Books
Neo-Bohemia: Art and commerce in the post-industrial city
By Richard Lloyd (Routledge, 295 pp.)Ever wanted a life that resembled a touring production of Rent? The steps, as outlined in Richard Lloyd’s Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City, seem simple. Step #1: Find a faded industrial district in an iffy part of town. Step #2: Move in artists—they need cheap space, they do their own construction, and they consider the local crack dealer “character.” Step #3: Open a coffeehouse. It probably won’t last, but it could be the coalescing agent that turns an experiment into a neighborhood—or better still, a destination.
The trick is, all this has to happen organically—which explains why, for example, Five Points in East Nashville has galvanized its surrounding neighborhood more than a project like Marathon Village. But the transformation Lloyd describes in his surprisingly lively book has as much to do with national, even global shifts in commerce and culture as with the price of property down the street. As artists, dot-commers and restaurateurs reclaim and reshape dying urban areas in cities across the country, Neo-Bohemia seeks nothing less than a new sociological model for the changes wrought by what the author calls “the aesthetic economy.”
Uh-huh, you say, eyes glazing over: I’ll wait for the movie. What makes Lloyd’s book so readable, and accessible, is its anecdotal focus on the shifting fortunes of Chicago’s Wicker Park—a neighborhood that evolved in less than 20 years from near-blight to a hipster hotbed, coveted by MTV, big-shot ad agencies and record-industry weasels trawling for trends. For much of the century, Wicker Park lived and died by Fordism, the principle that assembly-line production can sustain a community through high wages and high worker spending. By the 1970s—thanks in part to the ease with which Henry Ford’s automobiles carried urban dwellers to the ’burbs—it was mostly dying, riddled with vice.
But the neighborhood’s downturn unexpectedly reversed in the 1980s. Poor but energetic creative types trickled in. They renovated its shuttered buildings, the only urban space they could afford. When the local Polish diner gave them the heave-ho instead of bottomless cups of coffee, they found their own meeting place: Urbus Orbis, a java joint housed in a former sweatshop that most recently housed junkies. When they had nowhere to booze it up, they infiltrated the local dives and biker bars with their indie-rocker friends. Next thing you know, Liz Phair, Veruca Salt and Urge Overkill are meeting with the majors, and Rolling Stone declares once-dead Wicker Park a trendinista Mecca.
Lloyd, a Vanderbilt sociology professor, sees Wicker Park as the emblem of “neo-bohemia”—a community that carries the outlaw cachet and artistic bent of 19th century Parisian bohemia, yet has made a thoroughly modern peace with earning and spending. (The conservative columnist David Brooks devised the term “bobos,” for bourgeois bohemians, but “neo-bohemia” is better: for one thing, it doesn’t sound like test marketing for the next Tom Wolfe catchphrase.) Sure, it’s full of young urban professionals: painters, would-be Internet moguls, writers. But they define themselves against the dreaded “yuppie” tag—either because they’re working outside the system, or because they’re cool enough to live in neo-bohemia, with its vestiges of inner-city danger.
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Of course, hipness, like the cockroach, is a phenomenon of urban darkness; shine a flashlight on it and watch it disappear. Written with a keen eye for irony—especially the revisionist instant nostalgia of first-wave hipsters for “the good old days”—Neo-Bohemia bristles with tangents that explore how the perpetuation of street cred has become a powerful economic tool. Lloyd’s musings on subjects as far afield as the politics of bar tipping and the male-dominated Chicago music scene’s resentment of Liz Phair provide some of the book’s juiciest insights.
To get to these, the casual reader will have to wade through an early thicket of sociological comparisons, which are not without interest. Even here, though, Lloyd comes across as protean as the city and the culture he’s describing. He’s egghead or beer buddy as the occasion demands; he’s as apt to quote bouncers or bar-backs as he is Pierre Bourdieu. Neo-Bohemia paves the way for other authors to compare similar scenes in Austin, Atlanta, even in Nashville, to see whether they herald some new mediation of “the dual city” split between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. When other books follow, Richard Lloyd can grumble, like Wicker Park’s jaded first-wavers, that he got there early.