And really, a bit of perspective is in order amid the general bemoaning about the decline of affordable housing in New York: Anyone who thinks bohemia always involved great safe cheap housing needs to go back through the collected film works of No Wave cinema in the city. The safe affordable housing neighborhood of the Basquiat era of bohemian Manhattan, for example, looked like this.

By the mid-1970s, New York was nearly bankrupt. Large parts of it took on a bombed out appearance. People carved new bohemias out of neighborhoods that looked like today's Detroit, but worse, because of crack, heroin, and epidemic crime. Some of the causes of New York's decline were the same as those that have created today's Detroit; the fact of the matter was that the NYC of that era was shrinking, losing more than 800,000 residents between 1970 and 1980.



Flash forward two decades: There is a reason "low-rent" remained the byword for low quality. I remember going to people's places on Avenue D back in the day where they had those police locks with the giant bar that braced the door against the floor of their half-renovated loft space. Enormous 4th and 6th floor walk-ups in Tribeca that were $500 or $750/month, sure, but you had to put the kitchen and lighting in yourself. Lower East Side apartments with walls so thin you could hear neighbors pissing, and crazy supers you couldn't talk to without a knife behind your back, just in case. East Village railroad flats with bathtubs in the middle of the kitchens, because of the odd plumbing configurations that were common there. A "posh tenement apartment" -- that's what the ad said -- with the original gas lamp piping still in place, extending up the walls from where the gas flowed into the stove to aged pipe-caps in the ceiling you always worried maybe didn't fit quite right going on a century later.



I think people used to have lower standards for housing and for safety, and the housing laws were enforced more lightly.



Even where my folks now live -- the heart of the hyper-gentrified West Village, across the street from some of the most expensive apartments in lower Manhattan -- wasn't always so safe and so clean. Midday two Sundays ago Marc Jacobs jumped out of a Bentley and dashed passed me into Barbuto, where I'd just had brunch with my parents. He owns one of those new $10.5 million townhouses directly across the street from my folks that developers put up after tearing down the ink factory whose smokestacks anchored the view from my Westbeth window as a child, and whose beeping, backing-up trucks loading their haul daily punctuated my early morning sleep. When the first wave of artists moved in (my parents among them), before the city tore down the old collapsing West Side Elevated Highway, it was sketch over by the Hudson River. I remember seeing the hookers coming off their shifts when I was going to elementary school, done up in their miniskirts and rabbit fur jackets. Transvestite prostitutes -- and the johns who trolled the streets for them -- were a part of the neighborhood a few blocks north, along with the stench of rotting meat. Blood actually used to run in the streets of Manhattan's meatpacking district when it was still a dismemberment zone, and great big beef carcasses hung from awning loading zones on hooks. My brother worked in one of those meat factories one summer to help pay his way through Columbia. My sister sewed ribbons by hand onto pointe shoes for money when she was training to be a ballerina until her fingers were as calloused and pricked as her feet, before switching direction and going into the sciences. That's how the kids of artists lived when artists could afford to live in that neighborhood outside of the few low-rent pockets where they still, like my parents, remain. And they (we) went to public schools.



Years later I went to college with several of the N+1 founders. Perhaps we simply studied different things, but I do not recall any promises of the fantasy world they posit as an ideal in their article, where you can be bourgeois and artistic and bohemian and have no inherited money and no involvement with a boring straight job all at the same time, and the whole thing is a reliable enterprise in which everyone succeeds financially, and manages to change the world in some fundamental fashion on top of that, while still giving their children a comfortable life. Their complaints are far larger than one about the New York housing market, or the academy, as well -- they are about the relation of the intellectual and the artist to society, about the lack of recognition except by "the Happy Few." But the art and literary worlds have always been a total crap shoot, and far too many artists and writers reach old age as impoverished and unknown as when they began. There is nothing new in the failure of that dare. Even those who have one wonderful glorious moment of fame and fortune are rarely set, because a moment is not a life, and life is longer than most forms of renown these days.



T.S. Eliot worked as a banker. Wallace Stevens was an insurance company vice president. There are others who have carved memorable careers out of evenings and weekends. But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live.



I'm not saying any of this is good, only that it is hardly new. This great New York Times piece on Gabby Hoffman growing up in the Chelsea Hotel illustrates perfectly the great class disruption of life in bohemia, where high culture meets low incomes.