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Dilemmas of the Nightlife Fix : Post-industrialisation and the Gentrification of Nightlife in New York City
Laam Hae Urban Stud 2011 48: 3449 originally published online 11 April 2011 DOI: 10.1177/0042098011400772 The online version of this article can be found at: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/48/16/3449

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48(16) 34493465, December 2011

Dilemmas of the Nightlife Fix: Post-industrialisation and the Gentrification of Nightlife in New York City
Laam Hae
[Paper first received, June 2009; in final form, November 2010]

Abstract In recent years, nightlife has been increasingly recognised as an important resource for the enhancement of the post-industrial profile of the city and for the promotion of gentrification in derelict neighbourhoods. It projects an image of a vibrant social and cultural life, considered particularly appealing to the young professional labour force of post-industrial sectors, the members of whom are particularly apt to consider moving to the city. However, the advocates of this nightlife fix thesis ignore tensions that have emerged between residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods and nightlife businesses due to the nuisance effects of the latter. Using the example of New York City, this paper examines how conflicts over nightlife in gentrifying neighbourhoods have resulted in the gentrification of nightlife and have thus transformed the nature of the citys nightlife itself.

A New York Times article in June 2007 featured the story of Sion Misrahi, a developercum-landlord of several buildings in the Lower East Side of New York City (Salkin, 2007). In the mid 1990s, he rented out 18 vacant storefronts on one street to bars, restaurants and counter-cultural performance clubs, which he expected to bring in the hipsters and change the neighborhood. Indeed, within a decade, Misrahi and other similar landlords were cited

as being responsible for the hipification of the neighbourhood, a process that has brought with itself condominium apartments and boutiques for new residents, known often as yuppies. By helping to create a hipster vibe through the encouragement of nightlife businesses, Misrahi had created fertile ground for gentrification in a neighbourhood that had not yet attracted the attentions of real estate developers.

Laam Hae is in the Department of Political Science, York University, S671 Ross, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J1P3, Canada. E-mail: lhae@yorku.ca.
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online 2011 Urban Studies Journal Limited DOI: 10.1177/0042098011400772
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Nightlife establishments often constitute an important foundation for the rekindling of depressed property markets in derelict neighbourhoods by helping to generate an atmosphere of lively urban sociality. In particular, nightlife establishments associated with inner-city sub-cultures, such as underground music/performance clubs, add a particular aura to the neighbourhoods, often leading to hipster gentrification. However, it has simultaneously been observed that, once gentrification settles in, nightlife businesses have been pushed out of the very neighbourhoods that they helped to market as interesting to outsiders. Nightlife businesses in the Lower East Side, Misrahis neighbourhood, for example, have followed this trajectory. This paper details this contradictory process, what I call the gentrification with and against nightlife, in several neighbourhoods of New York City (NYC). I examine discourses and regulatory practices (especially zoning regulations) introduced by the municipal government to discipline nightlife following the growing protests of residents against nightlife, while setting them in relief against ironical official efforts to market nightlife as a symbol of urban vibrancy to tourists and middle-class professionals. I also detail the complex process in which this contradictory approach, together with rising property values and the tastes of newly transplanted yuppie populations, has reshaped nightlife into a cluster of more upmarket or corporate establishments, while marginalising underfunded clubs that are often related to alternative and experimental subcultures. This transformation also signifies that, in post-industrialising and gentrifying cities, certain nightlife cultures are more valorised than others and that cities are increasingly left with a narrowing scope of nightlife cultures.

Gentrification, Postindustrialisation and the Nightlife Fix

The move to promote the aesthetic and cultural identities of cities has been intimately

related to these cities efforts to deal with the exigencies of the post-industrialisation of their economies, primarily in Western cities (Harvey, 1989; Ley, 1996), but increasingly also in non-Western cities (Kanai and Ortega-Alczar, 2009; Yeoh, 2005). This is because these aesthetics, embodied in subcultural spaces or mosaics of ethnic enclaves, can be commodified as unique urban tourist attractions. It is also the case that what Florida (2004) terms the creative class(young) professionals in post-industrial, knowledgebased businesses such as dotcom businesses, finance, insurance, real-estate, media, advertising and other high-end service businesses that municipalities have courted in order to reverse their cities economic decline and enhance their global competitiveness routinely demand infrastructure for quality cultural consumption in cities they inhabit (Ley, 1996), often in the form of interesting and authentic sub-cultural spaces (Zukin, 2010). This is related to the cosmopolitan sensibility and sub-cultural experience that these educated young professionals have developed in relation to their consumption patterns, which have become an essential component of their cultural capital (Grazian, 2003). Florida (2004, p. 225), the originator of paradigms of the creative class and the creative city, maintains that a vibrant nightlife is one component of the mix of lifestyle options that municipal governments should offer to make cities appealing to the creative class. Currid (2007), another champion of these paradigms, further underlines the importance of nightlife businesses like bars, lounges and dance clubs, as these sites provide spaces where young urban creatives in fashion, advertising and music industries casually hang out, exchange information and form informal social networks which, she argues, contributes to the creative cultural economy of the city. Despite the popularity of the creative class thesis in North America, a nightlife fix to contemporary urban economies has in fact

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been more prominently sought in Britain (Heath, 1997; Lovatt and OConnor, 1995). In alignment with neo-liberal trends, the UK central government legislated a series of deregulatory measures for nightlife; and municipal governments, in conjunction with city councillors, regeneration agencies and licensing boards, have followed suit. These measures have included an extension of licensing hours, the release of restrictions on numbers of permitted nightlife establishments in particular areas and the standardisation of licensing processes (Talbot 2006, p. 160). Such measures were expected to encourage nightlife as an economic booster, particularly in impoverished cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle, as facilitators of vibrant new images for these cities and as important catalysts for neighbourhood gentrification projects. The promotion of nightlife businesses has, however, taken a contradictory trajectory. Concerned voices have been raised to underscore how deregulatory policies, which some have seen as a product of aggressive lobbies of corporate night-time businesses (Hadfield, 2008), would increase the risks and nuisances associated with nightlife, such as alcohol-/ drug-related violence, vandalism, crowding and noise (Hadfield, 2006). Reflecting these concerns, the terms that define a vibrant nightlife have undergone a re-evaluation in favour of forms of nightlife that do not interfere with the quality of life of gentrifying neighbourhoods. In this re-evaluation, new forms of social and cultural differentiation (Talbot, 2006, p. 160) have come into being as a way to define what are acceptable/unacceptable and orderly/disorderly premises. These forms of differentiation have often overlapped with the class (Chatterton and Hollands, 2002) or racial and ethnic composition of these venues (Talbot, 2004, 2006). In Talbots case study (2006, p. 164), she observed that among key authority figures in a licensing regime, the perceived distinction between orderly and disorderly venues was often

layered with a venues commercial viability or business competence. Profitable venues, such as large chains or syndicate companies that run dance bars catering to a young White contingent (often screening out non-White patrons, using a variety of practices), were viewed as equipped with qualities necessary for maintaining order. In contrast, venues catering to Afro-Caribbean patrons were generally regarded as lacking these qualities and therefore associated with disorder. This, combined with the general fear among young, White, professionals of the venues patronised by Afro-Caribbean contingent, and high rents resulting from gentrification that these venues have been unable to afford, have led to the marginalisation of Afro-Caribbean venues. Talbot (2006, p. 159) argues that such marginalisation has led to a sub-cultural closure, as forms of wilder, experimental and culturally diverse nightlife are increasingly purged out of gentrifying neighbourhoods and replaced by gentrified forms of nightlife (see also Hadfield, 2006; Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). In the gentrified streetscapes that seemingly represent the ideal of authentic mixed-use neighbourhoods (Zukin, 2010), the wilder version of nightlife often only remains as an image, as a simulacrum of the neighbourhoods sub-cultural history, wherein communities that produced this wilder nightlife and its spaces cease to exist. This shows how Floridas creative city type of policy development can ironically turn destructive towards creative sub-cultural formations in cities. This further casts a crucial question about changing social and cultural life in contemporary post-industrial cities, as citizens access to diverse and experimental urban sub-cultures becomes increasingly limited. The analysis of such transformations of nightlife under gentrification is, therefore, a valuable extension of other relevant research that has brought to light the marginalisation of certain populations under gentrification, such as homeless people (MacLeod, 2002; Smith, 1996), together with the implications

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of such marginalisation for the declining principle of the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996; Mitchell, 2003; also see Hae (2011) for how the intensification of the regulation of social dancing in nightlife venues has debilitated the right to the city). In NYC, the implications of the gentrification of nightlife for the right to the city are equally deleterious and the contradictions related to the promotion of the creative city are also palpable. Starting in the mid 1970s, when the gentrification of abandoned innercity areas began, nightlife regulations have become increasingly tight. In the period before 1990, the tightening of regulations often focused on discos, which were at the centre of the rallying cries of residents.1 Beginning roughly in 1990, however, a broader spectrum of nightlife (beyond discos) became the target of governmental crackdown and a series of new legal initiatives, in particular zoning amendments that drastically diminished planning zones in which nightlife businesses could legally locate, were implemented to prevent neighbourhood conflicts over nightlife (see Table 1). Both state and municipal

governments also empowered residential communities so that the latter could more effectively control nightlife businesses in their neighbourhoods. This period further saw the proliferation of official and popular discourses that had the effect of disciplining nightlife to take certain directions. Throughout this history, underfinanced nightlife venues that often incubated experimental and creative, but less lucrative, subcultures have been disappearing, replaced by up-market/corporate businessesa process similar to sub-cultural closure.2 The governing of nightlife in this way, however, has ironically been coupled with persistent governmental campaigns to use nightlife in tourism marketing campaigns (although this nightlife image-based campaigning was not as vigorous as that observed in some British cities). Gentrification in each neighbourhood has taken on locally idiosyncratic patterns, but it has also shown a similar pattern of gentrification with and against nightlife. That is, nightlife contributed as a catalyst for gentrification, only to be inculpated as neighbourhood annoyances when gentry

Table 1.History of nightlife regulations in New York City Pre-1990 Institutions and laws Increasing calls among public officials for new nightlife regulations to control nightlife Post-1990 New legal and institutional fixes to nightlife problems Zoning amendments and resultant decrease of nightlife-legal zones Discourses of disciplining nightlife Broadening scope of businesses Empowered to intervene in nightlife licensing process Mobilisation among nightlife actors; conflicts between them

Targets of nightlife regulations Residential communities

Focus on (mega) discos Increasing outcry against neighbouring nightlife businesses Individualised reactions to tightening regulations

Nightlife business owners Nightlife cultures Gentrification with and against nightlife

Intensification of uptownisation. Replicated in each neighbourhood.

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moved into the neighbourhood. This process has also involved complicated conflicts between different interest-groups existing beyond the anti-nightlife vs pro-nightlife binary (i.e. conflicts between different sectors of cultural creatives, or nightlife sectors) due to discord among their interests implicated in the gentrification process.

Post-industrialisation and Nightlife Dilemmas: The 1970s through early 1980s

In the 1970s, in the midst of a particularly severe economic crisis, NYCs nightlife, flourishing in abandoned neighbourhoods, projected images of disorder, decline and dangerous cultural liberalism (Greenberg, 2008).3 Despite the moral panic over nightlife, municipal regulations of nightlife businesses were lax because the city lacked enforcement funds and personnel due to the financial crisis (Chevigny, 1991). A sympathetic view existed towards nightlife businesses, too, as they were seen as an important part of social life and a means of keeping roots in shaky communities struck down by the recession and neighbourhood dereliction (Narvaez, 1976, p.1, p. 46). They were also viewed as one of the few economic resources available to the city and as a source of revenues for landlords in derelict neighbourhoods at a time of ebbing investment opportunities. The zealous leasing-out of properties in Times Square to discotheques in the late 1970s was a case in point (Horsley, 1978). Nightlife in the SoHo and NoHo neighbourhoods also enjoyed the relaxed regulatory environment at that time. These neighbourhoods had primarily been manufacturing zones, but as they were abandoned through deindustrialisation in the 1950s and 1960s, poor artists, underground dance partiers and experimental jazz musicians (sometimes with a creative network between these three) lived and worked there in the 1960s through the

1970s, illegally but with the acquiescence of landlords. These included David Mancuso, who held an underground party, Loft, in NoHo, which became the birthplace of disco. In the 1960s, artists groups, in alliance with middle-class activists, successfully stopped the city governments plan to demolish historical cast-iron buildings in these neighbourhoods and, in the early 1970s, they successfully pressured the government to make available affordable residences for artists there, too. The presence of artists in these neighbourhoods helped to revalorise the local property market and later attracted the real estate capital which successfully converted stocks of lofts into upmarket residences, by utilising zoning variances and tax benefits from the municipality. Since then, these neighbourhoods have been reshaped, made up of upmarket residences lined with galleries and boutiques. And, with the sharp increase in property values, and the municipalitys withdrawal of a housing subsidy that once helped to anchor impecunious artists in these neighbourhoods, artists were displaced from them as of the early 1980s (Zukin, 1982). This process exemplified the vulnerability of the arts to market exploitation, despite the apparent agency of arts to engender a positive use value in derelict built environments. The displacement of artists in these neighbourhoods was, however, also preceded by that of nightlife. In the early to mid 1970s, underground parties in these neighbourhoods, including the Loft, were contested by an alliance of middle-class transplants and artists organisations that were seeking to establish the areas identities as artistic mixed-use communities with a reformist middle-class character (Aletti, 1975). These constituents also successfully pressured the City Planning Commission (CPC) to make zoning modifications in 1976 that would ban the opening of noisy and offensive large nightlife establishments in these neighbourhoods (Fowler, 1976; interview, Ken

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Bergen, CPC staff planner, 11 March 2005). Throughout this process, discos and underground dance parties were primarily framed as undesirable commerce or drug-infested nuisances that were anathema to the neighbourhoods artistic character. This exemplifies how different types of arts and cultural commerce are valorised differently in the cultural politics of gentrification and are even pitched against one another in their struggles over urban space. In this struggle, the wilder ilk pave the way for those who conform to the taste economy of the gentry and the quality of life of a gentrifying locale. The value of nightlife was, however, not entirely dismissed. The 1970s disco boom was seen as one of the signifiers and drivers of the post-industrialisation of the citys economy (Lawrence, 2003, p. 182), the process in which businesses related to the provision of business services and consumption of entertainment and urban culture, were prioritised over the production of manufactured goods, that the municipality sought to implement in order to overcome the recession (for the post-industrialisation of NYC, see Fleetwood, 1979; Savitch, 1988; Schuerman, 2007). Many discotheques and underground parties were also located in former manufacturing districts or run-down working class neighbourhoods (interview, a club owner and DJ in the 1980s, 23 August 2006), literally replacing industrial landscapes with their own and thus adding to the post-industrial current in the city. Nightlife actors chose to locate in such areas primarily to cash in on cheap rents and large loft spaces, a phenomenon that converged with the interests of landlords who could not find other tenants for their derelict buildings. The citys marketing strategy in the 1970s also often spotlighted the citys flourishing nightlife (Greenberg, 2008, pp. 207211). The Broadway theatres and the nightscapes of Times Square, as well as sophisticated dining and live music experiences, prevailed in the marketing of the citys nightlife. Yet

the wilder part of nightlife, repackaged with a chic touch, was promoted as iconic of the rich diversity and the cultural vanguards of NYC. In one promotional campaign in 1978, Studio 54 was featured with the disco song I NY and with the message that hundreds of colorful and interesting people [keep] New York alive at night (Greenberg, 2008, p. 210). In 1978, during Disco Week, Mayor Ed Koch also stressed in a speech that disco symbolises a more harmonious fellowship towards all creeds and races which was, he meant, what New York was all about (Lawrence, 2003, p. 308). Residential communities, On the other hand, suffered from the raving disco night scene (Horsley, 1978) and controlling discorelated nuisancesnoise and crowding at nightbecame a pressing concern for public officials. The CPC called for amendments to the cabaret lawa zoning and licensing regulation applied to cabarets.4 As the city was increasingly pulling out of the recession, in the early 1980s, the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) was given the funds and authority to step up nightlife regulation. The liabilities that business owners incurred when they violated regulations also grew. The City Councils Consumer Protection Committee also proposed a bill that would require nightlife establishments generating loud noise to be soundproofed, noting that this type of law had become urgent, as the distinction between commercial and residential areas had been blurred [due to gentrification in the city] (Kennedy, 1983). Nightlife business owners voiced that the permissive atmosphere that characterised the 1970s was waning (Dunlap, 1983). Rents continued to increase rapidly city-wide, putting heavier strains on nightlife businesses; there was a 35 per cent reported increase in rents city-wide over the period 198385 and those owners whose leases expired in that period reported average increases of 66 per cent (Chevigny, 1991, p. 98). Media reports on conflicts over

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discos in places like TriBeCa, that were now experiencing soaring real estate prices caused by gentrification, continued (Landis, 1983).

Nightlife and Gentrification: Mid to Late 1980s

According to Mele (2000), the gentrification of the East Village (then called the Lower East Side) explicitly hinged on the aesthetic ambience that counter-cultural punk musicians and bohemian artists had created in the neighbourhoods derelict landscapes. Clubs here in the 1960s and 1970s were the core sites where these artists produced and showcased alternative arts, music, dance and performance. In the early 1980s, these artists entered into the mainstream art market and, subsequently, as the East Village style caught the attention of the popular media, the neighbourhood rose as a potentially desirable habitat with an interesting lifestyle to offer. This elicited the attentions of the real estate developers and since then the neighbourhood experienced rapid gentrification.5 The redevelopment of the neighbourhood proceeded, then, as the actual counter-cultural spaces that originally popularised East Village style disappeared from the neighbourhood, to the extent that a New York Times article (Gross, 1985) surmised that the party seems to be over in the neighbourhood. The tightening administrative grip on nightlife businesses and exploding real estate values contributed to the decline of music/dance clubs, especially the very clubs that founded the countercultural East Village ethos. Clubs either closed their businesses, or removed from their programmes live music performances or social dancing, which would have made them vulnerable to the stricter enforcements of the cabaret law. The East Village counter-cultures, having faded away, now remained as a simulacrum, as an image projected onto the upmarket bars, restaurants and boutique shops of the

areas new consumer landscape. Clearly, municipal officials were aware that clubs in this neighbourhood helped to breathe life into once-desolate streets, ultimately leading to the gentrification of the area (Gross, 1985). This was, however, rarely translated into awareness of the cultural importance of clubs and the need for institutional protection of them against prohibitive rent markets. Urging on the part of civil society for the protection of these clubs was also limited, in contrast to the committed middle-class activism that pressured the municipality to legalise the squatting of artists in SoHo lofts in the 1960s. The gentrification of the Flatiron District in Manhattan followed a similar pattern of gentrification with and against nightlife. From the mid 1970s, poor photographers moved into abandoned lofts in the neighbourhood, which had been a manufacturing zone combined with heavy commercial zones. In the early 1980s, the neighbourhood gentrified, the zoning code for the neighbourhood changing to legalise the entry of more residential development. The most important factor for gentrification in this neighbourhood, it was reported, was nightclubs and restaurants that had moved into the area before gentrification kicked in. Realtors opined that nightlife businesses had brought in excitement and glamour and that the young, night-time crowds granted the neighbourhood the prestige that usually presages gentrification (Hawkins, 1988). By the late 1980s, however, the neighbourhood became another battlefield over nightlife businesses (Dunlap, 1988). Nightlife establishments, the presence of which had raised the bar of cultural capital in the neighbourhood, were now seen as a prime obstacle, causing the devaluation of property values.6 In the mid to late-1980s, it was also widely observed that the downtown nightlife became uptownised, which impelled one club critic to write about The death of downtown (Musto, 1987; see also Mele, 2000, p. 233). Musto

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Figure 1. Zoning configurations of social dancing businesses, 1978.

opined that creative energies of downtown clubs were no longer felt in the uptownised new club scene, where the dominant crowd was now new affluent young Americans,

including Wall Street workers who were more interested in paying for the spectacle of glitzy clubs than creative experimentation with alternative sub-cultures. The producers of

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Figure 2. Zoning configurations of social dancing businesses, after 1990.

underground cultures were largely alienated from, or were co-opted into these new environs. The downtown network that used to connect clubs with independent recording

studios and specialty record stores was also eroding due to rising rent and shrinking demand (Fikentscher, 2000). Despite this transformation in the nightlife scene, however,

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my interviewees generally recounted that a sizeable swathe of NYC in this period was still available in which to run a new club or party, and creative energies still abounded to venture to experiment cultural transgression. Yet, with new regulations legislated at the beginning of the 1990s, these possibilities became severely restrained.

Legal Fixes to Nightlife Dilemmas: The Late 1980s to the Mid 1990s
Tightened enforcement by the authorities was particularly severe on small live jazz clubs that were still categorised as cabarets (see endnote 4). The terms of the cabaret law were, however, transformed when in 1989 musicians successfully challenged the constitutionality of the cabaret law for violating the First Amendment.7 After this defeat, the CPC revised the cabaret zoning law in 1990 so that the definition of cabarets was changed to refer mainly to nightlife businesses that offer social dancing together with drinks/ meals, but not live music businesses. Under this amendment, many of the existing zones as-of-right for social dancing businesses were changed to ones in which these businesses would have to meet strict special permits requirements (CPC, 1989).8 These neighbourhoods included TriBeCa, some parts of the East Village and the Lower East Side, and the Flatiron District (compare the size of as-ofright zones for social dance venues between 1978 and 1990 in Figures 1 and 2) and, in SoHo and NoHo, the CPC made the special permits requirements stricter than before. City planners justified this amendment by pointing out that discos had been nuisances to these neighbourhoods (interview, Ken Bergen, CPC staff planner, 11 March 2005).9 These neighbourhoods had undergone palpable gentrification by this time (see Hackworth, 2007; Zukin, 2010), so the cabaret law rezoning was also seen as an effort on the part of the CPC to benefit gentry by effectively zoning

out discos from these neighbourhoods (interview, New York Nightlife Association (NYNA) representative, 14 January 2005). The legal fix to the nightlife dilemma came in the form of zoning amendments, so to speak. Despite the 1990 cabaret law zoning amendment and the recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s that temporarily caused gentrification in the city to slow down, nightlife conflicts continued to grow. A wider range of nightlife businesses, including bars, lounges and restaurants, also became the object of public outcry in gentrifying neighbourhoods. The municipal government continued to craft legal fixes, including a new rule that strengthened the power of Community Boards (CBs) in vetoing cabaret licence applications in their neighbourhoods (Nieves, 1990). Incessant petitions on the part of residents to the State Liquor Authority (SLA) also led to a bill empowering CBs to petition to restrict the number of businesses with liquor licences in neighbourhoods already deemed overcrowded with nightlife businesses (Howe, 1993). In addition, both municipal government and the SLA increased the responsibilities of business owners for maintaining order outside as well as inside clubs (Glaberson, 1990; Howe, 1993). This tightened regulatory environment pressured business owners to negotiate terms of operation. Business managers started to attend CB meetings and looked for ways to work with resident neighbours (Howe, 1992). Furthermore, they changed the content of the parties they hosted, in order to draw an older, more affluent crowd (Freitag, 1990). Some even marketed themselves as being transformed into spaces that were upscale and regularly filled with young hip kids and models and sought to get rid of parties associated with violent crowds, such as hip hop and reggae parties (Glaberson, 1990). In other words, the solution to neighbourhood conflicts sought by business owners involved modifying the economic and racial constituents of

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patronsa phenomenon that became more common in the nightlife scene throughout the 1990s (interview, NY-based DJ, 22 December 2009). This also shows how gentrification and the subsequent neighbourhood conflicts over nightlife have led to what Talbot calls sub-cultural closure, as these processes compelled the nightlife scene to bowdlerise wilder parts of itself, the parts more related to zany, creative and experimental sub-cultures (often also associated with racial/ethnic minority communities) and transform themselves into more gentrified establishments catering to upmarket boulevardiers.

Crackdown on Nightlife: From the Mid 1990s to the Early 2000s

The standoff between distressed residents and nightlife businesses entered a new phase during Mayor Rudy Giulianis administration (19942001). Giulianis authoritarian quality of life policing, which was closely affiliated with his neo-liberal policies, brought about city-wide controversies over the legitimacy of such policing (McArdle and Erzen, 2001). This period was also characterised by an assertive municipal promotion of gentrification projects, with the help of which gentrification was intensified and extended to places that did not significantly experience gentrification in the 1980s: places such as the Lower East Side, Clinton, Manhattan Valley in the Upper West Side, West Chelsea and Williamsburg (Freeman and Braconi, 2004; Hackworth, 2007; Zukin, 2010).10 Nightlife policing by the municipality in this period became disproportionately punitive. At the centre of nightlife policing lay a Task Force comprised of city agents from each department involved in nightlife inspections, a body which the municipal government created in 1995 to overcome the obstacles posed by the bureaucratic complexity involved in nightlife inspection (Farber, 1995). The Task Force conducted nightlife inspections, visiting businesses without prior notice, frequently

on Friday or Saturday nights, disturbing businesses at their peak times. When the Task Force visited businesses, tickets were often issued based upon punctilious interpretations of lawsfor example, an ice scoop illegally touching an ice cubeunrelated to the noises or crowding that residents complained about, which was ostensibly what brought the Task Force in (Bumiller, 1996; Rothman, 1999). The Task Force also strictly interpreted social dancing, to the point that, if more than three people were discovered to be moving rhythmically together in establishments not licensed as cabarets, this was construed to be a violation of the cabaret law. Under the CPCs rewriting of the cabaret zoning law in 1990, a large portion of the commercial zones where people could drink became not as-of-right for social dancing, so any casual rhythmic movement in music clubs, lounges or bars became a violation. Music/dance clubs in the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side and in the East Village were particularly hard hit by this crackdown, as there were few streets in this neighbourhood that were as-of-right for social dancing (LeDuff, 1996). The inspections by the Task Force led nightlife establishments to sense that the Citys crackdown was being carried out for the purpose of harassing nightlife businesses, rather than to secure public wellbeing and safety (interview, the NYNA representative, 14 January 2005). The Deputy Mayor, who was in charge of the Task Force, denied this, stating that the city valued its nightlife businesses, but nonetheless adding the following
My message to these owners has simply been Be good neighbors.... Make proper investments in your establishments. Hire security. Check ages. Respect peoples property. This citys too crowded for people to behave, however, they want (Span, 1998).

To be a good and responsible neighbour became a mantra that members of the anti-nightlife allianceadministrators,

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politicians and residential communities have consistently chanted in confronting nightlife businesses (also see Bumiller, 1996). The nightlife problem may be rooted in structural changes, such as residential use encroaching into commercial and manufacturing zones, but the solution to the problem has been framed as having to come from nightlife businesses themselves. Nightlife business owners continued to claim that the tightened policing was unfair and that they should be given a credit for pioneering and subsequently revitalising derelict neighbourhoods like the Lower East Side (consider the example of Sion Misrahi at the introduction of this paper; Span, 1998). However, the frame of good/bad neighbours had the effect of disciplining nightlife into its own self-governance. Owners tried to be good neighbours, despite the heavy expenses of doing so. New businesses now had to spend up to $100000 in legal fees and delay opening by up to 18 months, due to the reinforced powers of CBs in reviewing liquor and cabaret licence applications, other bureaucratic quagmires and the expensive stipulations demanded by residents (such as paying neighbours for double-pane windows for sound-proofing) (interview, the NYNA representative, 14 January 2005; Bumiller, 1996). This regulatory environment wrought havoc on underfinanced and unprofitable nightlife businesses, often those of alternative and experimental sub-cultural scenes. In contrast, gentrified forms of nightlife, such as trendy lounges and carpeted live music venues that possessed sufficient financial capacity to qualify as a good, responsible neighbour, were spared such harassments, even if they were also susceptible to equally severe antinightlife crusades by furious residents and governmental authorities. In the late 1990s, nightlife businesses mobilised themselves to form the New York Nightlife Association (NYNA) in order to counteract the governmental crackdown on

nightlife. The NYNA has tried to promote a good neighbour policy among its members as a way to appease residential neighbourhoods, and commissioned a study of the nightlife industry in the city to publicise nightlifes contributions to the citys economy (Owen, 1997). However, the NYNA has also been blamed by more sub-culturally conscious nightlife actors for endorsing the cabaret law to keep the monopoly power of its affluent members in the dance club market (Romano, 2002). Nightlife has been divided within itself over this issue, but divisions have also often emerged between nightlife actors engaged in different genres (such as live music vs dance) (interview, NY based DJ, 22 December 2009). These divisions have often presented obstacles to unified pro-nightlife activism.

History Repeated: 2002 to 2010

The Mike Bloomberg administration, taking office in 2002, initiated a new set of nightlife regulations. The smoking ban in nightlife businesses was enacted in 2002, which owners furiously contested, as they saw that the ban would increase the amount of noise generated by nightlife on the street. In 2003, the Bloomberg administration proposed to replace the cabaret law with a new law that would require a nightlife licence, which would regulate nightlife businesses based on noise and traffic volumes, and not on social dancing. The administration eventually backed off the proposal due to protests by the NYNA, which saw the nightlife licence as imposing more onerous requirements on businesses than the current cabaret law system. In 2004, the administration put forward a proposal for a comprehensive overhaul of the citys noise code in 30 years (the proposal was legislated in 2007), which may bring more financial burdens on nightlife businesses due to tightened sound-proofing requirements. In 2006, the City Council passed a law that mandated a tightening of

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existing requirements under state law for the licensing of security guards, including background checks and training for bouncers, following a murder case involving the conviction of a bouncer. While at the governmental level new regulatory initiatives have continued to emerge, at the neighbourhood level the cycle of gentrification with and against nightlife has been replicated. Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, famous for its alternative club scene and the presence of artists who had moved out of gentrifying Manhattan, also gentrified (Zukin, 2010), at which point its artists and clubs packed up to Dumbo, elsewhere in Brooklyn. In 2005, the rezoning of some parts of West Chelsea (and the neighbouring Ladies Mile and Meatpacking District) was approved, opening up more residential development there. After the 1990 rezoning of the cabaret law, these neighbourhoods were among the few areas left as-of-right for cabarets and have grown as centres of nightlife, especially destination dance clubs. Under the West Chelsea rezoning, cabarets and other nightlife businesses are still as-of-right but, clearly, conflicts over nightlife would mushroom when the area takes on a more residential character, subsequently inviting stepped up nightlife regulation (interview, Ivan Schonfeld, CPC staff planner, 30 March 2005). Again, nightlife has been primarily responsible for triggering gentrification in this area, this case leading one nightlife commentator to declare that nightlife actors there have become victims of their own success (Hennessy, 2010; also see Zukin, 2010, p. 26). Indeed, it was very soon reported that dance clubs in this neighbourhood were remaking themselves into lounge- or restaurant-type businesses, in order to avoid future conflicts with residential neighbours (Ferris, 2007). Sub-cultural closure has only expanded. Rezoning has not been the only process through which nightlife has been losing its spatial ground. Famed music/dance venues (for example, CBGB, The Wetlands) have

been closed after struggling with drastically increased rents and the frequent complaints of residents. A performance club owner in Dumbo said that artists are now leaving for Berlin, Germany, where public interest is better oriented towards arts and cultures (interview, 8 December 2009). He voluntarily invoked Floridas creative thesis to underscore how arts and cultures are important to the competitiveness of cities and to criticise the municipalitys inaction in protecting subculturally rich nightlife. On the other hand, the mayor, who is equally inspired by Florida, frequently reassures the public of the citys place as one of the worlds foremost cultural and artist centres, and the Citys marketing branch, NYC and Company, boasts of the citys jubilant nightlife in its website. This is the irony that champions of the creative city thesis have yet to answerthe irony that the creative city may actually undermine creativity in cities.

Conclusion
Attracting professional constituencies or the creative class is expected to facilitate the post-industrialisation of the city as a solution to the declining urban economy. And, it has been argued that cities and neighbourhoods that can provide the charm of authentic mixed-use neighbourhoods, diverse and creative sub-cultures and a vibrant nightlife are especially appealing to these constituencies. Proponents of this creativity fix (Peck, 2007), however, have been mute about how the gentrification that has come with the nightlife fix has led to the embourgeoisement of nightlife, a process through which the nightlife that nurtures diverse and alternative sub-cultures has been largely displaced and through which neighbourhoods are left with a simulacrum of urban vibrancy. This paper urges that we should take seriously this process. We have to provide a critical appraisal of the ways in which academics and governmental officials have, explicitly or not, promoted the gentrification

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of nightlife and what important aspects of our social and cultural life have been lost through this process. This effort will add an important dimension to the right to the city movements, which have largely focused on the right to affordable housing, social services and public space, but very little on the disappearance of important sub-cultural spaces in cities.

Notes
1. The history of nightlife regulations in NYC resists a clear periodisation, but I treat 1990 as a point of divide for two roughly different periods for the purposes of my analysis. 2. It is worthwhile to bring up the point that subcultural closure can be observed in different national/municipal contexts, even though the process through which each locale experiences it varies. In this sense, this paper demonstrates how different locales operate under similar constraining structural mandatessuch as the mandate to operate with a creativity fix (Peck, 2007)to get ahead in the context of intensifying interurban competition, and how, under such environments, nightlife is transformed in similar ways across different locales. 3. My research on NYC nightlife consists of ethnographic work starting in the summer of 2002, with intermittent field trips to NYC since. The narrative of the 1970s through 1980s history was constructed primarily based on secondary data, from sources such as newspapers and the relevant academic literature. This was complemented by interviews with three club owners, one journalist, one ethnomusicologist and one staff planner who worked in CPC in this period. The New York City archive stores documents about new regulations and laws issued by relevant departments in the municipal government, the majority of which were also newspaper articles published at the relevant times that reported on these regulations and laws. Many of the sources for my paper are thus newspaper articles. The historical narrative from the 1990s to the present I established mostly based on interviews and participatory observation,

as well as on media reportage. Interviewees include four anti-cabaret law activists, one nightlife organisation representative, one lawyer, two journalists, five club owners and two DJs. The interviews covered a variety of subjects, including governmental regulations and the transformation of nightlife. 4. Under the cabaret law, cabarets were defined as eating/drinking businesses that: allowed more than three musicians to play in a venue; allowed musicians to play horns and/or percussion; and/or, allowed social dancing (referring to people dancing together, but not for performance purposes). Cabarets have been subject to much more stringent forms of licensing, and planning zones in which they have been allowed to locate have been far more restricted than other nightlife businesses. The restriction on the use of horns and/or percussion (due to their association with Black/Latin music) has led the law to be contested as racist (Chevigny, 1991). 5. Abandoned inner-city areas often become primary targets of gentrification, as developers expect to make more net profits there than in other places (see Smith (1996) for the rentgap theory that explains this mechanism). When these derelict neighbourhoods have a marketable cultural capital, real estate developers feel less doubtful about entering to invest (Mele, 2000, pp. 220246). 6. O n ce g en t r i f i c a t i on k i ck s i n , m ore nightlife businesses move into gentrifying neighbourhoods in order to trade on the buzz engendered by the presence of yuppie consumers (Anonymous, Taverners United For Fairness (TUFF), Listserve, 11 June 2010). This accelerates conflicts over nightlife in gentrifying neighbourhoods, and it is likely that it was the case in the Flatiron District, too. 7. Musicians Union Local 802 contended that, as the law discriminated according to the number of musicians and the type of instruments played, it violated freedom of expression. The law did not pass the strict scrutiny in the states Supreme Court and was declared unconstitutional (Chevigny, 1991). 8. As-of-right development means that a specific use by an establishment (in this case, social dancing) is automatically allowed in the

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specific zone that it is located in, without the establishment having to comply with any special requirements, as long as the structure that houses the use complies with the Building Code. 9. Chevigny (1991) infers that jazz had become an accepted, and even lite, music genre by this time and that this may explain why the court and city planners were open to easing zoning regulations of live music. He argues that social dancing venues were far from earning such recognition. This demonstrates, again, how certain sub-cultures are more valorised than others in gentrifying and post-industrialising cities. 10. The increased municipal promotion of gentrification in this period resulted from reductions in federal funds to localities in the 1990s, which increased municipalities need to generate tax revenues from other sources, such as real estate development, and also magnified the municipal governments market-friendly tendencies (for more detailed explanations of the political economic contexts of the increased municipal promotion of gentrification, see Hackworth, 2007, p. 130).

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Don Mitchell for providing helpful feedback on drafts of this paper several times and also wishes to thank Jesook Song and three anonymous reviewers for suggesting various ways to improve the arguments made in this paper.

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