Review: The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980, by Aaron Shkuda, and The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, by Brian D. Goldstein

Abstract

Aaron Shkuda The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 320 pp., 23 b/w illus. $45.00, ISBN 9780226334189 Brian D. Goldstein The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017, 400 pp., 40 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780674971509 Gentrification has been one of the most controversial and problematic urban developments of the past fifty years. It has benefited cash-strapped central-city governments in need of wealthier taxpayers and higher assessed property values but has proved a bane to lower-income residents who can no longer afford the rent in their gentrifying neighborhoods and feel increasingly out of place among the invading hordes of young professionals. Nowhere has this dilemma of gain and loss been more evident than in New York City. During the 1970s commentators bewailed New York's impending bankruptcy and rampant housing abandonment; the South Bronx was a burned-out ruin eliciting comparisons with Berlin at the close of World War II. Thirty years later, reporters told of the transformation of once-empty shells into upscale town houses, of hyperinflated housing values, and of an unabated influx of the rich and hip to Gotham's inner city. New York had seemingly quick-changed from a basket case to a treasure chest, with accompanying gains to city coffers and real estate moguls and losses to the displaced poor. In The Lofts of SoHo and The Roots of Urban Renaissance , Aaron Shkuda and Brian D. Goldstein explore the origins of this transformation in two famed New York neighborhoods. Shkuda addresses the early history of gentrification in Lower Manhattan's SoHo district, whereas Goldstein delves deeply into the recent history of Harlem. Although only seven miles apart on the small island of Manhattan, the two neighborhoods and their histories are quite different. Yet they are both part of the story of New York gentrification, and the authors ably describe their often difficult and complicated progress toward community revitalization. In the 1950s, as Shkuda relates, SoHo was a district of aging factory lofts that accommodated small manufacturing concerns employing many minority workers. Its multistory late nineteenth-century buildings …