When I moved in, that corner also featured a fenced-in gaping hole, where a landlord was rumored to have burned down his residential hotel, either for the insurance money or to make way for expensive yuppie condos or both. For all I know that was urban myth, but the point -- which Lloyd's book develops beautifully -- is that from its inception neo-bohemia is plagued by paranoia, nostalgia and status anxiety. The neighborhood "we" have (very recently) settled, and in so doing profoundly changed, is at any moment about to be invaded and presumably ruined by "them," generally meaning affluent professionals who will make the contradictions of "our" presence even more obvious than they are already. Lloyd quotes anthropologist Renato Rosaldo on what the latter calls "imperialist nostalgia," which occurs "where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed."

Hypocritical as it may be, this paranoia and nostalgia are not completely without foundation. The Mission District did change immensely in the 11 years I lived there, in much the same way that Lloyd saw Wicker Park transformed from "a relatively obscure and depopulated barrio into a celebrated center of hip urban culture." Rents shot up, the population of the neighborhood shifted dramatically, and many of the funkier first-wave coffee shops and thrift stores gave way to trendy boutiques and upscale restaurants. (Even the beloved Picaro has been reincarnated as a "tapas bar.") By the time I moved out in 1995, I could no longer afford an apartment in the North Mission on an alt-weekly editor's salary. (There were years in the '80s, on the other hand, when I survived on less than $10,000.)

As Lloyd puts it, this kind of transformation is customarily understood as an inevitable ecological succession, in which artists, musicians and the like serve as "the vanguard of a distinctive sort of gentrification." They redeem underused buildings and spaces, make the neighborhood attractive as a nightlife destination, and then give way to the dreaded yuppie invaders, who max out the neighborhood's economic potential, support numerous thriving businesses -- and also make the neighborhood more "normal," more homogeneous, more commodified. As every New Yorker knows, there are no artists left in SoHo lofts except long-established and wealthy ones, and most young rock musicians who would have inhabited the East Village a generation ago can only afford to live in Brooklyn or New Jersey.

How you view this kind of change is an inherently subjective question, and in my personal case the problem is not just imperial nostalgia but also the distorted lens through which we view our own youth. But here's how it felt: For the first three or four years I lived in the Mission, nobody cared about us. We wore our retro, faux-adult clothes, went to see depressing bands in dingy nightclubs, drank our martinis and our French roast coffee (and I'm really sorry about the martinis, people), listened to our weird late-night radio broadcasts and sat through our David Cronenberg and George Romero and Godzilla movie marathons, while the rest of civilization pretty much ignored us.

"Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial Era"

By Richard Lloyd

Routledge

295 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

In the go-go society of the mid-'80s, we had almost no consumption power, and few outsiders found our neighborhood desirable or interesting. Remember, this was an age before "The Real World," before Nirvana, before "High Fidelity." (Courtney Love was the friend of a girlfriend of a friend, but all I can remember about her is an Amish skirt.) MTV played videos by Ratt and A Flock of Seagulls. I suppose we felt superior to the yuppies of Pacific Heights and the rest of Ronald Reagan's hopelessly bourgeois America, but the truth was that bourgeois America barely knew we were there.

I'm not suggesting this was a golden age. Like most of my friends, I worked at crappy, dead-end jobs and had no medical insurance, while my desk drawer filled up with unpublished poems. I didn't go to the dentist for more than 10 years. The lifestyle of semivoluntary post-collegiate poverty, and associated irresponsibility, can be pretty dire: One of my roommates once stole toilet paper from a bar across the street because we didn't have any, and another roommate once threw the dirty dishes out the window onto a neighbor's roof because they were starting to stink. I don't remember ever cooking anything in that kitchen that wasn't spaghetti, canned soup or scrambled eggs.

Young bohemians have been living that way since the term was coined by Henri Murger in 1840s Paris, and I'm sure they still do. But the obscurity and economic marginality we enjoyed (if that's the right word) on Valencia Street in 1985 are no longer available, or at least not in the same way. Whether we knew it or not, and of course we didn't, neighborhoods like ours were about to play an important, if paradoxical, role in the structural transformation of global capitalism. This is the transition Lloyd documents on the ground in Wicker Park, and his central insight -- that neo-bohemia isn't just a zone of leisure consumption but also the locus for a new style of capitalist production -- is both compelling and original.

Much has been written about the economic and social transformation of America's cities in the '80s and '90s, often considered under the unhelpful catch-all rubric of "gentrification." This stuff mainly cuts in two directions: neo-Marxist diatribes about how the force of capital is dividing the city into two zones, one belonging to a homogenized, yupscale Starbucks culture and the other a virtual prison for the dark-skinned poor; and sweeping neoliberal treatises arguing that the longtime contradictions between art and capital have been healed by a benign meritocratic culture of "bourgeois bohemians," or by a "new creative class" that blends 1960s nonconformity with 1980s entrepreneurial ambition. Both of these arguments are transparently ideological, and Lloyd considers both while avoiding the pitfalls of either. Like most sociologists, he has one foot in the stream of post-Marxian theory, and his prose suffers from occasional outbreaks of academic jargon. But his goal is neither to praise nor to bury neo-bohemia, but rather to unpack and analyze its multifarious contradictions and possibilities.

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