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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Neighborhoods like Chicago's Wicker Park and San Francisco's Mission District -- where I lived in the '80s -- once teemed with hipsters living cheaply and making art. But should we be nostalgic for a life we ourselves transformed?
Nov 17, 2005 | In the fall of 1984, when I was a few months out of college, I moved out of my dad's suburban house (after discovering one of his graduate students in his bed) and into an enormous, ramshackle apartment in San Francisco's Mission District with a bunch of people I barely knew. I'd hardly ever been to the neighborhood before, but it was obvious that people more or less like me -- middle-class kids from suburbia who wanted to be musicians or writers or artists -- were starting to congregate there.
In fact, I was by no means an early arrival. It took me a while to figure out that our scummy apartment was a quasi-legendary crash pad well known to a certain self-selected rock 'n' roll circle. (Bono once dropped by for a visit, and the bass player for the Go-Go's stayed with us for a few weeks.) One of my roommates was the singer for Wire Train, a moderately successful '80s college-radio band that still has a cult following. (Their commercial high point came when they landed a song on the soundtrack of the 1991 Keanu Reeves surfing film "Point Break.")
Another roommate and good friend had been the leader of an arty punk band called B Team, and went on to found a much less dour pop-rock outfit called the Naked Into, which really should have made it big but never did. (I honestly think it may have been that name, Todd.) We also got mail for various former occupants well known in the insular San Francisco hipster scene, including members of the classic punk band Flipper and the machine-performance troupe Survival Research Laboratories; as I recall, the Rhode Island student-loan authorities were especially frequent correspondents.
As distinctive, even magical, as that apartment and the neighborhood around it seemed to me at the time, they weren't. The Mission District exuded the combination of "grit and glamour" that sociologist Richard Lloyd cites as crucial in the creation of the urban culture ghettos he dubs "neo-bohemia," but it was just one of many such inner-city districts being colonized in that decade by young wannabe rebels with ambiguous motivations. My roommates and I were participating in a ritual more than a century old, in which the children of the bourgeoisie live out a largely symbolic rejection of their own class and capitalist society as a whole. But as much as we were connected to generations of bohemians past, from the students of 19th century Paris to the beatniks of 1950s Greenwich Village, Lloyd would also argue that we stood on the cusp of something new.
"Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial Era"
By Richard Lloyd
Routledge
295 pages
Nonfiction
Lloyd's groundbreaking study, "Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City," focuses on Wicker Park, on the west side of Chicago, which in the early '90s brought the indie-rock world Liz Phair and the bands Urge Overkill and Veruca Salt. It tells a compelling story of one idiosyncratic neighborhood and how it changed; after reading Lloyd's analysis of how the service economy of Wicker Park actually functions, you'll never undertip the multiply pierced waitress at your favorite bar again. It also connects Wicker Park to a larger narrative of the American urban economy, which over the course of 40 years or so has shifted its focus from heavy industry to image production and high-end consumption, a process in which hipster neighborhoods like the Mission and Wicker Park have been crucial.
Lloyd could just as well be writing about Manhattan's Lower East Side (in many respects the ur-neo-bohemia), Capitol Hill in Seattle, Silver Lake in Los Angeles, Deep Ellum in Dallas or similar neighborhoods in cities from Atlanta to Boston, Madison, Wis., Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas. If you came of age in any American city in the '80s or '90s, chances are you did your time -- as a resident, a visitor or a service-sector employee -- in neo-bohemia yourself. There are even mini-neo-bohemias in places too small or remote to support a whole neighborhood. I found the one in Utica, N.Y., a few years ago: a single block in an otherwise decrepit downtown strip that boasted an excellent used-clothing store right next to a Goth-inflected comic book and record store (right next to a kitschy but completely unironic "Catholic goods" store). Across the street was what I presume to be Utica's only gay bar.
The Mission District wasn't much different from most neighborhoods of this kind, although it was heir to San Francisco's distinctive tradition of aimless bohemianism. It featured a volatile mixture of populations, cheap rent and a lot of places to hang out where the pressures of ordinary American commerce -- not to mention the Protestant work ethic -- seemed almost wholly absent. (This will seem hilarious to anyone who lives in the Mission or any other San Francisco neighborhood today, but the total rent for our apartment -- which could comfortably sleep four or five people -- was $550.) There were longtime Mexican-American families, new immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador, gays and lesbians, and middle-class exiles like my roommates and me.
You could still make out traces of the neighborhood's ethnic past in the Irish bars scattered along Mission Street or the Scandinavian restaurants on the neighborhood's northern fringe (where I lived). The burrito parlors around the corner of 16th and Valencia offered the city's best cheap food (and still do). That block also boasted the Roxie Cinema, one of America's finest art-house theaters; the cavernous Cafe Picaro, lined with miscellaneous books and mediocre neighborhood art, where you could lurk all day for the price of a cappuccino; several secondhand bookstores and a truly terrible greasy-spoon restaurant whose name I forget, where my friends and I ate far too many late breakfasts. (If you got there before 11 a.m., you were strictly a poseur. If you got there after noon, you might not get in.)
