON 274






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ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






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ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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ANDERSSON 270





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ANDERSSON 272






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ANDERSSON 274






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ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



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ANDERSSON 274






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ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






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ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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ANDERSSON 282














































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ANDERSSON 272






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ANDERSSON 274






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ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






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ANDERSSON 282














































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ANDERSSON 272






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ANDERSSON 274






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JW-IJUR140012indd 275 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






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ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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JW-IJUR140012indd 281 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 282














































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JW-IJUR140012indd 283 290515 553 PM






JW-IJUR140012indd 273 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 274






JW-IJUR140012indd 274 290515 553 PM







JW-IJUR140012indd 275 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






JW-IJUR140012indd 277 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 278








JW-IJUR140012indd 278 290515 553 PM







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ANDERSSON 280





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JW-IJUR140012indd 281 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 282














































JW-IJUR140012indd 282 290515 553 PM










JW-IJUR140012indd 283 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 274






JW-IJUR140012indd 274 290515 553 PM







JW-IJUR140012indd 275 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






JW-IJUR140012indd 277 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 278








JW-IJUR140012indd 278 290515 553 PM







JW-IJUR140012indd 279 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 280





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JW-IJUR140012indd 281 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 282














































JW-IJUR140012indd 282 290515 553 PM










JW-IJUR140012indd 283 290515 553 PM







JW-IJUR140012indd 275 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






JW-IJUR140012indd 277 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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ANDERSSON 282














































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JW-IJUR140012indd 283 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 276





Aven

ue o

f the

Am

eric

as

Wes

t St

reet

Was

hing

ton

Stre

et

Hud

son

Stre

et

Christopher Street

Wes

t 4th

Str

eet

West 10th Street

Ble

ecke

r St

reet

7th A

venu

e

0 400 800ft

The RamrodChi Chiz



JW-IJUR140012indd 276 290515 553 PM






JW-IJUR140012indd 277 290515 553 PM

ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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ANDERSSON 282














































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ANDERSSON 278








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ANDERSSON 280





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ANDERSSON 282














































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‘WILDING’ IN THE WEST VILLAGE: Queer Space, Racism and Jane Jacobs Hagiography

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Transcript of ‘WILDING’ IN THE WEST VILLAGE: Queer Space, Racism and Jane Jacobs Hagiography