Better New York Foundation Symbol Analysis

The Better New York Foundation symbolizes how outside money can gentrify communities without those communities’ consent. In the novel, great cities can come alive and choose a human protector, an “avatar,” from among its human residents. When New York is born, it chooses six avatars: one representing the whole city and one for each of New York City’s five boroughs. The avatars derive power from things that represent the essence of New York City: an antique Checker cab, the subway, and so forth. A creature from a parallel dimension, the Woman in White, seeks to destroy human cities at their birth. The novel first introduces the Better New York Foundation, a nonprofit the Woman in White seems to control, when the Foundation buys two brownstones that belong to Brooklyn’s avatar, Brooklyn Thomason, and her family. Brooklyn and her family didn’t want to sell the brownstones; in fact, Brooklyn was using these essentially New York buildings as safe houses immune to the Woman in White’s influence. The novel implies that the Woman in White uses political connections to repossess their home on a legal technicality, thus evicting the protagonists from a safe space and taking possession of this essentially New York building as a hostile outsider.

Later, the Woman in White poses as Dr. White of the Better New York Foundation when she offers the Bronx’s avatar, Bronca Siwanoy, an enormous donation to the Bronx Art Center (which Bronca directs) in exchange for replacing the graffiti art of New York City’s avatar (a young, homeless Black man) with the racist art of an almost entirely white artists’ collective called the Alt Artistes. When Bronca refuses the donation because she won’t exhibit racist art in the publicly funded Center, the Center’s board of directors threatens to fire her. This demonstrates the power of money to gentrify and racially homogenize a community’s culture as well as its buildings. Finally, the boroughs’ avatars learn that the Better New York Foundation is owned by an LLC called “TOTAL MULTIVERSAL WAR” that has been using its money to gentrify various great cities around the world—making them less essentially themselves and thus, in the novel’s universe, less powerful. This final revelation shows how money can invade local communities and gentrify them against the will of the original inhabitants.