CITIES FEBRUARY 20, 2013
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It starts with the local brewpub. Always with the goddamn local brewpub, located in some renovated craftsman schoolhouse or 1920s fire station with the locally sourced Czechoslovakian-style hops and the brewmaster with the certification from the Golden Barley Council or whatever governing body oversees alcoholic hipsterdom.
Whenever some self-appointed hometown convention and visitors’ bureau rep (and sometimes it’s an actual CVB rep) takes you to that cool little place in the downtown renaissance district where they actually make their own beer—So cool! Nobody does that, right?—you know you’re in trouble. Or, more precisely, you know you’re in that bastion of municipal mediocrity: the newly anointed “It” City.
Now, you may dislike or disregard places like Poughkeepsie or Plano or Palm Whatever. But there are few more insufferable banalities in modern urban life than a town recently deemed cool. Greg Brown name-checked Santa Fe and Sedona in his 1994 song “Boomtown,” an acid slap down of the phenomenon. It didn’t help: In the years since, cities “where people used to live their lives [and now] the restless come and go” have proliferated like fungus in a damp basement.
Most recently, it’s been Nashville’s turn. Last month, The New York Times laid out the usual liberal criteria for why sophisticates should embrace a city the kale-and-karaoke cognoscenti previously snickered at for its association with mullets and Rascal Flatts. “Flush with young new residents and alive with immigrants, tourists and music, the city made its way to the top of all kinds of lists in 2012,” the Times gushed. “Critics admire its growing food scene. GQ magazine declared it simply ‘Nowville.’ ”
Artisanal ice cream, gluten-free pizza, burrito trucks run by real Mexicans, jalapeño-infused margaritas, celebrity graffiti sprayers, and First Thursday art walks in revitalized industrial zones promoted by farsighted civic planners armed with government tax schemes—these are the totems of It City. I’m certain Nashville has plenty of them to brag about. But, then again, so do Asheville, Austin, Baltimore, Boulder, Burlington, Las Vegas, Madison, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, Santa Monica, Savannah, Seattle, Taos, Tucson, the Twin Cities, and a klatch of other cities that have ascended the heights of those “most livable,” “coolest,” and “best” lists.
When I lived in Dallas, I used to say that, if it wasn’t surrounded by Texas, Austin would be called Sacramento. Austinites took this the wrong way. The remark wasn’t meant to criticize the Texas capital so much as it was an acknowledgment of just how pedestrian eclectic local bands, underground donut culture, and galleries with funky art that no one buys have become.
Sacramento, of course, has its own hip district—it’s called Midtown, and it’s full of places with names like Lowbrau Bierhall and Firestone Public House. But you can find the same thing in blah hamlets like Aurora, Illinois, where locals were eager to take me to Walter Payton’s Roundhouse & America’s Brewpub. And it offered “hand-crafted brews from the bar (brewed on the premises)” (!) in a renovated train depot, plus an $11 burger topped with peppercorns, gorgonzola, and crispy leeks. Don’t act all hungry, people: You can get pretty much the same burger at the brewpub down the street from your office.
After visiting this hotbed of cool, I can attest that it’s every bit as entertaining as San Diego’s savagely dull Gaslamp Quarter or Baltimore’s prosaic Inner Harbor.
I’ve done my own It City exploring just a couple hours’ drive from Nashville. In 2011, I was dispatched by Outside magazine to report on the results of a Facebook poll that resulted in Chattanooga, of all places, being named the “Best Town Ever.” What I found was a pleasant enough little burg that might have been more accurately described as the best place in southeastern Tennessee to stop for a bite if you’re driving through on the interstate. Admittedly, there were some good mountain-bike trails and rock-climbing places thrown in.
Driving from the airport into town through the slightly unkempt neighborhoods where most Chattanoogans appeared to live, it took a while to find the righteous enclave that had carried the day with Facebookers. My city hosts put me up in a chic new hostel geared toward outdoorsy types. From the reception desk, I was taken to a steamy laundry room and instructed to pull a freshly laundered sheet (emphasis on the singular) from the industrial dryer and told I could use this sheet to make up my very own wooden bunk.
If Austin weren’t surrounded by Texas, it would be called Sacramento.
Forgive me if this struck me as slightly less cool than the moneyed clink of crystal glassware in the Oak Room.
But, as that Times piece on Nashville suggested, that’s the thing about trendiness, or at least the perception of it—it’s usually driven by the popular media and young people, two groups whose experience with the more interesting things in life isn’t often what one would call comprehensive. Setting aside the way it treated thinly supported proclamations from media cousins as news, what the story really did was pull back the curtain on the forces that determine whether or not some town gets hyped as an It City: advertisers and out-of-towners. For an otherwise fine-but-nothing-special town to break into the zeitgeist, it must first attract the affirmation of outsiders, then the cash flow of sponsors.
That’s what happened in the It City fountainhead of Portland, Oregon, a onetime mid-market waypoint between San Francisco and Seattle that has cannily monetized its reputation without tarnishing a surreal bohemian cred that still baffles longtime residents.
I’m sure there are insouciant wankers across the country grousing that, once Fred Armisen and his beat-a-single-punch-line-into-the-ground “SNL” ethos sunk his dull fingernails into “Portlandia,” the city irrevocably became the pitiable shark that has been politely stepped over. But that isn’t even close to true. As in all It Cities, Portland’s status is codified by its need for recognition from outsiders, embellished by how effectively it commercializes that attention, and sustained by the intensity of its need to prove that you don’t have to live in New York or L.A. to be surrounded by awesome musicians, world-class theater, and pretentious Sazerac culture.
Except that you sort of do.
Ground zero of Portland cool these days is an expanding grid called the Pearl District. It’s one of the first places you’ll go when you visit the city. Walk through the Pearl and you’ll find ad agencies, glass-and-steel condos that look just like the ones that are re-branding your city, and bars where they use nineteenth-century tools to chip shards from giant blocks of ice into your glass. You’ll also find Anthropologie, Aveda, P.F. Chang’s, REI, and Storables.
It’s not that I have anything against these establishments. But walk around the Pearl and you feel like you might as well be in Santa Monica. Or Santa Fe. Or Sedona. Or Sacramento. Or, come to think of it, SoHo.
And maybe that’s the point of it all. We’re all happening now, no one better than anyone else, no city that’s any more “it” than any other. Pretty cool. Or so they tell me.
Chuck Thompson is the author of Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.
11 comments
Cities look alike for the same reason that all McDonald's look alike. Or Holiday Inns. Or Walmarts. Bland, yes, but no surprises. As for the new old downtowns with their brewpubs and hip chain stores, I prefer the old new downtowns, the very new shopping malls made to look like an old downtown. Having the old new downtown surrounded by a massive parking lot takes away from the nostalgia experience, but it's no different from a visit to Disney World. Nostalgia, that's what the developers of the new old downtown and the old new downtown are trying to capture. Of course, old old downtowns didn't have brewpubs or hip chain stores. It reminds me of the long closed tourist attraction in Florida, Sic Gun Territory, that looked like an old western town, or at least it looked like a child's idea of how one would have looked. Yes, life in America is becoming one big tourist attraction. Have you been to Seaside? The "planned" new town that looks like an old town, or at least the developer's idea of how one looked. Peter Weir (he's Australian) picked it for the setting of his movie, The Truman Show, about a man, Truman Burbank, who lived in a fake town and had a fake job and had fake friends, all captured (without his knowledge) on "reality" tv.
- rayward
February 20, 2013 at 7:22am
Funny thing is that sameness doesn't change. Yea, sort of tautological, but true nonetheless. If you look at the late 19th century commercial downtown areas of most of the older American cities, St. Paul, Baltimore, Omaha, etc., the neighborhoods that had the restaurant supply houses, clothing wholesalers, jobbers, the German restaurants and Irish bars (think Joseph Mitchell), and so on, the architecture is pretty much alike. These precincts fell into ruin and were then revived as cuter, hipper versions of their earlier selves. Down the street from where I am two-fingering typing is the Eastern Market, designed by prolific, red-brick mad, German-born , Washington, DC, architect Adolph Cluss. Built in 1873, the market waxed and waned over the decades, waning in the 1960s into almost into decrepitude, before being resurrected by the renewed popularity of Capitol Hill. With rejuvenation came a price, stroller swarms and Japanese tour groups, but aside from that, I suspect the market is pretty much like it was back in the 1870s. Dan
- dbuck1
February 20, 2013 at 8:59am
I laughed so hard I cried -
- WandreyCer
February 20, 2013 at 12:58pm
The trend of naming the new "it" town or city isn't a recent phenomena that popped up with the invention of hipsters, artesenal cheese and brew-pubs. Heck, declaring oneself the new "it" town was part and parcel for the course of any new American city West of the Mississippi. Except back then it was whore-houses, saloons and gold or silver claims. Much of what you see happening in these older warehouse districts in cities or redevelopments of old downtowns into new downtowns is the long-sought fulfillment of the 60's urban renewal effort where parking lots surrounded a sole brick warehouse that hobos and squatters long since abandoned. Of course for some of us, seeing our beloved cities see a renaissance of people actually wanting to move, live and start families there is a good thing. The constant renewal, recycling, resurfacing and rehabitation is what keeps mid-size cities like Denver, Portland, Nashville, Ashville, Pittsburgh, and others from becoming the Albanys and Detroits of America. But look on the bright side, instead of complaining about all of the choices you have between the artesian cheese shops, brewpubs, gourmet burgers, yoga studios, etc. implanting themselves on the backside of the boring 'burg you live in, your town could make the list of 'coolest ghost towns in America'. NOW that is the "it" list to make. http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/americas-coolest-ghost-towns
- singlspeed
February 20, 2013 at 1:55pm
2,20,13, 3:45 pm, est///I didn't like this snotty, preening little article one bit, didn't find an ounce of humour in it, only self congratulation as to what a clever guy Thomson thinks he is, and didn't detect, save for the point about homogeneity, any case against cities rejuvenating themselves, especially in their forlorn, dysfunctional, crime ridden parts/// What Thompson sneers at is, typically, the kind of spontaneous municipal combustion Jane Jacobs argues for, and not a function of top down central planning, save perhaps from some "nudging" by virtue of rezoning and regulating expanded uses and that kind of thing. At least it's not in my city, Toronto, where neighbourhoods over time come and go, and are always changing, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, and always in response to what a sufficient number of people want.///Thompson's knock flowing from homogeneity is that we're drowning in sameness. As if. As if local entrepreneurial exuberance in league with some admitted big name franchisism, catering to what people want, could swarm the distinctive character, flowing always from the collective sensibilty of people--i.e. local culture--of dynamic, sizable cities.///Some of the nostalgia for the way cities were is sentimentality about poverty and its attendant terrible civic dysfunction.
- basman
February 20, 2013 at 3:46pm
I like a good rant as much as the next person, but I have to say I am with Basman. I mean, I am not quite sure what the point is - a sort of iconoclastic attack on presumptions of small towns to have character? Well, what's a city to do? Simply accept that it is mediocre, and a hellish place to live, and send all its coolest denizens to LA and NYC to have fun? Have a sort of balanced academic approach to the marketing effort? ("Chumpsville boasts a recent attempt at escaping the boredom of national beer brands by joining the ennui of microbrewerdom. It continues to sport an awful suburb full of icky working class types. So even though we are trying to bring a bit of colour into our lives, skip the place and head to LA for fun.")
- icarusr
February 20, 2013 at 5:00pm
2, 20, 13, 5:50 pm est////'...but I have to say I am with Basman.' Aw' c'mon: it's not that disreputable to 'be with me,' is it? Now for the first smiling icon on the revamped TNR :-)
- basman
February 20, 2013 at 5:49pm
SHOW 1 RESPONSE
Philly was a newly discovered "It" city a decade or two (or longer, come to think of it) ago, long enough that everyone's forgotten that it had that status once. But of course it always had a pretty legitimate tourist draw which had been thoughtfully furnished by Wm. Penn and the Founding Fathers centuries before. All it needed was a little sprucing up, some "It" restaurants, and some new hotels. And it's still improving, I think. Whether W.C. Fields would appreciate it or not, it's not to be sneezed at.
- JonJg
February 20, 2013 at 5:05pm
I'm not sure what the point of this article is. Is this just an overly long complaint about a pet peeve? Or is it a masked attempt to tell everyone how cool Thompson is because he doesn't follow the crowd. Please. I was into that back in high school... before it was cool.
- nindustrial
February 20, 2013 at 5:51pm
I did find this funny and refreshing. I too found the New York Times story about Nashville to be an example of tedious breathless boosterism, along with those surveys or declarations you see that so-and-so burgh is tops in every way when, all things considered, it isn't really. I don't think Thompson is out to denigrate these cities, and, although he finds the indicia of itness insipid, neither is he saying that these towns are "hell." I do question his equivalence of New York and L.A. culturally. New York is without question America's cultural capital and beyond compare in that regard. L.A. is a charmless aesthetic wasteland, a downright ugly town, the chief attraction of which is the above-average attractiveness and glamorousness of its residents. Culturally, of course, it has its museums and performing arts and all that sort of thing. But many other cities compare favorably on those fronts, while offering legitimate incarnations of the urban feel that "it cities" are trying to ape. In no particular order, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco come to mind, and even some of your struggling, non-it towns have their cultural charms without trying so hard, relics of their boomtown status, when Phase 2 meant getting yourself a good art museum. Lowly Buffalo has one of those, along with some outstanding architecture. Cleveland also has a great art museum, along with a world-class symphony orchestra, both of which reside in University Circle, a lovely, non-made-up neighborhood, and the city is encircled by the glorious and gloriously accessible and safe Metroparks system. New York it ain't, obviously, but a town with unique, genuine charms of its own. I'm with the other commenters where they ask, What's so bad about urban renewal projects? Nothing, true enough. But sometimes it seems bogus and lame and half-assed, not worthy of the ecstatic claims Thompson is reacting to. The most successful efforts pick up on what's already there, what is uniquely, say, Chattanooga about Chattanooga, and try to make it more desirable. The result, in those cases, isn't cookie-cutter and weak -- a Disney-like imitation.
- JakeH
February 20, 2013 at 10:42pm
Entertaining article and congratulations for recognizing that it is convention and visitor bureaus that are the marketing arm of communities. Only one small problem. Raleigh-Durham is the name of an airport listed among other city names. Durham is a very distinct community and definitely one of those "it" places
- Topbull
February 25, 2013 at 7:12am