the loss of soul in yorkville Op-ED

Realizing that while it is rather late in the game to attempt to forestall a rising tide, my life events of 2014 gave me pause to reflect on the price of development and its effect on what was once a working class neighborhood of four-story walkups. Being the owner of one of the oldest businesses in the area, the plight of Old Yorkville (roughly speaking, from 59th Street to 96th Street, and from the East River to Lexington Avenue) and the loss of our collective status quo has been personalized for me.

When surrounded by developers who seem to be seeking to build yet another millenial monolith at or adjacent to this very location, the profit-driven homogenization of Manhattan tends to get rather personal.

In an era when diversity is being championed as a by-product of 21st century progress, I remember the circa 1950’s and 1960’s neighborhood I came of age in as culturally heterogenous yet economically stable. Walking north on First Avenue from the 59th Street Bridge (as we called it), one could hear, from residents all, conversational Italian, Gaelic, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Yiddish, Hungarian, German, Greek, Spanish and yes even Chinese. You knew what part of the neighborhood you were in by the storefronts, where everything from mozzarella to moc/mak(ground poppy seeds, favored flavor of Eastern European bakers) were sold. In school, we were exposed to the wealth of African-American culture by the presence of students from East Harlem, just north of Yorkville. Likewise, Caribbean-born employees of the large hospitals throughout the East Side rounded out the vibrant, diverse dynamic of this area. The impact was not minute; my penchant for Afro-Cuban music and jazz started way back in the 1960’s, and remains an important part of my life to this day. Formative years indeed!

There were a great many disparate influences at work in Yorkville, but the common denominator was that we had an esprit de corps based on economics and locale...and that is what kept our neighborhood solid and strong. The streets were alive with vibrance and vitality, there was a watchful eye at every window, and anonymity was sometimes craved yet usually fleeting. But that was what gave this neighborhood its soul. It had issues, to be sure. What inner city area does not? But it always had a clearly discernible soul. That is, until it and its relatively inexpensive building prices became easy prey for real estate interests in the later 1970’s, with a seeming exponential increase in development with every successive year.

Which brings us to the critical mass of the here and now in 2015.

I do not mean for this column to be a lamentation for a past now relegated to the dustbin of history. I am not seeking to turn back the clock. I am aware that there is a dialectic of sorts underway here, and I don’t want to appear as if I am an opponent to the progressive thinking of 21st century New York. But when all that is recognizable in this neighborhood is a hospital complex or two, a number of churches and synagogues, a few schools and parks, and a handful of businesses, mine included, there is something rather unbalanced and inequitable in this development equation. Must the past be so disrespected that now even houses of worship, such as Our Lady of Peace, St. Stephen of Hungary, St. Elizabeth of Hungary (the only parish in New York serving the hearing impaired community!), not to mention the already late great Our Lady of Perpetual Help and Bethany Reformed, are on the auction block?

Such pressure to sell to perpetually feed a break-neck speed of development has resulted in the fracturing of quintessential old New York neighborhoods like Yorkville. This form of iconoclastic change is not being carried out in the name of the public good, vis a vis Robert Moses (who himself had some very grave issues regarding development and its impact on existing communities), but rather in the name of a seeming reverse Moloch, sacrificing the old in the name of the new, the new being where the profit margin borders on decadence and calling it all progress writ large.

However, I do not want to give any impression that I subscribe to the anarchist Proudhon’s assertion that property is theft. After all, I do not operate a not-for-profit corporation. But the degree of excess relentlessly pursued here smacks of a socio-economic Darwinism, a warped elitism in which buildings are more valued than existing and very real human communities, no matter the intent of the Landmarks Preservation Committee of Mayor Robert Wagner’s creation. For when real estate values throughout Manhattan have a unattainable mirage as a ceiling, no one but real estate interests benefit...and the loser, in every way, are the people, the neighborhoods, the communities that made old New York -- and old Yorkville -- a very unique and special place. For, it is written: What does it profit a man, to gain a fortune, and lose his own soul?

No less a sentiment can be applied to neighborhoods throughout New York, and specifically, to the community where I was born, where I was raised, where I have prospered, and where I intend to remain...Yorkville

John Krtil owns John Krtil Funeral Home on the Upper East Side