H Street NE: America’s 6th-hippest hipster neighborhood, according to Forbes
Remember hipsters? That cultural relic of the aughts, whose lifespan was marked by derisive irony, faux working-class affectations, and a now-cliche hankering for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer? As an urban tribe, they are dead — decisively dead — having out-mainstreamed themselves back into the mainstream, an ouroboros of meta pop cultural references and sneering disdain for itself.
But not to Forbes! The magazine recently released a list of “America’s Hippest Hipster Neighborhoods,” and our own H Street Corridor has made the list at number six. Neighborhood haunts like Sticky Rice, Toki Underground and the Rock and Roll Hotel put H Street behind hipster enclaves like Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the Mission District in San Francisco, but ahead of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and other spots in Austin, Minneapolis and Denver.
- Hipsters — the rare ones that still exist — loathe nothing more than being called hipsters. Will this designation make them flee their neighborhood, freeing it up for less hip denizens?
- Actual hipsters, by definition, should be so ahead of the curve that they’ve already moved beyond H Street, making this entire list outdated and meaningless, right? The number of Capitol Hill intern types in striped shirts at Little Miss Whiskey’s last time I visited, which was well over a year ago, is probably evidence enough of this. (Further evidence from afield: New York Magazine’s cover this week, which declares, “Brooklyn is Finished.”)
- Is there a less hip sentence about being hip than, “‘Politico’ hipsters flock to this D.C. hood?”
Regardless: Maybe there’s something to Forbes’ designation. And since the Style section is mockingly referred to as a chronicler of hipness by Gawker, we must ask, wincingly: Is H Street a hipster neighborhood?