by Erin Geld // Cornell University

Here’s the story: I had been visiting friends who had just graduated and (according to e-mail directions) lived in one of the remoter parts of Brooklyn, West Bushwick. At the time, I had vague plans of moving there too, after I graduated, because that’s what everyone else at Cornell did. On a quick summer ’05 foray, I had liked the “squat old buildings, low-hanging sky, trees, strollers and quiet traffic instead of the overpowering skyscrapers and sweating asphalt of Manhattan,” as I later put it in the column I wrote for our student newspaper.

That weekend, I had fun partying, brunching and feeling the cultural edge, but come Sunday, the hipsters had overwhelmed me. There were just too many of them, staring at each other with practiced apathy and mild discomfort. What were they all doing there, lumped together? It made me nervous. At the very least, it was a good topic for the column due on Tuesday.

The day my Brooklyn column ran, it was picked up by the notoriously nasty Gawker.com, where it was TORN apart in its commenting section, a New York hipster hub. (You have to be pre-approved just for the right to comment, making it a bizarre online club.) A brief, rather neutral note about my piece was followed by an explosion of scathing retorts, such as: “Gag. Please DON’T move to BK. We don’t want you either.” It hurt. I took every mean comment to heart. In two years of writing easygoing columns about local demolition derbies and ratty old hotels, I had received a steady stream of sweet e-mails but never really made any waves. This tsunami of attention was utterly insane. I recently reviewed the comments, and as far as I can tell, what pissed these readers off was: 1) “West Bushwick,” as I had called my friends’ neighborhood, is apparently just some real-estate/hipster-neighborhood-renaming conspiracy that Insiders otherwise know as “East Williamsburg,” which, according to said Insiders, sucks. 2) I had, without a smidgen of irony, announced I was moving to Brooklyn because it was cool. Which is, obviously, a very uncool thing to do.

In the wake of the Gawker-hipster attack, I hated hipsters. My skin crawled at the mention of an obscure band-writer-artist. I sneered at keffiyehs and square rims. I grew my bangs out. Complained about their awkward parties. Started shopping at J.Crew again.

But I couldn’t do it for long. I worked at an on-campus cafe amid Art and Architecture students, took lots of writing workshops, ran a literary magazine full of one-line confessions and tiny doodles of chairs. All of my friends were hipsters! My favorite people in the world (acted like they) knew everything and looked awesome every day. Actually, I applaud the vanity of hipsters, their relish for their moment in fashion—day-glo plaid, careful shag and cut-off tag. Bless them for their meticulously put-together selves. It is they, the deliciously ridiculous, who will be remembered in the illustrated history texts and costume parties of the future. They will be our generation’s glorious testimony. It can’t be helped.

With this in mind, I even forgive the hipsters of Brooklyn a little. I’ve concluded that the Gawker incident was very strange and New Yorky, and I refuse to hold it against hipsters nationwide. You see, New Yorkers have a tendency to be territorial and possessive of their addresses, and out-of-towners get serious stink-eye. Moreover, few people are as obsessed with New York as recent arrivals, with their arms spread open, crying out: “Hellooo New York! You will be mine!” Brooklyn is a bunch of out-of-town kids trying very hard to blend in and stand out at the same time, so of course you’re going to end up with a lot of bitter phonies with a taste for online bullying.

So, I eschewed the Ithaca-to-Williamsburg trend and went west to San Francisco. It is, surprisingly, almost more packed with bandanna babies than Brooklyn. They lounge in Dolores Park with organic sandwiches and two-buck Chuck as if it were stale bagels and PBR on Bedford Avenue. They are similar: name-dropping obscure bands, writing novels “secretly” and being endearingly vain. But in the Mission’s sweet-smelling cloud of tolerance, hipsters are relaxed and just a bit more lovable. Being from somewhere else is a good thing. It’s expected, interesting. There’s no convenient Internet venue through which to pick on people, as they lick their own outsider wounds. Instead, people comment on restaurants and farmers’ markets. They’re usually nice. Helpful. Memories of 1967 still linger in the Bay Area, and people are a little goofy for my East Coast taste. But, thank God, they don’t take themselves very seriously—they’re way cool with being cool.

Erin graduated from Cornell last May and is now writing in San Francisco. She wants to stress that if you have a problem with her column, you shouldn't post mean things anonymously to some website; you should take the old-fashioned route and either e-mail her or send a letter to the editor.

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Illustration by Sylvia Park // Parsons The New School of Design