Bourdieu Off-Broadway: Managing Distinction

on a Shopping Block in the East Village

Sharon Zukin∗
City University Graduate Center

Ervin Kosta
City University Graduate Center

The economic and social vitality of East Ninth Street, in the East Village of Lower
Manhattan, testifies to the area’s long-standing reputation for cutting-edge culture
and the street’s astounding high density of unusual stores. Like a regional industrial
district, the block between First and Second Avenues works as a specialized agglom-
eration of small producers, who are dependent on both supportive local suppliers
and populations and customers from abroad, and who are linked in networks of
mutually beneficial relations. This concentration succeeds not only because of the
aesthetic distinction managed by store and building owners, but also because of the
cultural diversity sought by a local yet cosmopolitan clientele, the material diversity
of the old buildings, and the sociability of old and new residents. Far from destroy-
ing a community by commercial gentrification, East Ninth Street suggests that a
retail concentration of designer stores may be a territory of innovation in the urban
economy, producing both a marketable and a sociable neighborhood node.

The East Village, in Lower Manhattan, is one of those former working-class neighborhoods
that people seek out because of their concentration of art galleries, unusual shops, little
bars and restaurants, and performance spaces. Unlike most other trendy neighborhoods,
its reputation for being “on the edge” has lasted a long time—half a century. Whether
its denizens have been bearded, tie-dyed, tattooed, or pierced, the East Village remains
resolutely hip. In the 1950s, the area was the cradle of abstract expressionist art, Beat
poetry, modern jazz, and off-Broadway experimental theater; in the 1960s, these embed-
ded roots—along with low rents and a spirit of tolerance—drew migrants from a new
counterculture, who set up thrift shops and music stores, and smoked marijuana in the
parks and streets. In the early 1980s, alternative art galleries and artists’ communes moved
into the unused tenement storefronts, expressing in graffiti and other on-site work their
visceral reaction to Reaganomics and gentrification, and creating the well-known slogan,
painted on walls and lampposts, “Die Yuppie scum!” This movement swiftly passed from
intense commercial success to exhaustion and, for some artists, a move away from the
city or premature death from AIDS. Since then, however, the area has continued to fig-
ure prominently in the media, remaining popular among young residents of the city and

∗ Correspondence should be addressed to Sharon Zukin, Ph.D. Program in Sociology, City University Graduate
Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016; szukin@gc.cuny.edu.
City & Community 3:2 June 2004

C American Sociological Association, 1307 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701

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tourists, especially students and artists from overseas. Through years of high crime rates
and drug wars, and despite continually rising rents, the East Village has helped to sustain
New York’s image as a culture capital.
Urbanists tend to study this neighborhood as a crucible of gentrification (Abu-Lughod
et al., 1994; Smith, 1996; Mele, 2000). Indeed, the low-rise, low-density housing—built
in the late 1800s—is mainly privately owned and has gone through the long postwar
waves of disinvestment and reinvestment—punctuated by some abandonment, arson, and
squatting—that epitomize the economic sequence of gentrification. By the same token, the
formation of the East Village’s concentration of artists, followed by media buzz and rising
rents (Unger, 1984; Dowd, 1985; Ault, 2002), has inspired the study of artists’ settlements
as a cultural stimulus of gentrification (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984; cf. Zukin, 1982). More
positively, in terms of current debates, the East Village illustrates how a cultural enclave
that is stable, diverse, and broad-minded can attract the “creative class,” which in turn may
spur economic development (Florida, 2002; cf. Green, 1999; Foord, 1999; Lloyd, 2002).
Though these frameworks all focus on the economic value of cultural concentrations,
they leave a crucial aspect of the local economy unexplored. Looking only at either local
housing markets or labor markets neglects one of a district’s key functions in urban rede-
velopment: to create the consumption spaces on which both cultural producers and new
middle classes rely. Whether these spaces cater to the “aestheticization of everyday life”
(Featherstone, 1991) that is so much a part of contemporary urban culture (Lash and
Urry, 1994; Zukin, 1995), or sustain a specific kind of themed spectacle on which urban
entertainment destinations depend (Hannigan, 1998), they are an important factor in
local economic redevelopment.
We don’t claim to be able to deconstruct the buzz that surrounds consumption spaces
in the East Village. Sociologically, however, we can say that these spaces are generally small
and individually owned, and they embody a sense of distinction by offering small-batch
and artisanal production, often in advance of dominant styles, with a self-conscious atten-
tion to appearance and design. They seldom refer to the area’s history as an immigrant
neighborhood, which dates back to the late-19th century when it was known as Kleine
Deutschland, which was even before it was called the Lower East Side.1 Neither do most
of these spaces serve the ethnic groups that still live in the area, mainly Eastern European
and Hispanic. Instead, they are geared to the needs and desires of “cultural intermedi-
aries,” or the relatively well-educated, art-seeking, but not wealthy middle classes who are
often either self-employed or employed in the city’s educational and cultural institutions
and in business services that work with the arts, such as advertising or publishing. These
consumption spaces provide cultural capital for the intermediaries in several ways: they
offer products and places for them to construct a distinctive habitus, in the sense the term
is used by Pierre Bourdieu (1984); they present something “interesting” for them to talk
about; and, when the shops and restaurants are recommended in the media and shopping
or tourist guides, they validate the judgment of this group as a “critical infrastructure” of
new urban culture (Zukin, 1991). Although the various kinds of consumption spaces that
we are discussing convey a clear sense of “difference” from mainstream norms, consistent
with the area’s social diversity, they are so familiar from other neighborhoods in similar
conditions of redevelopment around the world that they almost represent a standardized
cultural vocabulary (cf. Zukin, 1998).
Among the neighborhoods of a single city, however, the distinctive diversity of consump-
tion spaces in one district may count as a symbolic—or functional—specialization. The

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spaces attract shoppers and visitors, displaying what Jane Jacobs (1961) called the uses
of diversity. Though Jacobs specified factors—especially a mix of old and new buildings
and high and low rents—that could help sustain such a concentration of difference, she
did not explain the social processes by which these concentrations form. However, if we
compare neighborhood concentrations to regional industrial districts, we can think of
them as agglomerations of small producers, who are dependent on both supportive local
suppliers and populations and customers from abroad, and who are linked in networks of
mutually beneficial relations (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Sabel, 1994; Storper, 1997). Thus the
creation of distinctive consumption spaces in an urban district has two interdependent
economic and cultural effects: not only do such spaces produce consumers (Zukin, 2003),
they also produce a highly marketable neighborhood node.
As a preliminary study to explore these points, we looked closely at a single shop-
ping block in the East Village: East Ninth Street between First and Second Avenues (see
Figure 1). The area around East Ninth Street is literally a palimpsest of social diversity
and cultural innovation, with old buildings serving as incubators to successive tribes and
generations. One block to the north, St. Marks Church, which was built in 1799 on the
former property of the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, as New York was once called,
sponsors poetry projects and theatrical and dance performances.2 At the eastern end of
the block, P.S. 122, a former red-brick public elementary school, is a community-run per-
formance space. The next block of Ninth Street to the west attracts Asian investment, with
two Japanese restaurants, a Japanese hair salon, and a Japanese basement bar. On 10th
Street, a former Russian bathhouse is in vibrant reuse as a social attraction. Around the
corner, two blocks of Eighth Street—which are called, after the church, St. Marks Place—
form a sort of main artery into the area, with restaurants that are open throughout the

FIG. 1. Neighbors stand and talk around the small shops on East Ninth Street (photo by Sharon Zukin).

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day and night alongside record and video stores, cheap T-shirt and jewelry shops, tattoo
parlors, and sidewalk vendors. Though all of these blocks, on both cross-streets and av-
enues, are in mixed residential and commercial use, the avenues are the major shopping
thoroughfares, with the densest foot, car, and bus traffic and the highest rents. New York
University, whose campus is located several blocks to the west, near Washington Square
Park, has greatly expanded on the edges of the East Village since the 1980s, mainly by
demolishing old buildings to erect new, high-rise dormitories. Together with the smaller
but still considerable expansion of New School University, this has brought many more
young, highly educated people into the area.
We were drawn to the relative elegance of the shops on East Ninth Street between
First and Second Avenues (see Figures 2–3). They have an aura of distinction that is con-
firmed by recommendations in print and online shopping guides (see, e.g., <http://www.
popularspot.com/eastvillage/eastvillage.html>). Though the building stock and resi-
dents are no different from those of the surrounding streets, there is something about this
block that attracts a different sort of attention. It’s not a matter of an enforced aesthetic
homogeneity, however, for the block seems to succeed by its very diversity. It’s a block that
manages distinction.3
What accounts for the block’s ambiance—and for its apparent success? To what degree
do the shops on the block depend on a local clientele? How do they reflect the fortunes
of the East Village as a whole? Are they connected to—or do they contradict—the general
phenomenon of globalization? And most important, perhaps, can the factors of success
be replicated to redevelop other urban neighborhoods?

FIG. 2. Graffiti abouts sidewalk display of wares (photo by Sharon Zukin).

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FIG. 3. Among the many women’s clothing shops are the original Eileen Fisher store and newer workshops
that make and sell wedding gowns (photo by Sharon Zukin).

THE ANATOMY OF THE BLOCK

Though the buildings on East Ninth Street are old, they are not officially designated
landmarks, for they were built cheaply, for German, Italian, and Eastern European im-
migrants, at the end of the 19th century. All of the 35 houses are between four and six
stories high; 25 of them were built in only two years—1899 and 1900—just before passage
of a new tenement housing law that mandated sanitary improvements. Despite their age
and the variety of their facades, the houses look well kept. A few have tall stoops leading
to their front door, but most have no stairs and are built out to the lot line. Many have
been renovated in recent years—but without fastidious attention to historic authenticity
or expensive architectural detail. Though housing values have consistently risen since
1980, no house on the block is assessed at more than $750,000, which is fairly low by cur-
rent Manhattan standards. All the houses contain rental apartments; though some may
be owner occupied, none is in single-family use. Like the side streets in the surrounding
blocks, East Ninth Street seems always to have mixed “storefronts” and tenements. We can
imagine that the designers’ shops of today were butcher shops and grocery stores in the
early 1900s.
Visually, this block of East Ninth Street stands out from most of the surrounding side
streets in two ways: there are more mature, leafy trees and many more stores. Not counting
the buildings on the corners of the avenues, the block has 46 stores—which creates an
extraordinary density of shopping opportunities.4 These shops differ from those on the
surrounding side streets, for there is both a high proportion of one type of store—17

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women’s clothing boutiques—and a complementary assortment of other stores that

specialize in home design, clothing accessories, and body care. Typical of the East Vil-
lage at this time, there are few vacant storefronts: one is undergoing renovation and one is
available for rent. Atypically, there are only two restaurants, and no cafes or bars. Although
nearly all the stores carry unusual clothes, both new and vintage, semi-antique furniture,
or eccentric objects that suit a “post-Fordist” clientele, six shops—near the less-expensive
end of the block at First Avenue—cater to traditional, local needs: a veterinary clinic, shoe
repair shop, watch repairer, photocopy shop, bakery, and laundry. One women’s cloth-
ing store—a remnant of the old Eastern European immigration—sells only Ukrainian
handcrafted work. The large, well-known restaurant next to it—Ukrainia—specializes in
pierogi and borscht. The present owner, who is not Eastern European, created the restau-
rant from an older grocery and sundries store on the corner that was opened by his
Ukrainian father-in-law in the 1950s.5
Because many of the stores stay open until 7 or 8 o’clock at night, seven days a week,
there are always men and women strolling the block. This evening time is almost a rush
hour, with some residents returning home from work and visitors who have come to eat or
drink in the East Village pausing to do a little window-shopping. The Ukrainian restaurant,
moreover, is open 24 hours a day and, since it spills around the corner, it adds to the block’s
vitality. The other restaurant, Ninth Street Café, is located in the middle of the block. It
attracts a large number of young people, who wait outside for a table at brunch on the
weekend. Especially in summer, when Ukrainia’s sidewalk tables are crowded and the
stores leave their doors open, there is an attractive, sociable, and ultimately safe feeling
to the block—all of which is accomplished without a uniform design code or the visible
presence of security guards.
This feeling of security belies the area’s “wild” recent history—the drug dealers who
plagued neighborhood residents, peddlers who hustled old clothes and who knows what
else at all hours of the day and night, homeless encampments in nearby Tompkins Square
Park, and the general presence on the street of young people whom long-time residents
deemed rowdy and undesirable. During the 1980s, both permanent and ad hoc neighbor-
hood associations on many blocks pressed the police to increase the enforcement of drug
and vagrancy laws, a demand that divided opinions on the local community board and
eventually resulted in police campaigns of anti-drug “sweeps” and the forceful clearing of
homeless people’s tents from the park. In their way, East Village residents contributed to
the growth of quality-of-life politics in New York City (Smith, 1996; Vitale, 2001).
Yet the history of East Ninth Street does not exactly conform to this wild history. Although
a few long-time storeowners do recall a roiled past, the block escaped the worst ravages of
crime and disorder, a fact suggesting that some exceptional factors are already at play.

THE EYE OF THE STORM

Thomas, Ukrainia’s owner, first came to the East Village as a college student in the mid
1970s, and moved to the area permanently in 1988. Like other long-time storeowners
on the block, he pinpoints the late 1960s and 1970s as the worst time because of high
crime rates and general disorder: “There were a lot of drugs in the neighborhood, a lot
of crime. It got more dangerous.” Moreover, in the late 1980s, when he moved to an
apartment on Tompkins Square Park, “the park was a gathering place for the homeless,

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where they continuously camped. It was a mess, it was dangerous—a very dangerous place.
It was 24 hours a day, homeless people were in there sleeping with tents and making fires
at night. It was a mess, a real mess. And nobody in the city had the political courage to
clean it out . . . . Nobody else in the neighborhood could use the park. Too dangerous. Too
dirty.” Eleanor, who opened her accessories store on East Ninth Street in 2001, confirms
Thomas’s account. She says that when she first moved to New York City in 1981, she and
her friends often went to bars in the East Village, but for a few years, she could no longer
tolerate “all these dirty kids around.”
At first, East Ninth Street does not seem to have been exempt from the perceived
disorder of the neighborhood. Liza, the owner of a vintage clothing store on the block,
says that throughout the 1970s most of today’s stores were used as apartments. Next to her
store, “about 50 anarchists” lived in a commune. She remembers that they often smashed
windows of parked cars to steal radios or anything they could sell for money to buy drugs.
She mentions a store at the eastern end of the block that she and her friends suspected
of being a center for producing drugs; another storeowner suspects that a former owner
of the candle shop sold illegal drugs.
Yet the long-time storeowners say that conditions were different “west of First Avenue.”
According to Thomas, “this block has always been good. Even in the middle seventies,
when the neighborhood was bad, when there were some very bad blocks, and some very
bad areas, this block was always one of the better blocks in the neighborhood—if not the
best.” He remembers “a little Mafia clubhouse down the street, with all these gangster
guys hanging out there in the evening . . . [who] didn’t disturb, really. They were joking
around. They were like ‘wise guys’ there; they were not a problem because we knew them
and we knew where they were.” As far as Thomas knew, these “Mafiosi” ran an illegal
betting and numbers business. Not only did the men not peddle drugs on the block, they
apparently were, in some sense, good neighbors, for Liza remembers that they offered help
“whenever somebody gave [her] ‘a problem.’” The precise ethnicity of these “Mafiosi” is
not certain—another storeowner refers to them as “the Ukrainian Brotherhood”—but
what is important is that, as urban folk wisdom has it, locally-based criminals may actually
protect a block, at least by providing “eyes on the street.”
Aside from safety, this block differed from the surrounding side streets in another,
intangible way. “Even forty years ago, this block was popular,” says Susana, a saleswoman
who has lived on East Ninth Street since 1962. At that time, her rent was only $37 a
month—mainly because of the lack of modern facilities and possibly also because of rent
stabilization laws—but even when rents increased later, “this block has been all the time
popular. People would come out of the subway at Astor Place and they would walk towards
this street.” This could not be the explanation, however, for the subway exit really points
people toward St. Marks Place (Eighth Street). But, according to Glenna, the owner of a
home accessories store: “This block has always been trendy . . . forever. Back to the fifties,
maybe even the forties. It has always been an eclectic street, very eclectic.”
Thomas suggests that this eclecticism may be related to the stores on the block: “There
was a long tradition of shops,” he says. “Little shops, owned by artists and craftsmen . . . .
In the sixties and seventies, in this street, there were a lot of handicraft people. There was
one guy who used to make chess sets, and every one of them was different. Another guy
had a leather shop, and several women designed and made clothes. A lot of these people
lived in there, too. They had their little shop in front and they lived in back . . . . It was not
much different than it is now.”

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Although the atmosphere on East Ninth Street may have been like it is today, patterns
of sociability were different. “There were not as many people living in this neighborhood,”
Thomas remembers. And, in fact, the number of people living in the general area of this
zipcode has increased by about 12 percent since 1980—with a relative decrease of the very
old and very young (<www.infoshare.org>, Aug. 14, 2003). “So it was a little quieter . . . .
And it was a working class neighborhood, so everybody got up in the morning and went to
work. And the neighborhood was really quiet. Not much traffic, not many people . . . . And
then, at 5 or 6 o’clock, everybody came home. And there was a lot of activity, especially in
the summertime, when the weather was nice. People would bring chairs and sit outside,
talk to their neighbors. Kids would play in the street. There was a repair garage down the
street, and there would be cars in the street that he was fixing . . . . It was more of a social
scene on the street.”
So, for various reasons, East Ninth Street was able to maintain a relatively safe, rich
street life despite the presence of “hippies” in the neighborhood and rising drug and
crime rates.

WAVES OF CHANGE

In the 1980s, two population changes had a decisive influence on the East Village: the
aging of the working-class residents and the arrival of artists and yuppies. Liza mentions
the beginning of NYU’s expansion in the area; Thomas talks about the opening of art
galleries, and says that local residents got younger. He also discusses racial diversity and
mentions that Charlie Parker, the jazz musician, lived in the East Village for years with his
white wife; he speculates that they felt comfortable here. At this point in the early 1980s,
despite low-key racial integration, fears about disorder, and low rents, an astute observer
could feel a new wave of change. “The neighborhood got younger,” Thomas says, “and it
got more popular . . . . In an apartment where maybe a husband and wife [had lived], now
there might be three or four students living . . . so [there was] more of a concentration
of people and a younger population. Then slowly . . . a big thing [happened]: a lot more
people [were] in the neighborhood during the day.”
A few stores survived these demographic changes. Ukrainia metamorphosed from a
sundries shop into an inexpensive “ethnic” restaurant; the bakery and shoe repair shop,
which according to local lore were opened in the 1920s, retained their aging ethnic
owners and ways. Alongside them, new craftsmen of handmade shoes and chess sets plied
their trade. In 1980, the elder statesman of current storeowners on the block, an African-
American jazz musician, opened a clothing store. But the tipping point of change came
in the mid 1980s. As more “creative” young residents moved into the area, a number of
storefronts on the block were turned into vintage or semi-antiques furniture stores. In
addition to the four furniture stores that are on the block today, four other owners say
that their stores were previously furniture stores, either immediately before they took over
the storefronts or at some point in the past. Those eight furniture stores marked the first
step in the block’s present-day commercial agglomeration.
A few “pioneers” followed the jazz musician and opened clothing stores on the block,
and several of them remain. Liza, a Ukrainian woman who has lived all her life in the East
Village, opened her consignment store for vintage clothes in 1986, but recalls that not
many other stores, especially clothing stores, were around. “The block was just beginning

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to pick up,” she says. Around the same time, Eileen Fisher opened a shop that sold simple,
women’s sportswear in natural fibers. At first, she shared a single storefront with another
merchant; then, as sales increased, she moved into her own store across the street. Fisher
became the block’s first, and certainly greatest, success, for within 10 years she expanded by
opening stores in other areas of Manhattan and, eventually, sold her collections nationally
by mail order and in department stores and malls (as well as on Amazon.com). The
company still maintains the original shop on East Ninth Street, other storeowners believe,
from nostalgia; yet, according to Glenna, the home-accessories store owner, “when [they]
have a sale, there is a line in front of that store.”
The media attention that Eileen Fisher’s store attracted also drew attention to the
block. By that time, despite their different specialties, the new storeowners shared an
aesthetic sensibility to modern store design. Like The Gap, which underwent a full-fledged
corporate makeover in the mid 1980s (Zukin, 2003), these small shops installed large plate-
glass windows, used bright lighting, and painted the walls white; their clean lines and
illumination accentuated the subtle colors (at Eileen Fisher) or the bold combinations of
colors (at the other stores) of their stock. “Before, [the stores were] very hippie looking,”
Liza recalls of their dark, makeshift interiors, “but by then, very pretty stores started to
open. The New York Times started to write about [the block], and it became known.”
Media attention had already saturated the area because of the East Village art scene.
But these new stores evoked quite a different sensibility. And when the art galleries and
performance spaces that were so wildly popular in the early 1980s faded, journalists turned
to the area’s restaurants and shopping spaces: these became part of the new phenomenon
of “lifestyle shopping.” Liza remembers that the storefront next to hers was, “many years
ago,” an antiques shop. Then it became Paris Apartment, a designer-clothing boutique
that sold fabulous, one-of-a-kind objects of home décor; she thinks that a book was pub-
lished about it. Indeed it was, and, when we checked, we found that the book was written
by the store’s owner (Strasser, 1997). According to the jacket, “The Paris Apartment is
a popular shop in the East Village, where visitors can step back in time and immerse
themselves in the beauty and romance of antique furnishings. Reflecting an unusual mix
of design influences (Baroque, rococo, neoclassical, and Art Deco) and personal taste,
its style is luxurious, playful, and wholly original.” After that store disappeared, William-
Wayne, another shop that sells unusual home accessories and objects, opened in its place
and, in Liza’s words, “all the rich ladies used to come to them.” Many storeowners on
the block remember William-Wayne because when the store was written up in New York
magazine, “they made it really big” and moved uptown, also opening a branch in the cen-
ter of Greenwich Village. In the former storefront, a new shop now sells evening dresses
and silver jewelry, in line with the block’s current concentration of women’s clothing
shops.
Storeowners pinpoint a second wave of change in the mid 1990s when a number of new
stores—including most of the women’s clothing stores—began to open. “It changed in
1996,” says Glenna. “That’s when women’s dresses started. It happened just as I opened my
store here . . . . Very different shops were here before that. This shop was a camera store.
Another used to sell pianos. Another was a candle shop . . . . Paris Apartment . . . Hex . . . .
But now, [there are] more and more clothes.”
A third wave of owners opened stores in the early 2000s. They were drawn by the
reputation the block had established as a shopping destination, by Eileen Fisher’s success,
and by the aesthetic distinction of the stores already there. In addition to wedding gowns

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and evening dresses—with one wedding gown designer renting two separate storefronts—
the new shops on the block sell hand-sewn fabric purses, decorative objects, and home
accessories, and there is even a small shop that sells “exotic” dresses made in Vietnam,
which is the only American outpost of a Japanese chain. By this point, the block is not only
an incubator of new stores, it also represents a move up from cheaper surroundings. “It
made sense [for me to move here]” from a studio on the Lower East Side, Eleanor says.
“I had not even thought about the East Village before. It was not upscale enough in the
past. That is why I had not considered it five or seven years ago.”
The disadvantage of the block’s success is that rents climb steadily higher—which dis-
courages owners from opening stores outside of the proven money-maker of women’s
clothes (and that also conforms to general trends in the retail clothing industry). Yet “the
rents on this block have always been higher than the rest [of the neighborhood],” Glenna
says. If this is true, then East Ninth Street has “always” had a built-in exclusivity.

THE SYNERGIES OF DIVERSITY

The design of the storefronts, and the custom and hand-made products that they sell, give
the block an aura of elegance and creativity. None of the surrounding blocks has so many
storefronts that exemplify the hallmarks of clean, light, modern design. But this aesthetic
harmony contrasts with the diversity of styles the stores offer. This diversity is a point of
pride among the storeowners and a mark, they claim, of the block’s identity. “They are all
designers here and they all have their own styles,” storeowners repeatedly told us. “It’s all
different styles.”
Like Eileen Fisher when she began, many of the storeowners design and even fabricate
their wares. “I have my own look, it’s not the same as the others,” one storeowner says. “My
background is in design.” Asked how she differentiates her creations from those of other
storeowners on the block, she replies, “It’s not really competition. Everybody has unique
products, so that’s not a problem. Nobody has my stuff ‘cause I design it, of course.” The
owner of the purse shop says, “It’s definitely a ‘different’ shop.” And even the owner of the
eyewear store explains that he gets a lot of publicity “because we’re so unusual, you know.
Nobody has this stuff. I try to have things that nobody has. We have eyeglasses from the
1600s! And the accessories fit in accordingly. Look at this shirt: who [else] has a leather
cowboy shirt from the 50s? Where else can you find that? That’s why they come. They
think they have discovered something, and they want to write about it.”
Despite all this creativity, prices—though hardly cheap—are not very high. A dress may
cost $100–150; a wedding gown, several thousand dollars. Buying from these designers,
moreover, can be thought of as an investment, for they may be on their way to big careers
and to stores uptown. In light of these factors, the clientele includes young people on
modest budgets who want to explore the city’s aesthetic diversity, more affluent NYU
students’ visiting parents, and affluent residents of other areas of the city as well as from
wealthy suburbs. “This block has got written up in the New York Times and in guidebooks as
a good shopping block,” says Thomas. “So now a lot of people come in from Westchester
[County]. It’s become a destination.”
Yet the shops’ location in a marginal area downtown rather than on Madison Avenue
may confuse some shoppers. The owner of an evening dress store says that two types of
customer come to the block looking for the utterly Ninth Street outfit. One type is “the

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little rich girl from Park Avenue” who comes with her father’s credit card: “Some people
who come here, they’re label conscious, but here it’s not about the label. Some things I
do in only one piece, and they like that. They like the fact that, unlike something with
a brand name, if they get something here, it will be special . . . . [That girl] comes here
‘cause she knows that what she gets here will be special, and her friends will not know
where it is from.” But the other type of customer, seeing a lone designer working in her
shop, expects to order a custom-made wedding gown and pay a low price for it. “The other
day, a girl came in and told me she wants a wedding dress, and I said OK. She described
what she wanted—the best material. . . . But she said she could only pay me $600 max. I
said I can’t do it, and she was surprised I didn’t want the business. Well, with $600, I can
maybe cover [the cost of] the material, but custom made is a lot of work. I would have to
close my shop for so many days [to work on it]. So I said, ‘Look, girl, custom dresses are
not for everybody. That’s why it’s custom.’”
So it’s not only the products that are distinctive, it’s the whole experience of shopping
in the store. This common aura—what we might call “the distinction of diversity”—is
implicitly confirmed by the individual owners’ sense of identity as designers, as well as by
the collective identity of the block. Brenda, another storeowner, suggests that the owners
actively work to promote the agglomeration: “If somebody comes and asks for something
that I do not do, or I see that they need something else, I send them to other stores on the
block. I know that they send people to me as well. So I try to keep the customer within the
block.” Susana refers to the avoidance of competition as an unspoken etiquette. Unless it
happens by accident, she says, no one will deliberately sell something that is already being
sold in another store on the block. After all, says Eric, the husband of another storeowner,
“it’s New York City, and there are plenty of customers for everybody.”
In the past, the East Village had a merchants’ association that received funding from
New York State to improve business in the neighborhood, and also an association of East
Village designers that occasionally put on group fashion shows, but neither exists today.
At the moment, storeowners on the block are organized in a loose street association
that puts up holiday lights at Christmas and sometimes coordinates a summer sale day.
They have also placed advertisements for the block in tourist guidebooks, but we get the
impression that these are sporadic and somewhat spontaneous events. With the exception
of Glenna, no one among the storeowners takes an entrepreneurial role in promoting the
agglomeration, but even she is not very successful at doing so.
There are, nonetheless, synergies in the block’s diversity that are similar to the “formal-
ization of difference” that may help innovative economic regions (Sabel, 2001). Eleanor,
who did not find the East Village sufficiently upscale until she opened her store on the
block in 2001, says that there is a friendly feeling between storeowners and residents, which
contributes to the atmosphere. “Another nice thing is the people who live here in this
block. When I was renovating the store, they would come in and introduce themselves,
and ever since, if I happen to be looking up as they pass, we say hello to each other. We are
very friendly.” She contrasts this with SoHo, where she used to share a shop, and no one
came in to chat with her. “I think it’s probably due to the past of the East Village—all this
hippie culture, the friendliness, the openness . . . . I think this is a very solid neighborhood,
and I like that quite a lot. Not only the shops, but the neighborhood.”
Eleanor goes on to praise the old shops that remain on the block. “The past is here,”
she says, unlike on the newly upscale Lower East Side around Orchard Street. “I also like
it very much that it is not totally upscale here. Not like in SoHo. There are stores that have

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been here for 20 years . . . Like this musician [who opened his store in 1980, and plays his
keyboard on the street in the evening], he adds so much flavor.”
There is, in short, a coherence that arises from the aesthetic diversity and social re-
lations of the designers, storeowners, and residents of East Ninth Street. Managing this
diversity—and maintaining the distinction of difference—is one of the most important
factors underlying the commercial renewal of the block. But we emphasize that the rel-
evant unit is the block, not the individual store. You can often overhear visitors on East
Ninth Street saying: “Look at that cute store over there.” We believe that it is the clus-
ter of stores that really has charm. Again, Jane Jacobs’s ideas about the uses of diversity
provide the key. The old shops of several different eras form a backdrop for the newer
boutiques. They fuel the sense of what is “interesting” without jeopardizing the coherence
of stylish images. Unlike on St. Marks Place, moreover, no extravagant colors or models
are on display, no goth blacks or punk chains, no overtly hippie connotations. This quiet
coherence supports the dynamics of the block as a distinctive consumption space. And it is
maintained, in part, by restrictions set by building owners. The “For Rent” sign that is now
posted on one storefront says: “No Food, No Jewelry, No Gifts/Experienced Businessper-
son Only/No Flakes, No Weirdos.” More than cross-marketing, or sending customers to
each other’s stores, the store owners and building owners foster a synergy of images that
gives East Ninth Street a distinctive, urbane character. This cannot be reproduced at other
shopping sites, whether they are uptown on Madison Avenue or in suburban malls.6

WHERE IS THE GLOBAL?

Urbanists and students of globalization often make a false dichotomy between the “local”
and the “global.” Clearly, both the old population of the East Village and the storeowners
of East Ninth Street came from other places. So do the new population and new storeown-
ers on the block. Although there are foreigners and immigrants among them, however,
the new people come mainly from the United States and even from other parts of the
city. Products sold in the shops and the materials from which they are made are also often
imported: silks from Asia, home accessories from Zimbabwe as well as New Mexico, laces
from Switzerland, and other fabrics from Europe and around the world. But these are not
the finished products of sweatshop labor or multinational chains. The clothing storeown-
ers, in particular, often design and make the products that they sell. In a very traditional
sense, then, the shops on East Ninth Street “localize” the global.
This agglomeration of shops strongly resembles the regional economic districts that
are said to be able to innovate successfully in response to global economic competition.
Rather than enforcing a uniform specialization, these districts are “homogeneous viewed
from the outside, [but] highly differentiated in their own view, with micro-specializations
that make most of their colleagues into potential partners rather than rivals” (Sabel,
2001, p. 6). Of most interest to an urban economy, these districts represent a different
sort of globalization from the standardized, hierarchical subcontracting arrangements of
multinational corporations; they suggest “different territorialities of innovation,” which
are based on a self-conscious “reflexivity” and cooperative social relations (Storper, 1997).
Although industrial agglomerations are an old idea—and an even older reality—in the
urban economy, perhaps this sort of cluster of consumption spaces responds to many
cities’ new economic reality. They are not just part of the habitus of a new middle class,

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which is sometimes disparaged as full of yuppies: they are part of the production of a new
urban economy.
We are making, then, both an economic and a cultural argument, combining the in-
sights of the regional economists with both Jane Jacobs on diversity and Pierre Bourdieu
on distinction. This requires that we reconcile two quite different points of view on distinc-
tion. For consumers, distinction implies the serendipitous discovery of unique elements
among the aesthetic and social diversity of the city. For storeowners, it implies the adroit
management of diversity, mainly by concentrating, channeling, and coordinating unique-
ness. At some point—when consumers move on to less-traveled quarters of the city, or
when storeowners are unable to maintain a desirable cultural edge—a shopping street
risks losing its distinction and falling into a cycle of decline. Far from criticizing new con-
sumer culture as evidence of gentrification, we think it is good to encourage consumption
spaces that provide complementary kinds of distinction.
Managing distinction in this sense requires that building owners set limits on the kinds
of businesses they will rent space to. It also requires that city authorities ensure a mix of old
and new buildings and high and low rents. This suggests that the city government should
subsidize innovative, small-scale retail stores, perhaps by offering small business loans for
incubators through applied art schools and in cooperation with urban universities. The
failure of individual shops will surely be part of this development, just as it has affected
individual storefronts on East Ninth Street. But formalizing the “different” strengths of
new consumption spaces holds out potential for other urban neighborhoods.
Often, discussion of new urban consumption spaces focuses on fears of displacement,
usually because of higher rents. Indeed, the two-step economic process of gentrification—a
change, first, to “creative” consumption spaces and then, to chain stores—generally does
displace existing shops. Yet rents on East Ninth Street have “always” been higher than
on surrounding streets. In this case, as Sabel and Storper imply, it must be the social
relations of the East Village—and of the block—which sustain the cluster of difference.
Some residual local culture must survive despite the expanded social networks, through
media attention and clientele, which connect these shops to a global consumer culture.
That survival of local culture, we suppose, is the most difficult part of East Ninth Street’s
redevelopment to reproduce.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the storeowners on East Ninth Street who shared their views
and experiences with us. We take full responsibility for interpreting what they told us.
Notes
1 The East Village is the northernmost part of the Lower East Side, stretching about a mile from Houston
Street north to 14th Street, and from the Bowery (Third Avenue) to the East River. During the late 1960s, people
began to call this area the East Village because of its proximity to Greenwich Village. Within a few years, it was
also called “Loisaida,” a Hispanicization of Lower East Side, and the eastern edge of it gained the nickname
“Alphabet City,” a gritty romanticization of the avenues east of First Avenue, which are named for letters of the
alphabet.
2 As a history of recent avant garde poetry says: “In the 1960s and ‘70s, when St. Marks Church in the Bowery
served as headquarters for a second generation of New York School poets” (Lehman, 1998, p. 12).
3 We hope this description conveys both objectivity and familiarity. One of us has lived on the block for the

past year, and the other has lived nearby since the 1970s.

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4 There are more stores than buildings because several houses have stores on both the street and below-street
(basement) levels, and, in at least one wider building, there are stores on both sides of the entrance.
5 Besides these six “local” stores and the 17 women’s clothing shops, the stores on the block include five shops
for design objects and home accessories, four furniture stores (including semi-antiques), two furniture repair
shops, one unusual eyewear store (which has provided eyeglasses for A Beautiful Mind and The Matrix, as well
as other films and Broadway shows), one store selling handmade purses, one jewelry store, one backpack and
messenger bag store, two makeup and body-care stores, one store for wedding gown accessories, one art gallery,
one candle store, and one store specializing in children’s handmade and wooden toys. During several weeks
in the summer of 2003, we carried out semi-structured interviews with 11 storeowners about their history on
the block; each interview lasted between 20 minutes and one hour. We have tried to protect the storeowners’
identities by giving them, and their stores, pseudonyms, and by generalizing specific details.
6By the same token, East Ninth Street competes with other small agglomerations of designer stores in NoLIta
and the Lower East Side, which, as newer clusters, get more media buzz.

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