According to this article in the New York Times by Diane Cardwell, we’re taking the best of (our version of) Old New York and mapping it over the current city (New New York?), creating a simulation city: New-York-That-Never-Was-But-Should-Have-Been.

Cardwell focuses on the zombie-resurrection of chic West Village eateries. Other writers have undoubtedly examined various facets of this phenomenon: the olding of the new city, the creation of the New-Old New York.

Simulation and city-simulating fascinate me. First, I consider at work the ideal of New York (and, by extension, all of America) as eternally new, always remaking itself, changing, accepting new populations and growing and shrinking along unexpected vectors, so that once-chic neighborhoods become hoods, and hoods become chic, and populations at odds with one another are mapped asymmetrically onto one another, creating new generations of populations with new beefs and new-old traditions: “In Little [Origin Place], we’re going to do it how we did it back in [Origin Place].” (Or picture hipsters dressing “just like” Victorians.)

Simulation adds another level of complexity to this play, because it lets Evil Developer Guy or Artsy Small Business Dude simulate an “authentic to neighborhood X circa year Y” experience, and this new simulated experience continues to influence the “not-simulated” experiences surrounding it.

The trick is that every experience was, at one point, simulated. When populations moved into the City, they simulated the cities they came from. Russians brought Moscow; Cubans, Havana; &c. This is old hat, but worth repeating.

Simulation on a shorter wavelength (simulating one place in the same place—the Village in the Village—in 1960, a relatively short time ago) only changes the nature of what you’re simulating, why it’s appealing, and how you market it. Instead of harkening back to some eternal value or tradition, you’re exposing your process for your audience: “Come here because we’re just as new as they were, back then…”

To be “modern” (or Modernist), you must always be new against whatever is perceived as “old.” With our high old-new turnover, the “old” now ranges from the 1960s, for Baby Boomers, to the 90s of Tupac and Biggie, for students who were raised on Jay and Nas and have already forgotten even the Bush years and moved on to Weezy.

Metaphor-conjecture: City-simulating is the “reblogging” of old buildings, earlier styles, and bygone services in new social and physical contexts. You take a boring-”old” building (not old, yet not modern) and make it new by making it traditionally-old. You re-post a classic iteration of a classic meme, and the context around it makes it new, and it makes new the context.

Another ideal to consider: “Simulation makes it better.” Said in plain Amerkan: “Do ‘er over agin, boys. Second time’s a lucky charm.”

Look at Disney. Is your Land-That-Simulates-America-Better-Than-America-Actually-Is not grand enough for you, Walt? Simulate the Land. Make a World. Because every time you play God—as an artist, a CEO, a scientist—you might as well play God bigger and better than the last time.

From Cardwell’s article, emphasis mine:

“There’s so much that’s Vegas-y and Houston-y and random that you want a place that feels sort of timeless New York in a not-kitschy way,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who worked on the latest revival, in 2009, of the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “And of course you would want to re-create it in the current notion of what it ought to have been.”

Now a caveat: Humans have always done this. We’ve always gone back to tradition and built it over innovation, “exactly as it once was,” and it has never been “exactly as it was.” It’s always been innovation in “traditional-and-therefore-trustworthy” sheep’s clothing. To gives just one multi-example:

Rome made itself Greek; Constantine made Greek Byzantium into the New Rome; the so-called Founding Fathers made New York the (New) New Rome; New York makes itself the asphalt-and-steel-bound rod of splinters from every city; every city comes here to take back crap signifying “New York;” I can go to Tokyo and buy real New York crap that signifies the New Rome, which signifies Greece, which was a brutal Bronze Age seaside waste that the Greeks desperately fought to leave… Simulation implies a want, a want to make new, even if by making old. To harken-back-to, to legitimize.

Simulation is gimmickry, but it’s perfectly natural. We’re a species of charlatans. Drunken monkeys with the cleverness to build skyscrapers.

But again—old hat. Finishing off, from Cardwell:

During the Depression, [social historian Jan Whitaker] added, New Yorkers preferred old-fashioned fake-Colonial dining rooms to the sleek Moderne-style establishments that opened after the repeal of Prohibition.