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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> There is no real artistic or cultural activity in Lower Manhattan anymore

I live in Flatiron. My neighbourhood has multiple experimental ballet, jazz, classical music and small-style theatre venues. And it isn’t even a hotbed for any of those things!

For the audience it comes with, New York is cheap. Add to that our strong subsidised housing programs, many of which have special vouchers for artists, and our comfort with roommates and lack of a need for a car and I think you’ll find a thriving creative scene, in Manhattan and across New York.

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> I live in Flatiron. My neighbourhood has multiple experimental ballet, jazz, classical music and small-style theatre venues. And it isn’t even a hotbed for any of those things!

This is weird to me, because my social circle is full of Berklee and conservatory grads in these spaces, they all live here and are successful in their fields... and yet they have a better chance of their work being staged in Texas or Baltimore than they do here.

OP said there is a dearth of cultural and artistic activity in Manhattan. I was countering that with examples of numerous quality venues within walking distance of my lowish-key neighbourhood.

It does not follow that it is easy to get booked here. Of course it will be more competitive to be staged in New York than in Baltimore. But the pay-offs are higher. So you see quality concentrate with the ranks of the expelled replaced by ambitious newcomers.

Actually, my experience with these venues is that they don't care about local, available talent that's almost certainly better. The reasons behind this are up for debate.

I've seen a lot of mediocre performances.

>ballet, jazz, classical

To the author’s point, these are the default tastes of shallow wealth. You will find services of these genres/motifs anywhere you find wealth. Your point does not imply “creativity” but production and performance. It does not imply enlightenment but rather the very essence of decadence.

Are some of these participants creative? Naturally. These forms are plenty important/respected in culture and the arts, but that is not the perspective which underwrites their survival in NYC. This survival is based on their compatibility with wealthy patrons.

Realize that 1940s modern art, which is most associated with NYC becoming the center of the world’s art scene, was entirely a product of the working class.

It’s all relative. But to say the flatiron neighborhood is a thriving cultural scene is a stretch. Is a ballet school for rich kids part of a creative scene? Is Eataly, a food court for tourists?

A better measure of the neighborhood’s creative DNA is the number of cultural events in Madison Square Park, where just yesterday there was an LL Bean promotional event taking place next to a Brooks Brothers promotional event (you can’t make this stuff up).

In this New Yorker’s opinion the last time your neighborhood had a creative pulse was when artists and photographers lived there in order to be within walking distance of the (now long-dead) photo district, where all the labs and darkrooms were. How many musicians and ballet dancers live there now, when a take-out salad in a plastic bowl is easily $20?

The linked article is maddening to me b/c it’s so damn accurate.

> Is a ballet school for rich kids part of a creative scene?

Yes? And it isn’t a school, it’s a repertory. With performers—not kids—from a variety of backgrounds.

Next to the promotional events (which aren’t always horrible) you will find publicly-funded music performances in the park (I never go to these), lectures at NYU and the New School, and random local performers at several bars in the neighbourhood. (Though I personally prefer the West Village for jazz.)

This isn't much different from say Lawrence, Kansas, much less any decent-sized American city.

Anyone who finds the cultural variety within walking distance of any point in Manhattan is comparable to a mid-sized city probably shouldn’t be in New York. (You’re overpaying if the experiences are comparable.)

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