In a Salon article called Neo-bohemian rhapsody, Andrew O’Hehir talks about living in The Mission neighborhood in the late 80s in San Francisco. His text is an echo to a new book by sociologist Richard Lloyd called: Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, which uses Chicago’s hipster enclave Wicker Park to talk about neighborhoods that become gentrified through alternative culture.
I recognized a lot of what O’Hehir describes about the Mission even though I was there in the early 1990s and not the 80s (check out my old place). A lot of what he describes also applies to Montreal’s Plateau and the Mile-End.
« Wicker Park, as Lloyd tells the tale, was a relatively late neo-bohemia; no sooner was the « scene » created than it was discovered. He recounts an amusing anecdote about several neighborhood locals, some of whom had lived there as briefly as six months, deriding the crowd of « 708ers » (invaders from the northern suburbs) outside a Veruca Salt show. Obviously, Lloyd’s friends don’t really know where the Veruca Salt fans live; given the rising rents in Wicker Park, many of them may live there. But « the performance of cultural distinction, » that is, the ability to define oneself as a member of a select in-group, has always been important to bohemians, neo- or not. »
In Montreal, they make fun of the « 450s ». Different cities, same hipster attitude.
« Neo-bohemia is always contaminated by nostalgia, by the belief that the scene is over, and has been over since the yuppies moved in, the old bookstore closed, the Starbucks opened and so on. […]
This is fascinating, original and deeply humane sociology at its finest; he demonstrates that in the name of freedom, young people working in allegedly relaxed service-sector jobs waste years of their lives in a whirl of drugs, alcohol and deceptively low wages. It’s a classic example of a circular economy: While a bartender at an upscale Wicker Park club may earn $250 or more in tips from a shift, he or she is likely to go right out to an after-hours club with friends and spend it all on lavish tips to another bartender on the circuit. To anyone who’s ever worked in the nightlife business, all this will ring sad but true. […]
Contrary to the way some of its residents feel (to the way I felt in 1995, for instance) neo-bohemia is not « over » when it has been discovered by hordes of Oxford-clad yuppies and blathering newspaper reporters. In fact, it’s only coming into its own. Neighborhoods like the Mission and Wicker Park (and even older bohemias like Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s North Beach) retain much of their power as bohemian signifiers even when they’ve become too expensive for many young artists. This is just another of the numerous contradictions they embody; to be neo-bohemian at all, they must remain superficially hospitable to anti-establishment values while becoming both a « bohemian-themed entertainment zone » and a site of postindustrial production. »