Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City
By Richard Lloyd
2006, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

In the late '80s and early '90s, recent college graduates began gravitating toward Wicker Park , the Northwest Side Chicago neighborhood, near the Loop , previously depopulated and dilapidated by grim deindustrialization. Unlike the Polish and Latino immigrants who came to the neighborhood for manufacturing jobs, these predominantly white settlers arrived with the romanticized ambition of producing and exchanging their art within the throes of an urban Chicago jungle. They came well-versed in both the slimy horrors of Taxi Driver and the Jane Jacobs ideal of cities as clattering, patchwork channels transmitting new ideals for living. They had seen Greenwich Village once on television and with due ambivalence made their move.

The result, according to Vanderbilt sociologist Richard Lloyd, was to turn the buildings in Wicker Park from garment sweatshops to a "postmodern distraction factory, where everyday life, leisure and image production merge." Instead of escaping the rhythms of capitalism, a new technique of production emerged.

Wicker Park has not so much created ideas and art but instead the image of what a place with ideas and art ought to look like. Its considerable legacy is measured not so much in works of visual art, music, or literature but the production of the scene itself.

These insights are implicitly made in Lloyd's Neo-bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City . Lloyd has very, very rich sociological material here: it is the first book-length study of the '90s and early millennial gentrification phenomenon that has operatively refuted the notion of sprawl as signifier of post-industrial urban space.

Neo-bohemia largely makes fine use of this material, but it leans too heavily on an economic analysis that does not push hard enough in discerning who these new Wicker Park residents really are; what Wicker Park has become or is fluidly becoming; and how much power the new residents have in shaping their community.

Instead, he cynically renders '90s Wicker Park migrants as exploited consumers and producers instead of a sensitive, idea-oriented demographic caught in a period of historical social limbo. Lloyd is too drawn to the external façade of conquering cool and misses the self-conscious and ironic elements so vital to the scene. These elements subvert the socioeconomic supposition that Wicker Park can be assessed by the tangible.

Neo-bohemia is a two-part argument. First, Lloyd posits Wicker Park development of the past 15 years as congruous with traditional urban bohemianism. This section contains Lloyd's inspiring genealogy of the "urban bohemian mythology" started by Baudelaire, Flaubert and other Parisian cultural avatars in the 1850s and continued in 20 th Century America with romanticized grit and glamour from Hemmingway, Mailer and Wicker Park 's own Nelson Algren, author of the lurid Man With a Golden Arm . Lloyd points to the arresting image of Algren pensively strolling down Division Street in the '50s as an aesthetic template for '90s artists renting lofts in Wicker Park .

Before discussing such artists, Lloyd provides a short history of the 20 th century metropolis. His universalizing of both the industrial and bohemian experience is not entirely in sync with his parallel history of Wicker Park . As demonstrated in the hardboiled heroin-and-hookers writing of Algren, Wicker Park has never quite conformed to the notion of post-World War II industrial prosperity followed by rapid decay.

Rather, it has always been an economically uneven part of the city. The paving of Milwaukee Avenue after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 provided a route for newly arrived Polish immigrants to the downtown business center. The Polish population and its attendant culture would dominate the neighborhood until after World War Two creating a distinct ethnic space separate from the relatively affluent and assimilated European immigrants in other neighborhoods.

Industrial decline came early to Wicker Park . In the '50's and'60's Latin American immigrants began moving in with the aspiration of blue-collar prosperity. What these mostly Mexican and Puerto Rican natives found, however, was an apparel industry already outsourcing its jobs to third world countries without unions or labor laws. Evaluating that their quality of life was better in Chicago , anyway, the Latino immigrants stayed. The Polish community and others of European descent fled, however, for the promise of suburban home ownership.

The abandoned warehouses of Wicker Park were seen in the collective conscience as occupied by heroin shooters and other nefarious urban elements until bohemian kids out of college moved in around 1989. Why this movement happened, Lloyd says is, ahem, "complicated." The rents were really low and there was literally a space to fill. Again, Lloyd makes the cultural argument that new residents were drawn by the "authentic" and "edgy" display of urban decay. Like Mailer's "The White Negro" that mandated the hip must "gamble with his energies" in a perpetual state of urban danger, the Caucasian arriviste to Wicker Park felt "real" navigating streets of Latino-dominated blight.

Beyond this, Lloyd describes the evolution of a scene that once brought us culturally credible rock musicians like Liz Phair and Veruca Salt and now gives us a lot of "boutique" shoe stores, and bars that have become clubs.

Lloyd asserts that the dot-com boom of the late '90's reified the area's growing identity as a largely friendly meeting point for art and commerce, creating a new consumer culture.

The most telling post-industrial to industrial juxtaposition Lloyd provides is the relationship between Nike and the neighborhood. Once, Wicker Park residents stitched sneakers for garment corporations like Nike and now they digitally design Nike's image while people thousands of miles away make the shoes.

It is this shift from rationalized mass production to image production that comprises the second part of Lloyd's argument. Lloyd seems to be saying that the new bohemian is the same animal roaming in a new environment of "global capitalism and flexible accumulation." His chief admonishment of new bohemians is that they are still rebelling against modernist assembly-line notions of conformity, while allowing themselves to be exploited by an entirely new service-oriented economy. Lloyd concludes:

Rejecting the "organization man" way of labor in the 2000s is a gesture very different than what it was the 1950s, since to a large extent it doesn't exist anymore. In this broader context, the bohemian disposition that makes "living on the edge" a supreme virtue is in fact quite adaptive to labor realities.

This is quite a weighty criticism and it unintentionally helps to clarify both the problem with new bohemia and the failure of the book.

Lloyd is right that new bohemians are alarmingly apolitical. These ostensibly leftist urban settlers disengagement from class politics has resulted in a relationship mired in miscommunication with the Latino working class they coexist with. The misdirected rebellion against "organization man" conformity further demonstrates a poorly articulated contempt for bureaucracy that can be linked to the continued failure of suitably organizing service economy workers.

A failure to politically understand their economic situation has also led to the inability of the Wicker Park community to construct any coherent stance toward consumerism. For example, the resistance toward the both the incoming Starbucks and filming of MTV's Real World in 2001 was a more aesthetic than moral crusade. The protests were not about economic justice per se , but the lame proprietorship of a hip enclave. As Lloyd points out, few Real World protestors noted that the reality television talent could not become members of the Screen Actors Guild.

But to accuse the new bohemians, as Lloyd does, of unwittingly participating in a sophisticated postmodern arrangement that exploits their "useful labor" is a misdirected jab. Here lies the inability of the book to sincerely get inside the specific ethos of Wicker Park .

Denizens may read Mailer and Algren, but that does mean they take them so literally. There is a feeling of detachment and almost embarrassment that permeates throughout Wicker Park , uneasily mixing with the gaudier displays of commerce. At the very least, these are not imperialists in the classical sense but intellectually curious and artistically ambitious young people becoming adults in a post-Cold War world. If one seeks broad cultural landmarks, the deprecating early-'90s grunge musings of Pavement and Nirvana—or the feminine weariness of Phair's Exile in Guyville—are more apt than the lay philosophy of '50s beats.

For example, Lloyd quotes the owner of one bar as hiring artists because they are "more interesting and intelligent" and the author treats such attitudes as prevalent. Maybe the bar owner was not joking, but a majority of the entrepreneurs and laborers of the Wicker Park economy would be. Or they would be considered unbearably pretentious.

Yes, some bohemians are deadly earnest about their art and social self-worth, but a lot of people are just caught in a labor shortage and drawn by the idea of a community that could replicate the best elements of their liberal arts or art school existence. This isn't necessarily laudable, but it is important to emphasize that not everyone is buying into cheerful notions of liberating themselves through printmaking corporate logos or being next-door neighbors with poor, Spanish speaking families.

People have come to Wicker Park and suspended making traditional career choices precisely because they are unsatisfied with the current socioeconomic system. Whether in becoming a part of the Wicker Park community, they become part of that system surely speaks more to the polymorphous power of corporate America than the hypocrisy, delusions or phoniness of the new resident.

Perhaps a future analysis rooted more in ideology critique than post-industrial economics can look beyond the surface.