Ch-scene Digest, Vol 16, Issue 23

Allen, Richard RAllen at WWNORTON.com
Wed Feb 23 16:15:56 EST 2005


Right now in Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, NYC, clubs are being shut down because investment bankers are buying apartments in what they see as "hot" "hip" "underpriced" (to them) neighborhoods, then complaining about the very things that create hotness and hipness in those neighborhoods, i.e. the nightclubs. 

People with money (I would say yuppies except that the term is meaningless now) buy near clubs because they imagine a fun atmosphere which will offset the drabness of their lives. Then they have a kid and get livid because the booming bass 10 blocks away wakes the baby, which cries all night. Then the yuppies (so to speak, we're all whores here) can't get enough sleep to slog through their 80 hour a week jobs, and they march down to City Hall. They own property and pay a lot of taxes, so they always win in the end. 

If you put 100 apartments atop the Cat's Cradle, I guarantee one of the buyers is going to have a problem with the music within 2 years of the apartments going on the market, and there will be big problems. 

Another consideration: this development sounds vaguely like the Reston Town Center, scourge of my hometown (if by scourge one means the sort of place one hates and everyone else loves) - a fake downtown area which looks and feels like a movie set. Sounds like a good compromise on paper but is entirely prefab and gross in real life. Carrboro is a small town, not a suburb in need of a fake downtown where "Freedom Street" meets "Democracy Drive."

for reference:
http://www.restontowncenter.com/popmap.html

RA




Message: 14
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:06:39 -0500
From: grady <grady at ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: cradle & arts center move
To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene at lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <421CAA0F.80808 at ibiblio.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

Heh. I hope they read the "First Person" thing in last week's Indy by 
the lady who moved into Downtown Durham expecting it to be silent as a 
fucking tomb, all about how upset she is that there's a club in Downtown 
Durham that makes noise after dark.

And while I sure as shit wouldn't want to live anywhere near a club, 
especially one with booming bass, that's one reason why I bought several 
acres of land in the country & built a house smack in the middle of it. 
Rather than, you know, buying a building right in the middle of a 
downtown commercial district & then moving into it.

I said this when Christa posted the previous info, and I'll say it 
again: I predict hasslements from people moving into the 
apartment/condos in this development if there is *any* noise after 10:00 
p.m. from either the Cradle, the ArtsCenter, or the new outdoor 
amphitheater between them.

I love the idea of mixed-use developments and people living above 
commercial space, but it may be harder than people imagine to quickly 
make the transition from a suburban/small-town headspace to a more 
urban/mixed-use headspace. Certainly the person who wrote the piece in 
the Indy seemed to have *no* room in her headspace for the notion that a 
downtown area might be noisy after dark.

Ross



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