Geneviève Vallerand takes a fresh look at New York City

By Frank Kuin

Geneviève Vallerand has taken her research in history beyond books and archives to the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side.

Vallerand, who is receiving an Honours degree in History this month, has examined the gentrification of that area in an imaginative, cross-disciplinary study combining history with geography and urban sociology.

She has used cultural sources like advertisements and protest posters to analyze the “historical consciousness” that helped develop the Lower East Side from a poor neighborhood of working-class immigrants into a trendy enclave of middle-class New Yorkers.

“Gentrification is a topic that has been covered quite extensively by geographers and urban sociologists, but very little by historians,” she said.

“My idea was to historicize all the elements that are part of gentrification, like why are people fascinated with these crumbling landscapes, and what are the historical stereotypes of neighborhoods that entice young students or particular segments of the population to move back there?”

Current occupants of the area, from businesses to artists, like to showcase remnants of what the neighborhood used to be, such as an old signpost from its days as Little Italy, she observed.

Paradoxically, the middle class once disdained the immigrant character of the area. Now, its symbols of poverty and decay have become “urban chic.”

While gentrification has often been criticized by neo-Marxist scholars as a class-based phenomenon, Vallerand takes a pragmatic view. “There is displacement occurring, but at the same time, you can’t idealize what was.”

For her graduate studies, she is moving on to York University, where she plans to continue exploring the link between history and geography.

Vallerand, who has been active in student life in Concordia’s History Department, said she would miss the professors there. “They have challenged me in a way that makes me appreciate critical thinking.”