Where the hipsters dwell, if hipsters there be
I was in one of the neighborhoods in the 19125 zip code on that 82-degree Thursday in the first week of March.
I was in one of the neighborhoods in the 19125 zip code on that 82-degree Thursday in the first week of March.
I say "one of the neighborhoods" because I never know exactly where one begins and the other ends.
It is one of the drawbacks to writing "Town by Town." Early on, I half-seriously tried talking my bosses into something called "Zip by Zip" or "School by School," since those are the routes by which real estate is bought and sold.
But I digress.
I met developer Jeff Tubbs at Reanimator Coffee at 310 Master St., Kensington, in a building that was once an elevator factory or repair facility and later a nightclub, or so I understand. Across Master Street, at its intersection with Germantown Avenue, is the vacant Eugene Chernin Co. building, which a friend of Tubbs' is proposing for rental apartments.
The Crane Arts Building, home to architects and designers, is a block east on Master Street at North American Street.
Everywhere you look are townhouses made of steel and glass, which have replaced brick as the materials of choice in Philadelphia over the last couple decades.
It was all fascinating, but what stirred my curiosity was not the ever-changing landscape of 19125, which I have been monitoring over the last three decades, but the people dotting it - the ones sitting in Reanimator or inside the even-more impressive La Colombe on Frankford Avenue in Fishtown.
The men all seem to have beards and wear wool caps, even when the temperature flirts with 80 degrees. The women who aren't pushing strollers are much better dressed than the men - looking as if they are off to their next appointment.
Are these hipsters?
Tubbs, who is thinking about bringing in some enthusiastic undergrads from his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to conduct a demographic study, isn't comfortable with that word.
"I will say that the neighborhood seems to be filled with creative millennials who seem to be environmentally conscious and want to make a positive social impact," he said.
Nice comeback.
I first heard the word hipster in 1958, when a show called 77 Sunset Strip debuted on ABC-TV. Those who recall it are allowed to snap their fingers after reading the following lyrics:
"You'll meet the high brow and the hipster,
The starlet and the phony tripster,
You'll see most every kind of gal and guy,
Including a private eye."
The hipster, of course, was Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, who said things like cool, and combed his Brylcreemed hair a lot.
The description goes back much further, to the early 1940s, applied to aficionados of jazz or bebop first known as hepcats, but hep became hip, in pianist Harry Gibson's glossary: "Hipsters are those who like hot jazz."
By the way, a tripster, according to the Urban Dictionary, is "an educated and conscious psychedelic explorer," so a phony one might not be so much.
The Urban Dictionary defines today's hipster as "a subculture of men and women typically in their 20s and 30s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter."
Many dress in clothes acquired from thrift shops, it goes on to say.
Another entry describes hipster as a pejorative term suggesting "someone who is pretentious, overly trendy or effete."
Efforts to pigeonhole people have never sat well with me, especially not by those demographers in the late 1990s who said all baby boomers were rich and would live quite well in their retirement years.
Boy, do I beg to differ.
215-854-2472 @alheavens