Early in his documentary 7th Street, Josh Pais quotes a friend who once told him that the best way to find out about life is to travel the world or to stay in one place. Given that Pais' movie is about the life, death, and rebirth of one block in New York's Alphabet City neighborhood, the aphorism may be too tidy. To Pais' credit, though, 7th Street isn't that cut-and-dried. Pais moved to the neighborhood with his mother in 1967, and split time between hanging out with her hippie friends in the East Village and spending time on the Upper East Side with his father, a renowned theoretical physicist. Pais later become an actor, appearing in a rubber suit as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and picking up bit parts in series television. He moved back to his old 7th Street block (between Avenues C and D) in the early '90s, by which time his home had gone from merely slummy to dangerously crime-ridden. The documentary opens in 1992, with Pais interviewing some of the old Alphabet City characters from his childhood: the kind of scraggly, creepy-looking folk that the average city-dweller avoids. The old gang (pleasant enough, as it happens) fills Pais in on 7th Street's decay, and the inevitable rise of the drug trade. Then, a little more than halfway through 7th Street, he explains that a local crimelord has asked him to put his video cameras away–a request to which Pais nervously agrees. When he resumes shooting a few years later, Pais has an entirely different story to tell, about the revitalization of Alphabet City in Rudy Giuliani's New York. Pais' old block has become a fashionable address, newly clean and populated by hip shops and restaurants. But his more unsavory friends have gotten the boot along the way, and the documentarian finds most of them either living on the streets or dead. Throughout 7th Street, Pais impressively balances his own story with the story of the place, which he captures through skillful editing and well-chosen shots. He makes the documentary both personal and anthropological, and his only real journalistic failing is a little chronological fudging, cued by the fact that though Pais clearly traded up to better equipment for the second half of his movie, some of the cruddier-looking footage still pops up at the end, commenting on events that haven't happened yet. Otherwise, 7th Street speaks truthfully to the cycles that urban spaces go through, and the people who are affected.