Irish writer Maeve Brennan wrote about the demolishment of culture in 1960s New York. Photo: Getty Images
In the late 1960s, the transformation of Greenwich Village into a tourist attraction ended up commercialising nearby streets in New York, including West Eighth Street.
Sitting at a restaurant window, the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who wrote features for the New Yorker, observed the changed neighbourhood, the razing of some of its oldest houses, its vanished art gallery.
She was most saddened by the disappearance of the street’s bookshop, which had to relocate due to high rents. “Even if you bought nothing, you came out much better off than you were when you went in,” she wrote, in her article “West Eighth Street has Changed and Changed”.
It’s as if the bookshop was more than a local business where goods could be bought. It was somewhere to purposefully do nothing but browse, to pick up a book and allow time for thoughts to form. Visitors could do something for the sake of doing it, as opposed to just purchasing and consuming. Without the bookshop, the street itself seemed unhitched, its future uncertain.
I’ve been thinking of that image of Brennan, looking out the restaurant window at a grim vacant lot across the street, while walking past construction sites in Dublin, and mourning the popular venues that have been destroyed. Andrew’s Lane Theatre and the Tivoli Theatre were demolished by developers to build hotels, as was The Complex. (The latter has found new premises on Arran Street, at least). Theatre Upstairs, a venue dedicated to new writing, announced its closure last year, a couple of months before the sad death of director Karl Shiels.
Last week, a new planning notice went up on Smithfield Square at the former site of Block T. In 2016, the cultural hub had to vacate this premises because its model was “no longer viable in the growing market”. The notice seeks to build office floors and a restaurant.
Even though Block T found another site on Basin View, its steel and concrete performance space was left behind in Smithfield, and, for that iteration of the company, its destruction now seems complete.
The increasing disappearance of venues, against a backdrop of insurmountable rents, makes artists’ lives even more precarious. Last year, a National Campaign for the Arts survey found that 72% of artists earn less than the minimum wage and don’t have a pension. The lively theatre company Collapsing Horse has closed, and it's shuddering to think others will follow.
To ease the burden, a government could act on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar's promise to double arts funding by 2025, which would increase the Arts Council’s budget to €135m. Currently, Irish government spending per GDP is lower than any other country in Europe.
In the 2019 budget, €1.25m of new funds was allocated to the Arts Council. The figure would have needed to be €13.5m to keep on track with the Taoiseach's commitment.
As a general election looms, several political parties have promised that increase in funding that the Fine Gael government fell behind on delivering. But not all seem able to articulate how penurious the current rate of spending is in comparison to other European countries.
In their manifestos, both the Green Party and the Social Democrats have promised to create a detailed "roadmap” to bring Irish funding in line with average EU spending in five years. People Before Profit has also announced an increase of funding to the European average.
In Brennan’s articles about the reshaping of New York in the late 1960s, there is usually some depiction of art. When she looks down from her hotel window and laments the transformation of Broadway from a community neighbourhood to a shabby entertainment centre, she observes a trombonist playing with flourish on the roof of a nearby building. But the crowd below are too “deafened by the Broadway din” to hear him.
There is a sense of a version of the city that should be in place - a city that’s musical, arresting, transforming people’s moods - but isn’t.
Seeing the effects of unchecked development, the barriers it creates between city inhabitants and the art that gets made, the planning notices on the former sites of arts centres, it’s hard to shake an unsettling feeling. These could be the early signs of walking around a cultural ghost town.
No comments:
Post a Comment