Joni Mitchell Quotes

I lived on Thompson Street in SoHo for 13 years and I watched it go from a little Italian neighborhood to the Mall Of America. Then the obvious fact that it's pre-Internet, pre-cell phone. Everyone I think thinks their youth is a more innocent time. I just don't know.

Sometimes, I feel that Manhattan in particular has gotten really tame and gentrified or something.

I'm not dismissing prostitutes, but a lot has changed. This so-called gentrification, it can never be stopped.

The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone.

I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.

I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.

You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

At least Manhattan, in terms of danger and eccentricity, is much more of a theme park now. You couldn't really shoot the old Law & Order in New York today. It's a different city.

It's not just NYU. There are days when I feel like I'm stranded in some upscale mall in Pasadena. Don't even get me started on the insidious transformation of Bleecker Street!

I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.

When I was young, there were bars called the 'Hungry Hole,' and in those same neighbourhoods are now gay people pushing baby carriages.

I love San Francisco more than any other city outside of Seattle, but I've seen it go from a vibrant, creative community to a playground for tech bros.

I used to walk in the Bowery in the early 1980s, and it was not safe. It went from this to Disneyland under Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is now one of the best-run big cities in the world.

I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

I think Giuliani started a trend that Bloomberg continued with rampant gentrification, and I think it's tough because why would any city choose not to do that?

I've done my part to 'ruin' Austin.

Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. And the soul of New York has moved to Brooklyn, where everything new and exciting seems to be.

I do not resent Sarah Jessica Parker. We've been friends for decades. I just do not like what 'Sex and the City' did to my neighborhood.