How Hipsters Ruined Paris

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/how-hipsters-ruined-paris.html

by applecore • 13 years ago

10 11 13 years ago

keithpeter3• 13 years ago

What an odd article. I have some sympathy with what I take to be the basic premise: modern life in Western countries is becoming homogenised and gentrification is 'flattening' our cities.

But identifying the sex trade as an aspect of an area's authenticity is not classy. I've lived on the border of a red light zone and it is not nice (friends being curb crawled, hypodermics in the front garden, running the gauntlet to get the milk &c). We can do without that one.

downer972• 13 years ago

What do you mean by "curb crawled"? Does that refer to being solicited, or what?

keithpeter3• 13 years ago

It is the UK term for soliciting from a car. Forgot about variations in language.

Most police forces will now prosecute but they didn't until about 5 to 10 years ago.

danielharan• 13 years ago

Did you choose to live besides a red light zone? Were you not expecting those interactions with your neighbours?

keithpeter3• 13 years ago

No I didn't choose to live next to a red light zone, the zone grew around lower rent residential streets over a period of time. Higher rents prevented moving until better job obtained. Wasn't residents by the way, street traffic shifts around and police sometimes like it where they can see what is happening and contain.

dionidium• 13 years ago

This article is further proof that the word "hipster" is just a stand-in that means "whatever I don't like."

MrOrelliOReilly• 13 years ago

How? Sure, he uses 'hipster' as a synonym for gentrification but I think that's reasonable. And I think he articulates rather well what he means by gentrification - "urban spaces like style blogs or Pinterest boards representing a single, self-satisfied and extremely sheltered expression of middle- and upper-middle-class sensibility"

ginko• 13 years ago

I believe the term typically used in France and Europe in general would be 'bobo'(bohemian bourgeois).

grey-area• 13 years ago

Pigalle has been a tourist trap for decades, as is the red light district he describes. If you want to see a more interesting side of Paris, living in the area which contains the 19C confection of montemartre and the moulin rouge, famous for 19C artists, as he mentioned several times, is not the way to do it. The Marais and almost everything south to the river from this area are overrun with tourists or expats, particularly the weekend, and I'm really surprised he's complaining about gentrification.

Try menilmontant, saint sulpice, canal st Martin, pantheon or many places outside the central core for areas which are still more interesting or mixed - there is plenty to Paris away from the sights, and to complain about the gentrification of this area as too many people like him move in I find genuinely baffling. If he wants something seedy and rundown for that extra edge, there is plenty to choose from.

The sad truth of our contemporary moment seems to be only that you no longer need to be anywhere in particular anymore.

I'd be really interested to know if he's left the safety of the bubble he's complaining about in Brooklyn NY or Paris, because the areas he's chosen don't sound like they would ever deliver the reality he craves, and both cities have far more to offer than the hipster ennui he describes. It seems the first rule of being a hipster is that you must complain about all the other hipsters.

naterator• 13 years ago

Yea, these people want some fantasy version of Paris (or wherever) that only exists in the present day as an ideal. Back when those places were cool, they weren't cool, they were most often grudgy shitholes, or just coming out of being one. These are the people who wouldn't be able to stand living in the Paris of the 30's or 50's, or the NYC of the 70's and 80's, where you actually had constant background fear of crime; when you had to worry about starving.

Grudgy shitholes that might be legendary someday exist today, but these people don't have the guts to go there. Go to Shanghai, go to Caracas, go to Bangalore, got to Liberia. But that would be dangerous and, perhaps more importantly, come with the risk that in the future those places won't be legendary and they won't have any stories anyone will care about. So, they go to Paris and complain that they can't have their fantasy cake and eat it, too.

Not that I would go to any places I listed, but I also won't complain. As my father has put it, knowing that you're going to get mugged at least once or twice a year on your way to work, sometimes at gun/knifepoint, is not awesome. Bring on the yuppies and hipsters.

How Hipsters Ruined Paris

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