A series of related stories will sometimes cross the web-wires that we watch for Qnews without any obvious tie-in -- no book tour on the subject, no national news item to provide a hook for the local stories.
So it was last weekend when at least three daily papers ran stories about apparently unrelated local events, but with a common theme: gay neighborhoods that flowered in the 70s or 80s are now withering.
In Dallas, the Morning News recorded the likely passing at the end of the year of a gay bookstore in the city's Crossroads neighborhood.
Opened as a junk store on Dec. 5, 1980, Crossroads Market initially functioned as much as a community center as a business enterprise.
Its founders included a who's-who of early Dallas gay leaders including William Waybourn, Craig Spaulding, Terry Tebedo, Bill Nelson and Mr. Johnson.
"It became a safe place where people could go and discuss issues. We had an area in the back for political meetings," said Mr. Waybourn, who later became owner of the Washington Blade, the nation's premier gay newspaper.
It was in the back room that Mr. Nelson decided to run for Dallas City Council, the first viable openly gay candidate to do so, Mr. Waybourn said. After the AIDS epidemic struck, the AIDS Resource Center was born in the Crossroads Market, as was the AIDS Food Bank.
The Market was, the News notes, "a place to mingle."
In Dallas -- as in Seattle and cities throughout the country -- it is places to mingle that are being lost as short-lived gay neighborhoods give way to new demographic trends and real-estate imperatives.
In Seattle last weekend, it was the impending demolition of a block of tacky low-rise buildings on Pine St that gave rise to a series of stories on the changing nature of Capitol Hill. [see Qnews summary]
The one-storey buildings with cheap storefront spaces will be replaced by a higher, denser residential development -- something the city and that neighborhood have generally encouraged. Lost, however, will be the cheap commercial spaces where a local entrepreneur could try his or her hand at creating "a place to mingle."
manray, with its Clockwork Orange interior is gone. So too is the brief reign of Pony. Kincora, too, and Busstop which was never a "gay bar" in the classic sense, but still offered a comfortable "third place" for many gay men.
The block of cheap and tacky storefronts will give way to an expensive but, apparently still tacky condo building with blank spaces on the bottom where those bars once flourished. The suburban developer of the condo block has indicated that he won't be renting those retail spaces to a bar even if someone were willing to pay the high rents for the spaces.
Once the new condo is built there, East Pine will offer a very different experience to those strolling through the neighborhood. The suburban tract housing developers who are putting up the new building seem to think they'll be improving the area with their new building. Most of all, the developers seem to know what they don't want for the part of the neighborhood they now own -- and that's the kind of vibrant and sometimes noisy that's developed in the block over the past couple of decades.
The Boston Globe last weekend offered a great feature article by Robert David Sullivan, "Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life". Sullivan describes the process that has been repeated in Boston, Seattle, Dallas and other American cities:
When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties.
But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.
One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.
To sell their new condos on East Pine in Seattle, the developers appear to think they must create for their potential buyers the kind of sterile, empty, and therefore "safe" environments that they create for buyers of their suburban houses.
Bars, with their late-night hours and sometimes boisterous crowds don't fit the suburban model. And so -- for this one developer at least -- they'll be banished from the block.
In the Globe, Sullivan reflects on what it means for Boston to lose so many of its gay bars:
The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."
In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.
This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.
Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.
It's difficult to create a "third place". Starbucks tries and occasionally succeeds in some of their many locations. Changing demographics alter the character even of the "third place" that manages to survive:
[S]ocial and political acceptance helped end Oak Lawn's status as the city's signature gay neighborhood, a trend that has affected such enclaves across the country.
Greenwich Village long ago lost its image as a predominantly gay neighborhood, a phenomenon repeated in San Francisco's Castro District, along Chicago's North Halsted Street and around Washington's DuPont Circle.
A report released last month by the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, documented the declining importance of the older gay enclaves.
The greatest growth in the number of same-sex couples over the past two decades, it found, were in parts of the Midwest, Mountain and Southwestern states that were long considered socially conservative – among them, Fort Worth.
Oak Lawn has been affected by the Uptown boom, with many of its inexpensive apartments replaced by upscale condominiums. Young mainstream professionals -- less concerned than previous generations about the stigma of living in a gay neighborhood -- have moved in.
Meanwhile, many of Oak Lawn's longtime gay and lesbian residents have left, sometimes priced out of the market, and sometimes leaving voluntarily for suburbs they no longer consider hostile. [DMN]
But Sullivan points out in the Globe that an even more important factor has contributed to the shrinking of gay establishments in major cities:
Perhaps the most important change, however, is the Internet. When Internet access became widespread in the mid-1990s, gay chat rooms on America Online and other subscription services quickly attracted a crowd. More elaborate sites such as Gay.com quickly followed, usurping gay bars' most important function: a place for men to meet each other.
At the time of the Stonewall riots, "gay people had to go out to a bar to meet other gay men," at least if they didn't want to go to more dangerous cruising areas such as parks and men's rooms, says Michael Bronski, Dartmouth College professor and author of "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom."
There are several gay chat sites where a month's membership can cost as little as the price of one cocktail at Club Cafe - and on a recent Saturday night, one of them listed nearly 600 Boston-area members online. The site claims 600,000 members nationwide.
As a result of these changes, there are stories of gay bars closing all over the country. Since the early '90s, New York has lost its two biggest leather bars (the Spike and the Lure), as well as piano bars (the Five Oaks and Pegasus) and martini lounges (the popular but short-lived Hell). In Laguna Beach, Calif., the first city in America to elect an openly gay mayor, one of the two biggest gay bars closed this spring, and the other has been purchased by a developer who wants to tear it down. And the oldest gay bar in Pittsburgh (ironically, the setting for the TV series "Queer as Folk") closed earlier this year, after Carnegie Mellon University purchased its building. [Globe]
It is to high-tech workers at places like Microsoft and Amazon that the developers of many condos market their buildings. But the work they do at their various companies contributes to making the neighborhoods where they will live less interesting.
Still though, some developers recognize the value of a noisy complicated neighborhood to their work. Unlike their fellow developers on E. Pine, the developers of several blocks on 12th Ave. between E. Pike and E. Madison have said they aim to create a new sense of urban vitality in the micro-neighborhood they're building from what were once warehouses and car dealerships. They've invited restaurants and retail stores like Pacific Supply hardware store into their new and refurbished buildings.
If it survives its unrelated financial troubles, the LGBT Community Center would find itself in a vastly different and more vibrant neighborhood next year because of all the development around it.
It is a tough challenge to build a new urban neighborhood. It's admirable, however, that at least a few of the developers on Capitol Hill are trying to maintain the spirit of the neighborhood for their new residents.
Like Crossroads in Dallas and the South End in Boston, the gay neighborhood here, Capitol Hill, had but a brief flowering in that role. The first gay bar in the area -- The Elite -- didn't open until the 1970s. But by 2005, organizers of the town's gay pride parade were eager to abandon the neighborhood because they felt it was too restrictive for their idea of a celebration. They felt they would be better able to market their by-then commercial celebration if they moved it away from the urban distractions of Capitol Hill's bars and gay businesses.
The E. Pine developers show the same kind of contempt for what the neighborhood they've moved into briefly became and -- like the Pride producers -- hope to replace it with something they insist could only be better. Those developers seek to blot out 'urban vitality' from their project in favor of a 'suburban contentment' with which they're more familiar.
But there's a risk in this -- in building density that aims to recreate suburban isolation and 'privacy'. Suburbs force a certain interaction among neighbors whether it's caused by an errant lawn sprinkler or a wandered pet. Even if there's no interaction, one generally at least sees one's neighbors occasionally.
Despite living in closer proximity, on the other hand, urban mid-rise and high-rise condos and apartments offer greater isolation from neighbors. Apartment neighbors who share a wall are less likely than house-neighbors who share a fence to see one another and share a few pleasantries.
It was, in the past, the "third place" -- areas outside of the stacked homes that translated that isolation into interaction. But if the internet has usurped the economics of the "third place" business model, what is to provide the glue for the new neighborhoods developers are building in large cities?
Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.
Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.
Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.
This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function." [Globe]
The gay neighborhood in Seattle is changing just as similar neighborhoods throughout the country are changing. Capitol Hill will feel like a different place in then years, just as it's character today is different than it was a decade ago.
It's changing, and that's a good thing because it means that the neighborhood isn't stagnant and rotting. But the changes -- especially these quick changes -- could also be dangerous if too much of the area's prior organically-developed character is ripped out.
I hope the the East Pine developers fail in their attempt to bring Issaquah Highlands to Seattle and that the developers of the 12th Ave. properties succeed in their attempt to will a vibrant urban micro-neighborhood into existence. It will be a better city for us all if they succeed.
