Stealth Gentrification: Camouflage and Commerce on the Lower East Side

East Side. It examines how global factors such as expanding " content " industries, market differentiation , and the Internet have reinforced perceptions of the area as real and authentic while opening it to dramatic change. Specifically, the article considers a recent trend of commercial camouflage — hidden shops, restaurants and clubs that " represent " tradition by meticulously preserving defunct facades, signage, and other physical traces of the neighbor-hood's working-class and immigrant past. Urban camouflage, in various guises, has played a role in the transformation of the Lower East Side since the late 1970s, and has been employed by a succession of actors, from squatters to global retailers. As a cultural strategy, it has been inherent to the economic restructuring of the area, helping to overcome barriers to redevelopment that have persisted for more than five decades. In 1995 I visited a friend who had just rented a studio apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side — an area strongly associated with some of the city's main immigrant communities: European Jews, Italians, and more recently, Asians and Hispanics. The apartment was on the ground floor, in a derelict-looking converted storefront on Elizabeth Street, near the flophouses of the Bowery. Adjacent storefronts appeared vacant or defensively sealed, but we crossed the street to a restaurant that, in typical New York fashion, appeared to have no name. Its awning and facade instead advertised a previous, long-departed tenant — the brittle plastic letters on the marquis reading simply " M & R. " (fig.1) As it turned out, the restaurant was known as Marion's, and it was an offshoot of a fashionable, yet funky establishment a few blocks north. In later years, it would mostly be known as the M & R bar. By the late 1990s, it would also be encircled by the thriving shops of an emerging district, dubbed NoLIta (or North Little Italy) by merchants and real estate agents. By then, however, my friend had moved on to a more affordable apartment Lara Belkind is an architect and urban planner and a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.