New York’s Food Halls Suck
The food hall’s victims are not only difference and eccentricity, but the city itself.
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The Insipid City
Food halls have spread far and wide, deflavorizing neighborhoods every step of the way.
by Aaron Timms
It’s been said that we live in the age of asset management capitalism, in an asset management society. Owned and operated, with only minor exceptions, for the benefit of a single undifferentiated bloc of money managers and developers, New York’s food halls embody a set of aesthetic and behavioral preferences that reveal a distinct and increasingly influential asset manager culture. Not all development is bad, of course; in the midst of a socially ruinous housing crisis development is even vital. But food halls reflect a very particular cultural agenda, and this agenda has nothing to do with access or equality or any of the other progressive shibboleths developers reach for when trying to demonstrate the civic utility of what they do. Local Culture Management, as the ghoulishly named company that operates Dekalb Market Hall suggests, is indeed what food halls are all about—but there is nothing local about the culture they imprint on their neighborhoods. Localism, with its suggestion of regionality and specificity, is anathema to the regime of the food hall: the point of food halls is to eradicate difference, to secure the city as an asset class through the imposition of a bland uniformity.
As the cranks and kooks get swept away, the streets are straightened out, and new condos rise high over the East River, New York has begun to look more and more like Washington, DC. Food halls are now an important part of this sanitization project, offering a form for the replication and standardization of taste across the city. No matter how adventurous its food (and to be fair, it’s not all bad) or raucous its clientele, the food hall always acts as a social deflavorizer.
Make Politics, Not Art
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. How to Build a Pipeline is no different.
by Sam Kriss
Like most people, I started planning my first terrorist atrocity around the age of twelve. Back then, the plan was to blow up the Bank of England, which I understood to be the epicenter of the entire capitalist system: so crucial, in fact, that simply igniting some fertilizer around the place would immediately blast us all out of the current of history and into a glorious new world. The plan for getting my bomb into the building was less clear-cut. I thought I might study economics, apply for a job there, and sneak the bomb in during my interview. But that would take about a decade—I didn’t want to wait that long. I needed to do it now. I nursed happy visions of the whole building collapsing in a cloud of limestone dust, broken masonry, and screams. If you’d asked me why I was so certain that violent means were necessary, I’m not sure I would have understood the question. People were dying every day; animals, plants, ecosystems—the planet was dying. How could anyone just sit there and do nothing? The sheer state of everything seemed to invite violence all by itself; the only sensible response to an obviously dysfunctional reality was to make bits of it explode.
As it turns out, economics and explosives both pose significant challenges. Writing about art is easier.
Nimble, Accountable, Tangible
NYRA talks to Boston mayor Michelle Wu about the Green New Deal and her fondness for brutalism.
In September 2021, NYRA contributor Dan Jonas-Roche spoke to Michelle Wu about her Boston mayoral run. Two months later, Wu took office in City Hall. Prompted about her thoughts on the divisive brutalist landmark, she had this to say:
I love the building that I have the honor to work in. I’ve realized over the years, however, that not everyone shares my deep love for not just what happens inside the building, but also the architecture. The other mayoral candidates and I were in an interview with a local media outlet awhile back about our views of Boston City Hall, where I said that I would be willing to fight anyone who disagrees with my assessment of how amazing and beautiful the building is or to take them on a tour. Unfortunately, there were way too many people who disagreed with me to do individual tours.
Read the rest of the interview here.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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