A recent story about progress towards beginning construction of Ballpark Village next to the new Busch Stadium – now with condos, and the possibility of breaking even! – reminded me of an article by William Gibson. Gibson wrote of the “gone world” in a city as described by a friend, the familiar buildings and areas of New York City that natives knew but were gradually disappearing over the last 20 years as they gave way to new development meant to ‘regood’ the city:

The sewing machine spare-parts quarter, for instance (gone), or the tenement that once housed McGurk’s Suicide Hall (gone). Bits and pieces of SoHo and TriBeCa and Chelsea, all gone. Had I not had so observant a guide, I certainly would have missed them, these glimpses of vanishing things, but my friend had treasured them all, and was pained by their going, and took care to show them to me. It was his conviction that they were invariably replaced by much less interesting things (to put it mildly), and I generally agreed.

Gibson goes on to describe how he had already gone through this process with his own city of Toronto, its history written in old crumbling townhouses with scrollwork and timeworn stones with roots back to the gaslight era. Over time, the ‘regooding’ erased these and many other reminders of the past, the bohemian districts gradually overtaken and remade into condos and more sterile developments, a process now repeated in New York’s SoHo and especially Times Square. The intent is clearly to modernize, sterilize, and frankly to pimp out a city to make it more attractive to visitors. In a later blog posting, Gibson quotes Cory Doctorow’s response to the article, where despite these efforts, “Toronto is a great place to live, and not such a great place to visit.” And as for regooding process itself, he goes on to note:

That “we are doing a city here, but we are simultaneously operating as a complex of gated attractions (and we’ve got the labret stud to prove it)” thing is inherently dodgy. Anywhere. Or everywhere, increasingly. Yesterday, reading some retail-hipster web-guide to Berlin, I noted the writer taking it for granted that London loses a certain kind of tourist, these days, to Berlin and Amsterdam. The ones looking for the city thing as opposed to the gated attractions thing.

In other words, London – like NYC and Toronto – has headed down the path of trying to remake itself into someplace people would want to visit, rather than its prior reputation of being someplace people want to visit because of what it was innately, and the savvy visitor in search of something genuine has moved on to less-altered destinations. The elaborate new constructions come at the expense of layered history, and genuine experience is traded for synthetic. The very concept of the Ballpark Village making downtown St. Louis a ‘destination,’ along with the major casino development already underway near the Whatever-It’s-Today Dome, all falls into this same model already seen elsewhere (after all, we wouldn’t want to do anything here unless it had already been done on the coasts). Put another way, the Olive Garden is a genre franchise based on a generic Italian restaurant. What happens once all the real, authentic Italian restaurants have been replaced with Olive Gardens?

This same struggle for authenticity in a world increasingly consumed with the cleaner, faster simulation has other recent examples:

• Digital cameras that make you look slimmer, remove wrinkles or add a tan, and even wait for a ‘genuine’ smile, further undermining the role of photography in recording reality.
• Colleges are scrutinizing applications for evidence of ‘authenticity,’ resulting in advisors suggesting how to game the system with strategic typos. The colleges themselves get a drubbing for the de rigeur pamphlets that show immaculately-attired, race-balanced students smiling with their textbooks in hand under trees.
• Mike Lee ponders the rise and fall cycle of fame/success/cool in his Sincerity Theory.