Kris
January 3rd, 2004, 11:11 PM
January 4, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Make the Street Fair Less Generic
By BRIAN LEHRER
The political battle over vendors the city doesn't want on its streets got me to thinking about those it apparently does — the ones who populate those ubiquitous street fairs. You know the kind I mean — the ones with the close-out underwear, the $5 sunglasses, the butter-drowned corn on the cob. Over the past 20 years, these fairs have multiplied like discount drugstores along Manhattan thoroughfares.
So much so, in fact, that the city, which last year temporarily capped permits for multiblock fairs at 270 annually, now plans to make the cap permanent. That already allows you to attend an average of two fairs every three days. Officials say the city cannot afford to pay any more overtime for the officers they deploy on the sausages and fruit shakes beat.
Such a cap may well be wise, given New York's current resources. But we also need to stop and rethink what street fairs have turned into. Sadly, they have come to represent the triumph of commerce over culture, the marginalization of community in the name of community. Not to mention what they do to traffic.
Once upon a time, street fairs were an expression of the streets they were on. Find a New Yorker of a certain age eating a street fair funnel cake, and he's likely to wax nostalgic about a bygone era of homegrown street culture. Maybe it was a block party on West 107th Street, or the legendary 52nd Street Festival.
The sponsors were usually block or neighborhood associations, and the goals were to enable neighbors to meet one another and raise money. On some blocks, just the act of partying outside helped put drug dealers on notice that they would not own the streets forever. Then, the fairs were actually destinations. Today, you just run into them. Maybe you buy the souvlaki, maybe you don't. But they are as standardized and dreary as a suburban mall.
What happened? Essentially, a good thing got out of hand. By the 1990's, block associations and other nonprofit groups realized tens of thousands of dollars could be made. The city also gets a cut based on vendor fees — a total of about $10 million since 1995, it says. Professional promoters got into the act, and recruited more nonprofits. Cheap imported crafts and clothing from Ecuador and India came to replace locally made wares. New York artists and clothing designers fled to higher-end crafts fairs and flea markets because they couldn't compete.
Which raises the question: if street fairs are so awful, why do they do so well? In Midtown, tourists are the main reason — New York tchotchkes cheap. As for us locals, the funny thing is I know almost no one who claims to like the fairs, yet everyone seems to go. I, for one, am a sucker for that corn. Once, I even bought one of those big pairs of sunglasses that fit over my regular glasses. They had me feeling darn good about life for about five minutes, until I spotted myself in a mirror. Oh, the shame.
At a time when money is in short supply for nonprofits, it's hard to get too worked up about the social cost of revenue-generating street fairs. But this is New York. We're supposed to care about creativity and commerce. And we can have both.
In fact, some fairs already do. One held by the 92nd Street Y highlights Jewish-themed vendors. The Earth Day fair promotes environmental themes. The Ninth Avenue International Food Festival celebrates local restaurants and people. But there's a downside that keeps those fairs to a minimum, says one promoter, candidly: "More work, same buck."
The problem with a cap is that it threatens to perpetuate all this mediocrity. City policy puts seniority first in choosing among permit applications. That means today's fairs will be tomorrow's fairs will be forever's fairs. Jonathan Greenspun, commissioner of the Community Assistance Unit, which grants the permits, says the city must take a hands-off policy toward their content, asserting that it would be as unconstitutional to judge their quality as it would for government "to favor Manet over Monet."
The East Village is a case in point. One of the city's best street fairs last year was the first annual Howl! Festival, along St. Marks Place. It was vibrant with local artists and activities. Its organizers, the Federation of East Village Artists, bypassed the commercial promoters, relying instead on fund-raising and corporate sponsors. Next year, they want to do more. But the cap would forbid it.
Yet the city does make other value judgments. It insists that sponsors be based in the neighborhood. That's good. And government at all levels does judge art — take grants, for example. Must our streets belong to tube sock vendors until the end of time because of seniority? Sponsors could do more, too, by reserving spots for local or inventive material and by partly subsidizing young artists.
As street fairs once helped reclaim blocks, the blocks should now save the fairs from themselves. Today, they are just another cog in the economy, posing as part of the neighborhood. They should be at least partly about the streets they are on. Today, like "Seinfeld," they are about nothing.
Brian Lehrer is a talk-show host on WNYC radio in New York.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Make the Street Fair Less Generic
By BRIAN LEHRER
The political battle over vendors the city doesn't want on its streets got me to thinking about those it apparently does — the ones who populate those ubiquitous street fairs. You know the kind I mean — the ones with the close-out underwear, the $5 sunglasses, the butter-drowned corn on the cob. Over the past 20 years, these fairs have multiplied like discount drugstores along Manhattan thoroughfares.
So much so, in fact, that the city, which last year temporarily capped permits for multiblock fairs at 270 annually, now plans to make the cap permanent. That already allows you to attend an average of two fairs every three days. Officials say the city cannot afford to pay any more overtime for the officers they deploy on the sausages and fruit shakes beat.
Such a cap may well be wise, given New York's current resources. But we also need to stop and rethink what street fairs have turned into. Sadly, they have come to represent the triumph of commerce over culture, the marginalization of community in the name of community. Not to mention what they do to traffic.
Once upon a time, street fairs were an expression of the streets they were on. Find a New Yorker of a certain age eating a street fair funnel cake, and he's likely to wax nostalgic about a bygone era of homegrown street culture. Maybe it was a block party on West 107th Street, or the legendary 52nd Street Festival.
The sponsors were usually block or neighborhood associations, and the goals were to enable neighbors to meet one another and raise money. On some blocks, just the act of partying outside helped put drug dealers on notice that they would not own the streets forever. Then, the fairs were actually destinations. Today, you just run into them. Maybe you buy the souvlaki, maybe you don't. But they are as standardized and dreary as a suburban mall.
What happened? Essentially, a good thing got out of hand. By the 1990's, block associations and other nonprofit groups realized tens of thousands of dollars could be made. The city also gets a cut based on vendor fees — a total of about $10 million since 1995, it says. Professional promoters got into the act, and recruited more nonprofits. Cheap imported crafts and clothing from Ecuador and India came to replace locally made wares. New York artists and clothing designers fled to higher-end crafts fairs and flea markets because they couldn't compete.
Which raises the question: if street fairs are so awful, why do they do so well? In Midtown, tourists are the main reason — New York tchotchkes cheap. As for us locals, the funny thing is I know almost no one who claims to like the fairs, yet everyone seems to go. I, for one, am a sucker for that corn. Once, I even bought one of those big pairs of sunglasses that fit over my regular glasses. They had me feeling darn good about life for about five minutes, until I spotted myself in a mirror. Oh, the shame.
At a time when money is in short supply for nonprofits, it's hard to get too worked up about the social cost of revenue-generating street fairs. But this is New York. We're supposed to care about creativity and commerce. And we can have both.
In fact, some fairs already do. One held by the 92nd Street Y highlights Jewish-themed vendors. The Earth Day fair promotes environmental themes. The Ninth Avenue International Food Festival celebrates local restaurants and people. But there's a downside that keeps those fairs to a minimum, says one promoter, candidly: "More work, same buck."
The problem with a cap is that it threatens to perpetuate all this mediocrity. City policy puts seniority first in choosing among permit applications. That means today's fairs will be tomorrow's fairs will be forever's fairs. Jonathan Greenspun, commissioner of the Community Assistance Unit, which grants the permits, says the city must take a hands-off policy toward their content, asserting that it would be as unconstitutional to judge their quality as it would for government "to favor Manet over Monet."
The East Village is a case in point. One of the city's best street fairs last year was the first annual Howl! Festival, along St. Marks Place. It was vibrant with local artists and activities. Its organizers, the Federation of East Village Artists, bypassed the commercial promoters, relying instead on fund-raising and corporate sponsors. Next year, they want to do more. But the cap would forbid it.
Yet the city does make other value judgments. It insists that sponsors be based in the neighborhood. That's good. And government at all levels does judge art — take grants, for example. Must our streets belong to tube sock vendors until the end of time because of seniority? Sponsors could do more, too, by reserving spots for local or inventive material and by partly subsidizing young artists.
As street fairs once helped reclaim blocks, the blocks should now save the fairs from themselves. Today, they are just another cog in the economy, posing as part of the neighborhood. They should be at least partly about the streets they are on. Today, like "Seinfeld," they are about nothing.
Brian Lehrer is a talk-show host on WNYC radio in New York.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company