Hunting season: prowling for hipsters in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties
Hayley Richardson | Sun, Nov 18th, 2007 | Category: Commentary | Tags: hayley richardson, hipsters, philly hipsters, hunting for hipsters, northern liberties, the next great city, art star, prowling for hipsters
Hipster Hunting Season officially began for me on this misty November morning with a trip to Philly’s Northern Liberties neighborhood. My weapon of choice wasn’t a crossbow, however. My plan was to locate hipsters, and then explode them with my midwestern wholesomeness, unabashed patronage of JCrew, and diminutive stature. They would inevitably be reduced to worm-like quivering on the sidewalk, begging forgiveness, and promising to never buy children’s T-shirts again.
However, things didn’t quite go according to plan, maybe because Northern Liberties isn’t quite your typical hipster story. After escapades in the much documented veneers of Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Wicker Park, I was expecting see an aesthetic based on consumption and not of participation, of people moving into a neighborhood and ignoring a community’s needs.
But the hipsters in Northern Liberties actually do things. Like art. “This is a working neighborhood… with a still-unfolding history of industry, a history of function and work and the present tense” writes the President of the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association. The association numbers the working artists at 50, and is also behind the neighborhood’s new community center, which is scheduled to open in 2008.
And then there’s the whole adorable factor of the owners of Art Star, Philadelphia’s first craft store. They sing of the amazing entrepreneurial spirit endemic to NoLibs, and tell me that most new businesses are being started by women! Meeting the owners of Brown Betty’s, a tantalizing cupcake shop next door, only gave credence to this assertion. And there’s also the enchanted park called Liberty Lands, where a gate leads to a pint-sized orchard and community garden, and the paths are made of stones.
Aside from the self conscious reuse of industrial spaces (does the Tower Investment Properties really need to keep the autowarehouse sign above it?) and the bizarre, Aspen-like development that is Liberty Walk, it was sort of cool. And I have to admit that after spending my urban studies education in DC, where gentrification is always an issue framed in black/white racial politics, it was refreshing to see that in this case, it had been reduced to its bare bones, class-based definition.
However, I’m afraid my perusing may be lamentably topical. Since Tuesday is probably the new Friday, the hardcore hipsters may have been sleeping off their boredom in the garish lofts that pepper the landscape. I’ll have to go back, with camera in hand, to document what happens when exuberance meets apathy.
But maybe this is one of the many reasons Philadelphia is poised to become ”The Next Great City.” The hipsters don’t suck. As much.
Mark
Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 5:04pm
After spending a few months in Williamsburg, and now living in Philly, I agree that the hipsters here are comparatively refreshing. Whereas in W-burg we had flyers on our door from the local Hasidic Jewish synagogue decrying the “plague of the hipsters” (and rightly so - hipster money pushed many an immigrant family out of what had been their homes for generations), Philly hipster-relations seem to range from a cautious indifference to an even-more-cautious acceptance. What interests me now is why…
Perhaps because Philadelphia is cheaper to live in than New York, we’re attracting a poorer and less-snobby class of hipsters here. Perhaps they’ve responded with humility to the City Paper’s issue last year dedicated to gleeful hipster-bashing. Or perhaps it’s hipster-churches like Circle of Hope that are instilling in them a greater sense of purpose.
Also, once you get north of the NoLibs into upper Fishtown, Kensington, and Port Richmond, you can get a good, current sense of alterna-youth-driven gentrification. It’s pushing upward, and developers are taking notice.
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