Jessica Hagedorn Quotes

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

It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.

People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

Gentrification and consumerism... have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen.

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

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

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

I go out in New York, and I think, boy, you can look at someone and pretty much determine their zip code. Everyone seems to want to conform. I wonder, are they all just button-pressers, on the Internet all day long? I don't know.

Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

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.

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

I always had this notion of a noir novel in Galway. The city is exploding, emigration has reversed, and we are fast becoming a cosmopolitan city.

In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.

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

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I've grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn't bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well.

I like Toronto a lot, it's a good city. The only thing that really annoys me about Toronto is that you're turning Maple Leaf Gardens into a grocery store, which is absolutely nothing short of disgusting.

What is Southern California but an ever-changing dreamscape backdrop for the postmodern ideal? The psychology of the postmodern world is the continual state of change as we live in its idealist manufactured dream, built by developers.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

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

My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.

These are such First World problems, but there's a certain claustrophobia to New York. You don't escape in the East Village, but it at least feels full of camaraderie and youth - or full of camaraderie and youth in an East Village that is as full of Chase banks and Starbucks as the Upper West Side, or anywhere else in Manhattan.