Gurin’s decentralization plan saw subcultures franchised into every neighborhood by 1977.

Evidence

Gurin argued for decentralization. Instead of one central MacDougal Street, every neighborhood needed one. In its way Murray the K’s World had been that; in another way Gurin’s prescription would develop over the next decade. The 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever is both vision and evidence of neighborhood MacDougal Streets. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1951

Categorization

• SEED: The franchising-of-scenes argument — from one MacDougal Street to a disco in every borough — is a precise test case for how avant-garde density disperses and dilutes.
• XREF: Direct evidence for why culture stagnates now: the decentralization/scaling of subculture is the obverse of the density that produced the 60s scene.