My local 'atheist church' is part of the long, inglorious march of gentrification

[rug]

The Sydney Sunday Assembly isn’t much deeper than consumption, dressed up as community, for yuppies who want to feel good

Adam Brereton
theguardian.com, Wednesday 12 March 2014 00.04 EDT

There’s a pub in Petersham, a suburb in Sydney’s inner west, called the Oxford Tavern. It was once an iconic strip club, but far as I’m aware there hasn’t been a pair of bare breasts in there for a while. Last year it was transformed into a strip club themed yuppie gastropub, with craft beers on tap and tasting plates on offer.

“Because it was such an icon of Sydney, we tried to pay a bit of a homage to the place, so we’ve tried to recycle as much as we could from the old venue,” licensee Steve Forbes said of the new fit-out. “So the original stripper poles are still in the front bar ... and the neon lights out the front have changed from ‘Live Hot Girls’ to ‘Live Hot Barbecue’.”

The Sunday Assembly, an atheist church founded in London last year, has set up shop a few stops up the train line from the Oxford Tavern, in Redfern. They swap out hymns for pop songs, motivational speeches for readings, and celebrate “the one life we know we have”. I attended their last service, and found myself disagreeing violently with co-founder Sanderson Jones’ characterisation of the gathering as “all the best bits of church, but with no religion.” That’s like saying the best part of the old Oxford Tavern was the poles.

Enjoyable or not, both the new Tavern and the Sunday Assembly are part of the long, inglorious march of gentrification. The pub’s new clientele tries to access some of the old strip club’s charm, drinking cocktails like the “swinging tit” and the “banana hammock”. In a similar way, the Sunday Assembly attempts to recreate an imagined moment when vibrant church communities were a real thing, but with none of the obligations. In order to operate, both have had to kick out the original tenants, the reason for visiting in the first place: the strippers and, in the case of the Sunday Assembly, God.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/12/my-local-atheist-church-is-part-of-the-long-inglorious-march-of-gentrification

[cbayer]

1. Nothing new about gentrification.

There was a lot of fuss when Ann Rice bought a former nunnery and turned it into a home/museum. And I remember a church in New York that was turned into a dance club. In both instances, the chapels were used for rather decadent purposes and some people were offended.

The Sunday Assembly remains rather enigmatic, but it seems a more appropriate use of a church than a dance club might be.

[rug]

2. That was The Limelight in Manhattan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limelight

It's a gourmet food market now.

[cbayer]

3. Ahha!! Such memories I have of that.

AIDS was becoming a major issue. I remember the first time I went. I think it was the first big dance club I had ever been to. There were dancers up on altars and the whole scene was, well, pretty fabulous. After a while, though, it started to feel like dancing on the titanic.

[rug]

4. Those places repelled me.

I grew up a few blocks from the original Fridays on First Avenue and the yuppie scourge spread uptown like the plague, all the while the rent-controlled buildings on the East Side were being torn down for luxury high-rises to house them.

[cbayer]

5. Do you remember Adam's Apple?

It was kitty cornered from the TGIF's and it was my first job in Manhattan.

When I went to apply for my job, it was entirely staffed by gay men, though it catered to a mostly straight "Saturday Night Fever" loving crowd. For whatever reason, they hired me (this has been a repeated phenomenon through my life and led to some of my most interesting experiences).

Anyway, what the staff did to some of the food and drink, particularly during prom season, will not be shared by me.

[rug]

6. Oh yeah. How many of the customers came in from Long Island and New Jersey?

[cbayer]

7. And Brooklyn and Queens.

Very few actual Manhattanites came near the place.