neighborhood in cultural production

The Neighborhood in Cultural Production:Material and Symbolic Resources in the New Bohemia

Richard Lloyd∗

Vanderbilt University

Drawing on an extended case study of the Chicago neighborhood Wicker Park, thisarticle examines the role that neighborhood space plays in organizing the activitiesof young artists, showing how an urban district can serve as a factor in aesthetic pro-duction. The tendency of artists and fellow travelers to cluster in distinctive (usuallyolder) urban neighborhoods is well known. While in recent decades many scholarshave recognized that these creative congregations contribute to residential gentri-fication and other local patterns of increased capital investment, the benefits thatsuch neighborhoods offer for aspirants in creative pursuits are generally assumed,not explained. I use the Wicker Park case to show how the contemporary artists’neighborhood provides both material and symbolic resources that facilitate creativeactivity, particularly in the early stages of a cultural producer’s career. I further con-nect these observations to the production of culture as a commodity, showing howselect neighborhoods fill quasi-institutional roles in the flexible webs that character-ize contemporary culture industries.

In the 1840s, the Parisian writer Henri Murger ([1848] 1988) serialized the stories ofpenniless artists living in the garrets of Montmartre, applying the term bohemia to markthe material and symbolic spaces occupied by these strivers. Murger’s romantic imageryof destitution and idealism among a newly constituted creative class drew on a phe-nomenon of the modern metropolis that has proven both durable and portable, thepurposive clustering of young artists as well as various hangers-on in distinct urban districts(Gendrion, 2002; Gold, 1993; Polsky, 1969; Schorske, 1981; Seigel, 1986; Simpson, 1981;Smith, 1953; Snyderman and Josephs, 1939; Zukin, 1982). In the United States, pro-totypical bohemias emerged in neighborhoods such as New York’s Greenwich Village(Stonehill, 2002; Stansell, 2000; Ware, 1935; Wetzsteon, 2002), where artists, political rad-icals, and other lifestyle eccentrics shared space with immigrant laborers. Today, we canstill identify spatial practices characteristic of bohemia in large and small cities throughoutthe United States, even in the face of significant changes in the structural foundations ofmetropolitan growth. As I will show, contemporary participants draw on the cumulativemythology of past bohemias in designing contemporary strategies of action. Moreover,they continue to derive advantages from the morphology of older industrial neighbor-hoods, with important consequences for the articulation of the postindustrial city.

∗Correspondence should be addressed to Richard Lloyd, Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, VUStation 351811, Nashville TN 37235-1811; [email protected].

City & Community 3:4 December 2004C© American Sociological Association, 1307 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701

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Current debates on the contemporary Western metropolis focus on the shifts in theeconomic contexts within which urban form is articulated, including de-industrialization,globalization, and associated increases in the importance of immaterial labor in areaslike finance, technology, and media design (Castells, 1989; Florida, 2002a; Hardt andNegri, 2001; Sassen, 1991). The vaunted “LA school” of urban studies stresses patternsof de-concentration that seem to obviate the dense neighborhood morphology in whichtraditional bohemias have been located (Dear, 2001; Scott and Soja, 1996; Soja, 1989).Other studies indicate that alongside sprawling growth we also find the resurgence of olderdowntowns and select center-city neighborhoods (Kotkin, 2000; Sassen, 1991, 1998; Smith,1996; Zukin, 1995). This neighborhood-level resurgence, unevenly distributed through-out older cities, no longer follows the impetus of industrial production. Instead, newpatterns of production characterize the city and its neighborhoods, with increased em-phasis on the production of culture and technology. Bohemia, rooted in the modernistmetropolis, persists in the transition to what Michael Dear (2000) calls “the postmodernurban condition.”

In fact, there is reason to believe that precisely because of the postmodern emphasis onculture as a linchpin rather than just a reflection of economic activity (Anderson, 1998;Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1998), new bohemias are more prevalent and more importantto understanding urban fortunes than were their modernist predecessors. In that case itbecomes especially important for urban scholars to examine the contemporary advantagesthat center-city neighborhoods offer for young artists, and to show how this figures intothe political economy of cultural production as well as urban redevelopment.

During the 1990s, a century and a half after Murger’s literary contributions, Chicago’sWicker Park neighborhood emerged as a noted hub for the activities of young artistsand a seedbed of hip, funky urban culture. Only recently an obscure and depopulatedbarrio, ravaged by the effects of de-industrialization, Wicker Park serves as a model of theartists’ neighborhood in the late capitalist metropolis. Both the press and local participantsevoke past bohemian instantiations in accounts of the neighborhood’s change. However,a new bohemia like Wicker Park is distinguished from its predecessors by virtue of thestructural context within which it unfolds. Via an extended case study of Wicker Park, I haveexamined this neo-bohemian articulation, arguing both for its thematic continuity withbohemian archetypes, and for the distinct differences that emerge from the encounter ofbohemia with the dynamics of late capitalism (Lloyd, 2002).

The modernist bohemia has typically been viewed as a marginal space in the city withregards to the urban economy and, indeed, as oppositional to the norms of capitalist ac-cumulation. Cesar Grana (1964) argues that the central ideological feature of bohemianlife in Murger’s Paris was antipathy toward the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Daniel Bell(1976) incorporates Lionel Trilling’s notion of bohemia and the avant-garde as an “adver-sary culture” into his analysis of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. These analysessuggest the durability of the oppositional frame despite what were already seismic shifts inthe articulation of capitalism, from the bourgeois shopkeeper capitalism of 19th-centuryParis to the mass production economy of the mid 20th-century United States. What seemsto unite bohemian sentiment during these two very different stages of modernism is therejection of the utilitarian work ethic; Bell quotes Baudelaire: “To be a useful man hasalways appeared to me to be something quite hideous” (1976, p. 17).

Ideological objections to perceived norms of capitalist labor in fact persist in WickerPark, though these idealized constructions appear to respond to the stereotypes of the

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mid 20th-century “organization man” (Whyte, 1956) rather than to contemporary ar-rangements of flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989). These oppositional sentiments beliethe salient fact of the new bohemia. As a practical matter, the neo-bohemian features ofWicker Park enhance the interests of capital. This utility of bohemia for the articulation ofcapital unfolds along multiple dimensions and, as we will see, divergent capitalist interestsoften conflict with one another in the ways that they utilize the neighborhood as a site ofaccumulation. Two such dimensions are by now relatively well known: (1) the implicationof new bohemian space in strategies of residential gentrification and (2) the relationshipbetween the new bohemia and the agglomeration of new media enterprises.

These will be dealt with briefly below. Less well considered is the status of a neighborhoodlike Wicker Park as a privileged site in the production of culture, serving as a de factospace of research and development for culture industries. Industries in film, television,and popular music, whose interest lie in the dissemination of a variegated cultural productas a commodity, require the constant input of cultural innovations. These innovations,however, occur in a process not contained by the formal boundaries of these organizations;contrary to the classic formulation of Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944] 1994), they arenot vertically integrated. Places such as Wicker Park emerge as privileged productionsites outside of formal organizational boundaries, concentrating cultural activity that canbe selected from by industry gatekeepers. In this case, it is useful to examine artists insomewhat unusual and counterintuitive terms, as workers in a cultural production process(rather than as, say, tortured geniuses or the heroes of modern life).1 Then we can askthe overlooked question: How does the space of neo-bohemia operate in the organizationand deployment of this labor power?

ARTISTS AND THE URBAN ECONOMY

There is accumulated evidence of the role that artists now play in the rehabilitation ofolder industrial neighborhoods, reimagining apparently anachronistic features of thebuilt environment as living lofts, performance venues, and galleries. Thus far, this pointis made most strongly in a series of case studies focusing on New York City districts suchas SoHo and the East Village (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984; Mele, 2000; Simpson, 1981;Smith, 1996; Zukin, 1982). This impressive research nevertheless raises question of rep-resentatives, given New York’s traditionally outsize role as a center of production in themedia and fine arts (see Guilbaut, 1983). But while it is appropriate to question the ex-tent to which we can generalize from these cases, contemporary indicators suggest thatattention to new bohemias is illuminating beyond the confines of these traditional urbanarts bastions. Our own case study, in Chicago, is indicative of how processes documentedin New York also occur elsewhere, even if we can also assume some important varianceamong cases owing to their historical and geographic particularities. Combined with thecomparative quantitative data found in studies that I will examine below, the broad corre-spondences between cases suggest that the sampling problem is not serious, though thepropositions advanced by a sited study, as always, invite refinement via further empiricalwork.

The population of self-identified artists in the United States has increased dramatically,both proportionally and absolutely, in the past half-century (Table 1); arguably it hasoutpaced the carrying capacity of the small contingent of classic U.S. bohemias. Moreover,

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TABLE 1. Artists, Writers, and Performers in the United States, 1900–1999

Year Artist’s Population U.S. Population Per/100,000

1900 203,000 76,094,000 2671910 288,000 92,407,000 3121920 291,000 106,461,000 2731930 406,000 123,077,000 3301940 439,000 132,122,000 3321950 524,000 152,271,000 3441960 608,000 180,671,000 3361970 791,000 205,052,000 3851980 1,284,000 227,224,000 5651991 1,957,000 249,464,000 7841999 2,454,000 272,691,000 900

Sources: 1900–1960 from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970(1976). 1970–1991 from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings as Reported in the U.S. Bureauof the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1999 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupation andEmployment Statistics (available online). Thanks to Richard Florida and Kevin Stolarick.

cities such as New York and San Francisco, traditional leaders in cultural production,currently evince a cost of living quite daunting for often poorly paid cultural aspirants. Butartists, for reasons that will be illuminated below, remain disproportionately committedto center-city living. Thus, as Ann Markusen (2000) points out, they are an especially fast-growing population in cities not traditionally associated with bohemian activity. Chicagofalls somewhere between New York and Cleveland in this regard. It boasts a solid traditionin the literary arts and in music; however, heading into the 1990s its contributions to newcultural production were relatively moribund (Boehlert, 1993).

In addition to the increasing population of artists in large cities, recent theorists pointout that dynamics commonly associated with globalization promote a new class of urbanresidents, educated cosmopolitans employed in the postindustrial growth sectors of fi-nance, insurance, real estate, and media technology (Clark et al., 2002; Florida, 2002b;Nevarez, 2003; Reich, 1991; Sassen, 1991). Such individuals, significantly interested inconsuming cultural offerings as part of their quest for authentic experience, are drawnto bohemian and offbeat fare, in Chicago ranging from smoky blues bars to avant-gardegallery openings (Grazian, 2003; Lloyd and Clark, 2001; Lloyd, 2002). This developmentleads artists and other cultural producers to emerge as avatars of urban consumptionpatterns, a trend not unknown to past bohemias, but one whose scope and impact hasincreased with the corresponding increase in cosmopolitan consumers.

Other studies suggest that the impact of bohemia is not limited to residential gentri-fication and the development of local entertainment districts. The presence of artistsapparently cross-fertilizes with other economic enterprises. Markusen and David King(2003) argue that the concentration of artists in a region increases both local productiv-ity and earnings. Richard Florida uses data from the 1990 Decennial Census Public UseMicrodata samples to generate what he names the Bohemian Index. Via this index, helocates a robust correlation between the presence of artists in a region and the locationof high-technology firms. He writes:

The presence and concentration of bohemians in an area creates an environmentor milieu that attracts other types of talented or high human capital individuals. The

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presence of such high human capital individuals in a region in turn attracts andgenerates innovative technology based industries. (2002b, p. 3)

Likewise, Terry Nichols Clark proposes a model for the postindustrial city that turns oldassumptions about economics and population on their head; according to Clark, urbanpopulations no longer follow job creation, but rather employers now create jobs where thedesirable population lives, that is, those educated, high-cultural-capital individuals mostlikely to take their consumption cues from artists (Clark et al., 2002).

In his work on the late 1990s digital economy emerging in New York’s Silicon Alley,Andrew Ross (2001, 2003) indicates that local artists not only attract workers in digitaldesign, but also become co-opted themselves into the local labor force, valued for theirown technological savvy and aesthetic competence. I have documented similar patterns inWicker Park (Lloyd, 2002), though as Gina Neff (2001, 2002) points out, these artists wereparticularly vulnerable employees following the dot.com market crash of 2001. Nonethe-less, artists continue to be available as potential labor in fields like graphic design anddigital design, and their value may be enhanced by their amenability to contingent andflexible arrangements such as subcontracted or project-based employment (Zukin, 1995;Neff et al., n.d.).

Beyond this cross-fertilization with digital enterprises, new bohemias also must be ex-amined for their relationship to traditional culture industries, that is, film, television, andpopular music. This proposition may appear surprising given Adorno and Horkheimer’s([1944] 1994) depiction of culture industries as highly rationalized purveyors of standard-ized product, and Bell’s (1976) influential image of the avant-garde as staunch enemies ofthe instrumental rationality that characterizes the corporate economy. These images aremisleading given the contemporary situation. The culture industries signaled by Adornoand Horkheimer have grown dramatically, earning substantially increased profits while be-coming the United States’ principal exporter. However, their organizational forms havebeen substantially transformed since mid-century, providing excellent examples of thegeneral economic trend away from Fordist mass production and toward “flexible special-ization” (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Storper, 1989). In this case, Fordist-style vertical integra-tion gives way to the new style webs of flexible production described by Lash and Urry(1994). In contrast to the old image of the culture industry “artist” as a “studio owned andoperated” commodity (Gamson, 1994; Storper, 1989), the new trend is toward “projectbased labor markets” (Bielby and Bielby, 1999) in which Peterson and Anand (2002) arguethat “chaotic careers create orderly fields” (2002). Although flexibility “liberates” laborfrom conventional organizational boundaries, this does not mean a democratization ofthe rewards. Media oligopolies and a select stratum of privileged cultural producers con-tinue to dominate profits under new arrangements (McChesney, 2004), while less formalrelations of exchange with cultural producers in general absolve large but vertically disin-tegrated corporate concerns of bearing many associated market risks; in Wicker Park thisincludes especially the risks associated with new product development.

Under these circumstances, as I will argue, the commitment of contemporary bohemi-ans to the romanticized images of starving artists and the primacy of the aesthetic doesnot confound the instrumental interests of the culture industries. Instead, the ideologicalfeatures of bohemia work to the benefit of these industries, sustaining a pool of potentiallabor that largely bears its own costs of reproduction. Neo-bohemian neighborhoods helpmake this possible by clustering employment opportunities in areas like entertainment

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provision that help aspiring artists to subsidize their creative pursuits. The local ecologyof neo-bohemia combines these opportunities with appropriate residential, work, and dis-play spaces, creating a platform for artistic efforts that may then be mined by extra-localcorporate interests, who recruit talent and co-opt cultural products from these settingsat their discretion. This indeed did occur in Wicker Park during the 1990s; music in-dustry scouts, for example, routinely scoured the neighborhood, signing many local actsto recording contracts. Likewise, the works of selected fine artists made their way intoprestigious and profitable galleries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Traditionally, the cultural production of the bohemian avant-garde is considered to bean entirely different matter from the presumably crass and generic popular culture com-modities disseminated by formal organizations (see Gans, 1999). However, as Jamesonpoints out, such artistic innovations in fact directly impact the mainstream of the con-temporary economy: “Commodity production . . . [is] now intimately tied in with stylingchanges which derive from artistic experimentation” (1998, p. 19). This insight neglectsto specify the social process through which these influences intermingle, or to locate theseinteractions spatially; more recent work by Harvey Molotch (1996, 2003) directs attentionto the way that locality operates in the development and diffusion of design principles.In fact, Molotch advances a provocative thesis, which exceeds the scope of this article, ar-guing that the creative work of local artists impacts not only culture industry production,but in fact becomes inscribed in the more ordinary products that emanate from a distinctregion, as in the case of Los Angeles.

In neo-bohemia we can see the material conditions through which different modes ofcultural production cross-fertilize. As Molotch points out: “Culture workers are typicallyeach interdisciplinary and spark one another’s energies across genres. The great majorityof artists are active in more than one art” (2003, p. 179). Leaving aside normative judg-ments of cultural value, we can note that in fact new bohemias are characterized by theintersection of participants oriented to cultural forms that are obscure and unlikely to bevalorized by the market under any circumstances (i.e., performance poetry) and to thosethat are intended to find a mass audience (i.e., popular music or film). Not infrequently,the same individual will bridge these distinctions, as in the case of a Wicker Park infor-mant who combined his personal commitment to directing avant-garde theater with thecareer ambition of writing mainstream Hollywood screenplays. Bernard Gendrion hasextensively documented the intersections between popular music and the avant-gardein bohemian sites “from Montmartre to the Mudd Club” (2002). One colorful exampleinvolves famous denizens of New York’s 1980s bohemian scene; Madonna was a stalwartof the East Village club scene and temporary paramour of bohemian icon Jean-MichelBasquiat before becoming one of the best-selling pop musicians of all time (Hoban, 1999).The cross-fertilization of comparatively obscure cultural pursuits in the fine arts with themore popular forms of the mass media therefore alerts us to an often overlooked waythat bohemia can act as a generative field useful to culture industry interests. Thus, in theWicker Park case, even residents who went on to produce for highly popular media liketelevision or Hollywood films were likely to be conversant in high art traditions, and tohave been avid consumers of the more avant-garde fare produced locally.

I argue that a neo-bohemian neighborhood like Wicker Park fills a quasi-institutionalrole in the production of culture, interacting with more formal culture industries. Byconcentrating talent and potential new products in a visible milieu, the neighborhoodacts as a site of de facto research and development, with large amounts of innovative work

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contributing to a small amount of marketable product. What differentiates this from othersites of R&D in areas like aerospace and biotechnology is that it is formally distinct fromits potential industry beneficiaries and unsubsidized by them.

This sort of innovative work may be particularly difficult to perform within the moreformalized organizational structures of global corporations. The art historian ThomasCrow argues:

In our image saturated present, the culture industry has demonstrated the ability topackage and sell nearly every variety of desire imaginable, but because its ultimatelogic is the strictly rational and utilitarian one of profit maximization, it is not ableto create the desires and sensibilities it exploits. (1998, p. 34)

In this analysis, Crow suggests that the informal but structured space of bohemia can serveas a staging ground for such creation. Typically, cultural products produced in WickerPark are not market ready; the neighborhood does, however, facilitate the incubation oftalent and the piloting of innovative designs that may eventually contribute to marketoutput. Such output is mediated by formal institutional structures. Thus, Wicker Park isbest understood not as a self-contained space of innovation but as a privileged site in anetworked geography of cultural production.

THE CASE

During the 1990s, Chicago’s west side Wicker Park neighborhood garnered significantlocal and national attention as a center for creative production, recognized by mediaoutlets as “cutting edge’s new capital” (Boehlert, 1993) and the “Windy City’s burst ofbohemia” (Shriver, 1996). Although the initial burst of national acclaim, around 1993–1994, focused on its rock music scene, in fact the neighborhood was home to aspirantsin a variety of creative pursuits, including film, theater, literature, performance poetry,and the fine arts. By the mid 1990s it was widely considered to contain one of the largestconcentrations of working artists in the United States, with more than 100 local artistssharing studio spaces in the neighborhood’s Flat Iron building (Huebner, 2001). Althoughmost of these have labored in comparative anonymity, the neighborhood boasts among itsalumni several widely acclaimed successes in their respective media, including film (RoseTroche, Steve Pink), the fine arts (D-zine, Alan Gugel, Adam Siegel), and pop music (LizPhair, Veruca Salt, Urge Overkill).

Corresponding to its arts notoriety were several local developments that have come tobe viewed as emblematic of the new bohemia in U.S. cities. Characterized by industrial dis-investment during the 1980s, with a relatively high rate of poverty and depressed propertyvalues, Wicker Park during the 1990s was marked by significant residential gentrification.Median home values and household incomes within the neighborhood increased dramat-ically from 1990–2000 (Table 2). The attraction of this new bohemia for the cosmopolitannew class is further illustrated by the change in educational levels among neighborhoodresidents, with the proportion of adult (over 25) residents possessing a college degreeor higher increasing from 20 percent to 50 percent. In the latter part of the decade, theneighborhood also received increasing attention for the presence of new media compa-nies, typically small firms that cited the local creative ethos as a key source of comparativeadvantage (Jaffe, 2001; Karp, 2001; Kotkin, 2000; Littman, 2001).

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TABLE 2. Income, House Value, and Rent in Wicker Park (Dollars), 1999 and 2000

1990 2000

Cook County Wicker Park Cook County Wicker Park

Median household income 32,673 23,327 45,922 54,791Median house value 102,100 109,913 157,700 400,100Median rent 411 325 648 802

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (16-Tract Area)

I conducted ethnographic research in the neighborhood during two discrete intervalsin the 1990s. The first period was in the years 1993–1995, corresponding to the initialexplosion of neighborhood notoriety mostly associated with the success of several localmusicians. I took up this case study again in 1999, continuing through 2001. During theseperiods I visited artists’ residences and studios, local entertainment outlets, galleries andperformance venues, and the offices of local Internet and design firms. I buttressed directobservation with formal, recorded interviews with over three dozen local informants. In-formants included not only local artists, but also property entrepreneurs, service workers,designers, and other professionals. Collectively, their association with the neighborhoodspans the period from the late 1980s to 2001. Data from the census, the Chicago Artist’sSurvey of 2000, and from media accounts has been incorporated to contextualize andextend my ethnographic observations. This work comprises the data for this article.

Case studies are not randomly selected. As biased samples, they pose problems of gen-eralizability, and invite comparative work in other locales. What is necessary is that thegiven case possesses demonstrable features of more general phenomena. For a numberof reasons Wicker Park seems to be a promising site for generating propositions about thenature of the contemporary artists’ neighborhood. It has become well known as a leadingcenter of arts activity and during the period of interest has contained participants in awide range of creative pursuits. It shares many features that have come to be recognized asimportant by scholars of the arts and neighborhood change. Finally, it is not in New York,and therefore it offers a comparative counterpoint to the many ethnographic studies ofartists’ neighborhoods that have been focused there. We will now turn our attention todeveloping how Wicker Park worked during the 1990s to sustain the activities of creativeparticipants, meeting both material and symbolic requirements.

MATERIAL SUPPORTS

THE ECONOMIC PROFILE OF BOHEMIAN ARTISTS

The opportunity exists to earn large fortunes in both the mass media and the fine arts.Jeremy Seabrook identifies the “celebrity class,” including highly successful cultural pro-ducers, as comprising a key component of the rarefied strata of the “global rich” (2002,p. 23), and as the designation suggests, their rewards are ample in terms of both monetarycompensation and social status. Plattner argues that the (short-lived) boom in the marketfor living artists in the United States during the 1980s led to the belief that even avant-garde producers in the visual arts could realize fantastic payoffs for their efforts (1996,p. 83). Such an outcome is not, however, a common occurrence and few aspirants in the

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TABLE 3. General Demographics for Chicago Artists by Percentage Income from Art, 2000 (Number andPercent)

Household Income (Annual)

Income from Art No. Respondents With College Degree or Higher Under 25K 25 to 40K

0 to 25% 562 85 26 2926 to 50% 107 85 38 2951 to 75% 28 91 39 3676 to 100% 217 85 22 30

Source: Chicago Artists Survey 2000, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

arts will ever realize it. “From a distributional perspective, artists show a high variance inincome. Poverty rates among US artists are higher than for all other professional and tech-nical workers” (Menger, 1999, p. 556). The distribution of rewards is a classic example ofa winner-take-all market, with a relatively small number of participants reaping the lion’sshare of monetary gain (Frank and Cook, 1996). Even for those fortunate few, the receiptof fame and fortune is often preceded by a de facto apprenticeship, perhaps lasting manyyears, during which remuneration for artistic efforts is intermittent and paltry (Filer, 1986,p. 63). Despite possessing relatively high levels of cultural and formal educational capital,most artists find their creative pursuits significantly unrewarded by formal art markets ofany kind.

Results from the 2000 Chicago Artists’ Survey, conducted by the Chicago Departmentof Cultural Affairs with over 900 respondents, further illustrate this point. First, we mustnote the strikingly high rates of formal educational attainment; in total, 87 percent ofrespondents reported a college degree or higher. Still, in keeping with bohemian mythol-ogy of the starving artist, the return to this education in terms of household income isrelatively low. Indeed, in excess of a third of these respondents report household incomesunder $25,000/year. Seventy-three percent report making less than half of their incomedirectly from art; 61 percent report less than a quarter (Table 3). Thus, most artists mustsupport their creative pursuits with other income-generating activities.

Bohemia is typically occupied by younger artists and fellow travelers, and Wicker Park isno exception. Indeed, Ephraim Mizruchi ([1983] 1990) identifies youth as a fundamen-tal feature of bohemia. In his formulation, bohemia is a “space of abeyance,” in whichparticipants forestall adult commitments, and he suggests that the age of 30 is the tippingpoint beyond which such a slack existence ceases to be socially acceptable. Although inWicker Park most of the more visible and active scene participants are in their 20s, manystill students at local arts institutions, there is a significant minority who pursue la vieboheme into their 30s and beyond. Despite their advanced age, these individuals continueto evince the styles and strategies typically associated with youth culture; they are moreextreme examples of the American trend in which once standard markers of “adult” lifesuch as marriage and children are increasingly deferred (Laumann et al., 2004). In anyevent, the overall youthfulness of the scene means that local incomes are likely to beeven lower in a neo-bohemia than they are for the total population of artists. Filer notes:“Although artists earn an average of 6 percent less than the general work force, the differ-ential varies substantially over the life cycle . . . Income differentials shift in favor of artistsas workers grow older, so that above the age of 40 artists typically earn more than thecontrol group” (1986, p. 63). This “convergence,” coupled with the fact that overall the

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population of artists skews young (Menger, 1999), suggests that many “failed” bohemiansfollow Mizruchi’s advice and drop out.

Income pressure for young artists is elevated by the decline in public funding for thearts. Federal funding sources such as the National Endowment of the Arts, founded aspart of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, have been the object of significantcontroversy, decried by conservatives for moral laxity as well as government waste (Vance,1989). Federal funding for the arts peaked in 1981, and has declined since, althoughfunding at the state and local levels has intermittently made up some of this shortfall(Plattner, 1996, p. 39). Meanwhile, private funding for the arts via corporations tends tobe project based rather than taking the form of individual grants, and it therefore tendsto reward already established artists rather than aspirants (McCarthy et al., 2001; Toeplerand Zimmer, 1999).

This financial profile impacts the spatial requirements of young artists. They requireliving/work spaces that are comparatively inexpensive, and are therefore drawn to tran-sitional neighborhoods, areas where what Neil Smith describes as a “rent gap” betweenpotential and actual rents prevails (Smith, 1996, pp. 51–74). Beyond low rents, these as-pirants also require access to display venues in order to enhance their visibility in nascentcareers; because their profiles are typically low during the bohemian phase, such venuesmust have relatively low barriers to entry, welcoming new and experimental work. Finally,the artists must be able to find work to subsidize pursuit of their crafts; ideally, they seekwork that is flexible around their lifestyles, including both time requirements and aes-thetic predilections. We will see how these material requirements are satisfied in WickerPark; we will also see how they are in tension with one another, producing a precariousenvironment.

CLAIMS ON SPACE

Young artists are typically compelled by financial constraint to seek out living and workspaces in areas that offer affordable rents. Additionally, many artists require studio spacesthat combine qualities such as high ceilings, ample wall and/or floor space, and adequatenatural light. As researchers such as Charles Simpson (1981) and Sharon Zukin (1982)point out, artists have creatively adapted underutilized industrial structures, former fac-tories and warehouses, to meet these demands. Such spaces may also be advantageouslyadapted as performance venues and galleries, lending artists local platforms from whichto display their efforts to a wider audience, including potential buyers. Wicker Park in the1980s was a formerly thriving enclave of immigrant industrial labor fallen on hard times(Lester, 2000). As such, it provided both relatively low rents and a built environmentamenable to meeting these needs.

Many neighborhoods in Chicago share this basic profile. Indeed, the sprawling SouthSide offers even lower rents and a greater abundance of unused loft space. However, WickerPark also provides a strategic location well placed on transportation arteries and near boththe downtown gallery district and the North Side off-loop theater and performance venues.The Elevated Train provides a convenient conduit to the Art Institute and ColumbiaCollege (Figure 1). Moreover, the majority population of Wicker Park in the 1980s wascomprised of recent Latino immigrants rather than African Americans, who dominatethe South Side. Assessment of gentrification trends during this period in New York’s East

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FIG. 1. Map of Wicker Park and Chicago.

Note: Map created by Richard Lloyd and Todd Schuble, University of Chicago

Village and Chicago’s West Side indicates that a preponderance of brown rather thanblack faces serves as less of a deterrent for white residents, including young artists.

Still, while informal channels among Chicago artists may have indicated that the neigh-borhood was an advantageous place to be during the 1980s, this was a fairly well-kept secret.Moreover, artists in Wicker Park found it difficult to make contact with one another, andreaped comparatively few benefits from this agglomeration compared to during the 1990s.The sculptor Alan Gugel, who moved into Wicker Park in 1988, illustrates the point: “WhenI moved into this neighborhood, that’s one thing they kept saying: ‘There’s a lot of artists,a lot of artists, move down there.’ And when I got there, there were no artists. I couldn’tsee them.” Thus, even as artists were beginning to take advantage of the opportunitiesoffered by the local built environment, the scene remained nascent, and did not providethe significant advantages for collaboration, material and symbolic support, and displayto a wider audience that would emerge during the 1990s.

This achievement required increased public visibility, which occurred only as artistsbegan to realize claims on a number of local institutions. The possibility of these claimson institutional spaces in the neighborhood was not only an effect of artists’ activities; italso reflects the strategic decisions of local actors who were not artists, particularly smallentrepreneurs. For example, by the late 1980s, a small number of nightspots that hadformerly catered to a Hispanic or Polish working-class clientele began to actively addressthe needs of local artists. Phyllis’ Musical Inn, established in the 1950s by the Jaskot family,had long been the home of Polish folk music, but by 1988 it had made the switch to cutting-edge rock and roll, providing a performance venue for local musicians and a hangout forlocal bohemians. Other local drinking establishments, such as Czar Bar, the Rainbo Club,

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FIG. 2. The Urbus Orbis building.

Dreamerz, and the Bop Shop, likewise became popular meeting grounds in the nascentbohemian scene, reflecting not only the preference of patrons, but also the active attemptsof entrepreneurs to court this new and growing artistic population.

In 1989, Tom Handley opened the Urbus Orbis Cafe in a brick warehouse structureon North Avenue, just off the six-cornered intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee(Figure 2). This cafe, with its cavernous, brick-walled interior, quickly became an essentialcongregation site for artists and like-minded individuals living in the neighborhood. AsHandley indicated to me: “Our initial clientele was definitely from the art community.There wasn’t much of a gentrification scene at the time, so the art community was definitelyour first prop.” In fact, Urbus Orbis proved to be more of a prop for the arts communitythan the other way around, in part because of Handley’s ideological commitment toproviding a place where artists could spend time regardless of their willingness or abilityto purchase his goods. As Michael Watson, a local writer during the early 1990s, put it:

If you went to Urbus Orbis—and in those days I would spend so much time there—Urbus was such an institution at that point because you could literally sit at a table,you get into a conversation, and the next thing you know you’re involved in sixconversations. You come in at 2:00 in the afternoon, you look up it’s 9:00 . . . We’dall [local artists] sort of end up at Urbus Orbis and sit there, nursing a bottomlesscup of coffee for $1.35.

Handley’s intention was to create a place of congregation amenable to the exchangeof ideas; he in fact alerted me to Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place (1989) as ex-pressing the model for what he hoped to achieve. Oldenburg describes cafes as potential“third places,” neither work nor home, which serve as generative milieu for the creationof community. In fact, the cafe did not meet Oldenburg’s (overly simplistic) criterionof being a social leveler welcoming to all—like bohemia in general it was cliquish andexclusive. However, it did enhance the general feeling of solidarity for those whose bo-hemian credentials were in order. This was helped by Handley’s tolerance of unprofitable

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FIG. 3. The Flat Iron building (exterior).

patronage; as an article in the Chicago Tribune indicated: “There are few places where itis acceptable to table hog, and Urbus Orbis is one of them” (Sall, 1993, p. 7). AlthoughHandley was exceptional in the degree to which his commitment to the arts supersededthe desire to run a profitable business, other local entrepreneurs also indicated in inter-views that they acted as much to realize a vision of creative community as they did to makemoney.

If we take these claims seriously, and in many cases observed practices suggest thatwe should, it confounds a simplistic but common assumption that entrepreneurs are nomore than cynical manipulators of the organic bohemian community, quick to sell itout for a more affluent client base. In fact, many business owners identify strongly withthe local artists and their concerns, viewing themselves as world builders, and baskingin the prestige of association as the neighborhood became a nationally renowned centerof creative energy. At the same time, they did not necessarily welcome correspondingadvances in gentrification, even where these developments would appear to enhancetheir profit-making potential.

For example, across the street from the Urbus Orbis building is the Flat Iron building,whose upper floors provide studio space currently shared by over 100 artists (Figures 3and 4). The majority owner and director, Bob Berger, insists that he rents these spacessignificantly below market value and vets tenants according to their artistic commitment.At the sidewalk level, Berger rents storefront space to businesses he considers consistentwith the neighborhood’s neo-bohemian ethos, refusing lucrative applications from chainoutlets such as Starbucks. Berger claims that in the decade he has controlled the building(since 1993), it has operated mostly in the red as a result, losses he subsidizes with theprofits from commercial property he owns elsewhere in the city. Handley, meanwhile, hadno comparable source of outside income, and Urbus Orbis, never profitable, succumbed

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FIG. 4. Flat Iron building (interior studio space).

in 1998 to rising overhead as gentrification increased operating costs but not necessarilyprofits (Vitello, 1998).

These strategies of action adopted by nonartists are important to creating the distinctbohemian milieu of innovation. As the recollections of informants suggest, a quasi-publicspace like Urbus Orbis is conducive to fostering productive interactions among localartists, interactions that arguably enhance individual creativity. Michael Warr, the directorof the Guild Complex, a local nonprofit dedicated to supporting literary pursuits, madethe point:

When Urbus Orbis was open in Wicker Park, it was huge cafe that was full of peopledoing creative things, and you could literally go from table to table and a poet couldwind up collaborating with a visual artist because their art may have actually been onthe walls. Where you can actually be on the ground floor of creative ideas, peoplestarting projects, and I think artists find other artists supportive, and that’s a criticalpart of what an artist needs when [the art] isn’t necessarily monetarily rewarding.

In addition to collaborative benefits, the cafe also provided opportunity for emotionalsupport networks to develop—networks fostering the sorts of symbolic advantages thatwill be dealt with below.

Urbus Orbis, along with the several other bars and coffee shops in the neighborhoodthat local artists, musicians, and hipsters claimed as their own, is therefore important formore than just understanding the recreational ethos of Wicker Park. Apparently a space ofleisure, Urbus Orbis contributed to the real work of artists by facilitating interactions andcollaborations. It also created a general culture amenable to the arts, where a collective

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disposition coalesced that supported bohemian values of self-sacrifice and the primacy ofthe aesthetic. Antonio Negri argues that “work processes have shifted from the factory tosociety, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine” (1989, cited in Terranova,2000, p. 33). But while creative labor may resist the routinization of the factory floor, itstill occurs in the context of material, spatialized social relations. The practical interac-tions in these Wicker Park locales shed light on how this “complex machine” operates inconcrete locales. These spatial practices link the new bohemia to culture industry prof-itability in a variety of ways, but they are contingent and vulnerable in the face of ongoingneighborhood dynamism.

EXPOSURE

The existence of the admittedly vast marketplace of cultural offerings like popular musicand film reflects an even more extensive selection process from among cultural aspirants,mediated by culture industry gatekeepers (Hirsch, 1972). For every cultural object thatenters into relatively broad circulation and enjoys enhanced potential profitability, anunknown number of actual or potential objects do not. But when we view the productionof culture as a social process, rather than a case of genius revealing itself, we can come tounderstand that these failures are a key part of the social condition that allows some tosucceed. A dense community of young artists will necessarily contain only a handful des-tined for real success (measured by the standard indicators of media recognition and bigdollars). But when a large amount of cultural work becomes concentrated in a particularplace, the job of industry gatekeepers responsible for discerning potentially marketableproducts is made easier.

Wicker Park serves as a site of specialized production for culture industries, one con-ducive to fostering nascent products and careers. Particularly in the early 1990s, whenits reputation achieved national proportions but gentrification processes had not yet dra-matically raised local rents, the neighborhood contributed to the flourishing of youngartists and musicians in the early stages of their careers,2 as well as a number of hip, funkyhangouts where these artists could work and play. Typically, those Wicker Park artists whoachieved real acclaim and financial success—only a small fraction of the total applicantpool—promptly deserted the neighborhood, often for New York or Los Angeles. Thisis consistent with the traditions of bohemia since Parisian origins; Grana indicates thatBalzac considered bohemia a “stimulating interlude until the chance for real work arrives”(1990, p. 3). This standard denigration of bohemian activities as something other thanreal work misses the point of Wicker Park’s active contributions to cultural production,however. The excess of cultural activity made visible by neighborhood notoriety providesthe platform from which those lucky few stars emerge. Moreover, the movement amonghierarchically differentiated locales, as well as diffusion into mass markets, further indi-cates the way that Wicker Park’s contribution to cultural production gains its meaning asa distinct node within a networked cultural geography.

Venues such as Urbus Orbis increase the visibility of the neo-bohemian scene. RecalledHandley on the eve of Urbus Orbis’s demise in 1997: “There was already a huge scene here[in 1989]—bands, musicians, visual artists—but we gave the scene a real focal point” (inHuebner, 1997). This site not only helped young artists in the neighborhood to find oneanother, it also helped shine a light on their activities for outside interests, including the

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media. Indeed, in 1994 the national popular culture magazine Rolling Stone indicated thatUrbus Orbis was “the coolest place [in Chicago] to suck down a cappuccino” ( J. H. K.,1994, p. 22). The cafe afforded outsiders a point of entry into the neighborhood, andthey were exposed to the work of local artists, many of whose efforts Handley used todecorate the walls. Within Urbus Orbis, the plan for the annual “Around the Coyote” artfair was hatched, a venture that attracted significant media attention as well, and helpedto advertise both the artistic community and the neighborhood as a potential site ofinvestment and more upscale residence (Huebner, 1997, p. 3).

Thus, we can see the important mediating role played by both local institutions and theprint media. Wicker Park’s national reputation as a creative center is socially constructedthrough the decisions of institutional gatekeepers as well as the activities of local artists.When Billboard Magazine creates a “buzz” about its music scene, this increases the futurelikelihood of music scouts, journalists, and art buyers entering the neighborhood, makingit a more advantageous place for artistic aspirants hoping to be seen. The media thus bothreflects and drives the development of neo-bohemia, just as Thornton (1996) argues isthe case for dance subcultures. Despite the pretentious bandying of the word underground,Wicker Park’s postmodern bohemia is highly visible to a variety of relevant publics, fromculture industry scouts to local consumers, and that is also part of what keeps the localartists coming back to the neighborhood.

The common image of the aspiring American artist has him or her making the pilgrim-age to the meccas of New York or Los Angeles, toting a single suitcase packed with dreams.Chicago is less likely to figure in this popular imagery despite the fact that both culturallyand economically it is a world-class city, with a significant corporate sector oriented tocultural production, especially in advertising (Abu-Lughod, 1999; Lilley and DeFranco,1995). Still, Chicago does not compare to New York and Los Angeles in terms of cultureindustry concentration. Despite this, Chicago has certain advantages over those localeswhen it comes to incubating new talent. Particularly compared to New York, its cost ofliving is far less prohibitive for starving artists. Moreover, in Chicago, new artists often findopportunities for performance and display much easier to come by.

Shappy Seaholtz, a comic writer and performer, graduated with a degree in theaterfrom Eastern Michigan University in 1991 and came immediately to Chicago and WickerPark. He insists that it was much easier for him to get started there than it would havebeen in New York.

I knew a lot of people that had already moved to Chicago and told me it was reallyeasy to start your own shows and stuff—which it was. I couldn’t believe how easy it wasfor us to get a space. With all the creative people . . . it was very easy to collaborate, tocome up with scripts. I remember we were writing and producing our own materiallike the minute I got into town.

Wicker Park’s surplus of emerging performance and display venues, coupled with the largetheater and live music scenes already established on the nearby North Side, thus made itrelatively easy for young artists to quickly go public. Along with his collaborators, Shappyalmost immediately mounted a comedy sketch show called “Every Speck of Dust That Fallsto Earth Really Does Make the Whole Planet Heavier,” staged in the upstairs of Urbus Orbisbefore that space converted to a futon outlet. Over the years he developed a substantiallocal and national following for his poetry and comedy, hosting comedic “Shappenings”at Wicker Park venues such as the Note and the Empty Bottle, and traveling with the

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heavily sponsored summer music festival Lollapalooza as part of the poetry tent. In 2001,he relocated to New York.

Steve Pink, a native of the North Shore’s Evanston community, founded the New CrimeTheater Company in Wicker Park following his graduation from UC Berkeley in 1990. In1991, the company mounted a production of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, opening atthe Chopin Theater on the neighborhood’s southeast Division and Ashland intersection.Pink recalls the work his company did to rehab the venue, which continues to operate inthe same location.

We opened the theater. It was owned by a Polish immigrant named Ziggy, who’s stillthere. We approached him because he had this great space . . . We made a good dealwith him . . . we were like, ok, you don’t charge us that much of anything for theentire space and we will build out the space, we’ll build everything. We’ll build outyour space entirely, we’ll put in a grid, we’ll put in the risers, [and] we’ll build thestage.

This sort of exchange, with artists offering brow sweat rather than rent, was especiallycommon in the early 1990s and it contributed to development of enduring performanceand display venues.

Pink relocated to Los Angeles in 1994. This veteran of small Chicago theater now worksdeveloping film and television projects, earning writing and producing co-credits on themajor studio releases Grosse Point Blank (1997) and High Fidelity (2000), both starring Pink’sEvanston high school classmate John Cusack. According to Pink, despite the enormousnumber of writers and performers that concentrate around L.A.’s film and televisionindustries, the scene there is comparatively atomized, undermined perhaps by the intensecompetition for film and television dollars.

There is culture [in L.A.] but there is no interaction, there’s no interconnectedness,there’s no people being expressive. When we were doing theater [in Chicago], ev-eryone came and saw our shows, and liked them or criticized them and then we saweverybody’s shows and everyone knew what we were doing. I’d see people from 20theater companies every week, you know, you don’t see that [in L.A.]. In LA, “theIndustry” is film and television . . . that’s what people do. On a much higher kind offinancial and class level, that’s all happening.

Thus the lower stakes in Chicago, where the opportunities for big culture bucks are farmore circumscribed, make it a likely spot for the development of new talent, which canthen relocate, and for the trying out of more innovative products.

As Pink indicates, the critical mass of artists that coalesced during the 1990s was essentialto producing a local audience for comparatively obscure art offerings. Local writer SidFeldman indicates the high levels of commitment that locals were exhibiting vis-a-vis theirmedium as the community was taking shape: “You had people who were very serious aboutwhat they were doing . . . At the time all the artists could talk at length about their medium,about its history.” Hence, participants are well versed in the codes and conventions ofcultural production. This competence may or may not enable them to produce culturalwork of their own that will find its way to market. Regardless, these individuals, who haveinvested time and energy into mastering cultural conventions that are complex, becomeexceptional consumers of culture. They are positioned to get in early on other culturalinnovations, to value and reward new artistic efforts before a wider audience does.

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Indeed, participants pride themselves on their ability to do so, and the constitutionof bohemia involves a commitment by members to being ahead of the game, on the“cutting edge” as it were. An internal status system emerges in such communities, wherepractitioners receive local rewards for their efforts mostly in the form of prestige, whichmust sustain their work during the uncertain wait for actual material compensation. Thislocal selection process raises the visibility of some artists, making the work easier for moreformal cultural gatekeepers on the lookout for potentially marketable cultural objects.Other consumers, who are also attracted to some notion of “the cutting edge,” use theconsumption practices of artists as a model as well, and thus the number of participantsin such a scene swells.

Thus for most of the subcorporate cultural offerings in the neighborhood and nearbyareas, including musical acts, poetry readings, and art openings, a substantial portionof the audience will be artists themselves, although not necessarily working in the samemedium. As Pink indicated above, a collective bargain is maintained, essentially that “I’llgo to your shows if you come to mine.” Indeed, William Bullion, a founder of Sliced BreadProductions, tagged the email announcement of his last play with the plaintive reminder,“I go to your shows.” Art openings, musical performances, and theatrical productions fillthe social calendars of local artists. Particularly strong new cultural offerings will generatelocal buzz among the creative community, another factor facilitating the eventual selectionprocess by formal industry gatekeepers.

LOCAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Pierre Michel Menger offers a succinct recap of several features of artists as an occupa-tional group: “Artists . . . are on average younger than the general work force, are bettereducated, tend to be more concentrated in a few metropolitan areas, show higher rates ofself-employment, higher rates of unemployment and of several forms of constrained un-deremployment . . . and are more often multiple job holders” (1999, p. 545, emphasis added).These multiple jobs are not limited to the plying of strictly artistic trades. As Molotchpoints out:

[Artists] do still other things as well, mostly out of necessity—only 15 percent of LAunion actors, for example, are working at any given time as actors, and that meansthat they take their “creative multipliers” to sectors beyond the arts themselves. Asthey do so, they work differently than others who perform the same tasks. NewYork restaurant waiters, as one example, bring a theatrically specific manner intoserving food . . . The consequences magnify when a painter switches to a dot.com,a costume maker develops a line of clothing, a set designer works on industrialproducts, packaging or print. (2003, p. 179–180)

During the 1990s, two sectors of Wicker Park’s local economy emerged as importantsources of employment for young artists: entertainment, in the form of bars, restaurants,and coffee shops, and design, especially new media design, a field that flourished in thelate 1990s but that has since declined as a source of opportunity. A map of neighborhoodestablishments in 2001 shows the dense intermixing of art, design, and entertainmentwithin the neighborhood’s boundaries (Figure 5). Both the entertainment and designsectors met artists’ demands for flexible terms of employment, as well as satisfying to

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FIG. 5. Art, entertainment, and design in Wicker Park, 2001.

Note: Map created by Richard Lloyd and Todd Schuble, University of Chicago

varying degrees their ideological predilections with regard to “desirable” work. Moreover,consistent with Molotch’s analysis, each capitalized on the distinctive properties of localartists. Entertainment venues benefited from artists’ performative competence as “hip”or “cool” individuals, while design firms benefited from their aesthetic competence andattentiveness to current cultural trends.

Entering the 1990s, only a small number of entertainment venues existed serving theethos of hipness and creativity that would come to define the neighborhood by the end ofthat decade. As the neighborhood achieved celebrity status, the number of such venuesexpanded dramatically. By 2000, the neighborhood, while still retaining traces of its olderindustrial character, had become a Chicago hub of culture and entertainment-orientedbusiness. In fact, the extensions of local celebrity and associated entertainment venuesgrew dialectically, as new entertainment outlets enhanced local notoriety and attractedparticipants.

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Participation was not limited to young artists; neighborhood gentrification and a grow-ing tourist trade brought professionals onto the scene whose higher levels of disposableincome sustained the profitability of many more local bars and restaurants. But theseoutlets also improved the opportunities for young creative types to support their pursuits,offering them employment as waiters, doormen, bartenders, and managers. Therefore,while gentrification created problems for local artists by raising rents, it also enhancedemployment opportunities insofar as it was accompanied by an expanded service sector.

“Starving artists” are not a viable base for sustaining a large entertainment scene, almostby definition. Venues that retained a dogged commitment to this clientele, such as UrbusOrbis, in fact found themselves vulnerable as rising rents increased the cost of doing busi-ness. Still, while the desirable patronage for local entertainment venues may have in factbeen gentrifying professionals or nocturnal tourists, local artists continued to be dispro-portionately charged with conferring the aura of neo-bohemian hipness that these venuesthematized. Both local and national media consistently celebrate the neighborhood’srestaurant, bar, and performance outlets for evincing the quality of countercultural cool(Belluck, 1999; Fiedelholtz, 2002; Fowler, 2002; Shriver, 1996; Wheaton, 2002), and thehiring of local bohemian types in front-stage service positions is one way that local en-trepreneurs strategize to maintain this marketable image. Matt Gans, a former managerat the trendy neighborhood restaurant Mirai, made this plain to me.

[The staff] is very representative of Wicker Park. The girls are very artistically in-clined, very imaginative, very creative. The guys are the same, they’re musicians. Wespecifically hired very funky looking people because of wanting to appeal to WickerPark. Meia [the owner] specifically hired these girls that looked crazy. They lookedtotally different than everybody else. It’s eye candy. It’s something you don’t nor-mally get up close and personal. Piercings, different colored hair, no bras. It’s what’sgoing on.

Other local employers expressed similarly explicit justifications for hiring from the localarts community.

Work in the service sector tends to be relatively flexible, allowing actors and musicians,for example, to exchange shifts when necessary to make performance dates. Service jobstypically leave days open, potentially available to devote to creative interests, and theyreward the nocturnal dispositions that characterize bohemian culture. Moreover, localartists perceive that these jobs offer greater latitude to express themselves aestheticallythan would jobs in the “corporate” work world. They are pleased by the opportunity to“wear their own clothes” and to perform their high levels of aesthetic competence withinthe confines of a hip entertainment setting. David Grazian refers to this competence as“nocturnal capital” (2003), and as noted above, its display also rewards the expectationsof local employers.

Poorly paid in terms of salary, most local service workers in Wicker Park indicate thattips are lucrative enough to allow them to live on less than a 40-hour per week schedule.According to one local writer and bartender, Krystal Ashe:

Artists and writers work in the industry because where else can you work for fourhours and make two hundred, three hundred dollars? If you’re a waitress you canmake one or two hundred dollars in four hours. That’s why artists flock to the serviceindustry. You can support yourself on twenty hours a week.

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Actually, detailed ethnography suggests that this income is overstated by failing to takeinto the account that much tipped income comes from the largely symbolic practice oflocal service workers extravagantly tipping each other. Local musician and bartender BretPuls sums this up cogently.

It’s funny, all the bartenders in the city make like two hundred and fifty bucks [a shift]but if they go out they have to spend a hundred bucks on tips to the same bartenders.So it goes right back into the other bartenders’ pockets. You know, there’s all thiscircular motion, no money is made, just changing hands.

Yet even if the rewards turn out to be less than commonly indicated, these service jobsprovide incomes adequate to maintaining circumspect bohemian lifestyles, while alsoproviding free time and flexibility to pursue nonremunerative artistic activities. Further,while service sector work is not highly regarded in the society as a whole, the artists asservice worker in Wicker Park may enjoy status rewards among their peers, especiallyif their place of employ is well respected. On the other hand, such jobs also containsignificant drawbacks; they offer comparatively flat trajectories for advancement, and theyexpose participants to significant hazards associated with drug and alcohol abuse (seeWorkplace Resource Center, 1999).

Especially during the years 1998 to 2001, at what would prove to be the tail end of thedot.com boom, some Wicker Park artists began to find frequent opportunities for work inInternet and graphic design, often as subcontractors. In doing so, local artists leveragedtheir aesthetic competence, as well as the comparatively high comfort levels with newtechnology many acquired by incorporating digital presentation into their repertoires(Pariser, 2000). Much of this work came from the large Loop-based advertising sectortapping neighborhood networks; however, as we can see in Figure 1, the neighborhoodalso became home to several boutique-style media design firms such as Streams, Buzzbait,and Boom Cubed, with offices in local lofts or in the landmark Northwest (“Coyote”)Tower, and these also employed participants in the arts community. As Dave Skwarczek,the founder of Streams, indicated in 2001:

It was not hard to find creative talent [in the neighborhood]. Many of the folks thatwe hired throughout the years lived around here because there were always a lot ofreally cool people around that were really ambitious and talented . . . We always triedto stay tied in with the people that were doing the [creative] stuff, and whenever wehad opportunities those were the folks we turned to.

In addition to technical assets that young artists might bring in terms of design com-petence, they also posses high levels of hip cultural capital. Their immersion in localyouth-oriented musical and artistic subcultures keeps them abreast of the putative cuttingedge, and this knowledge is considered to be an asset, particularly in accessing the covetedyouth market. Says Brad Cowley, the co-founder of Boom Cubed:

We know that [youth] age group. We have so many people with so many different[subcultural] interests. We use that knowledge, and we encourage that knowledgeto be brought in, and brought back to the client, to say “Look, this is what ourunderstanding is of the audience that you are trying to talk to.” In that contextit’s a great asset, because it really does help to sell our image, what we are tryingto do.

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Local artists are attracted to work in these firms for several reasons. As with local en-tertainment, formal dress codes are nonexistent, and the informal expectation in factfavors experimental self-presentation. Similar to Ross’s (2001) findings in New York’s Sil-icon Alley, work in these local lofts, while often rigorous, unfolds against a backdrop ofplayfulness. Offices are typically decorated with kitschy pop cultural detritus like plasticaction figures, and electronic music, hip-hop, or alternative rock comprises the typicalsoundtrack for office activities. Moreover, local artists strive to experience this work ascontinuous with their overall creative personae. Andre, an employee at Boom Cubed in2001 and also a musician in a local punk rock band, indicates:

I used to think of myself as a musician or a designer, but now I just like to think ofmyself as an artist, I don’t know, I never did like the idea of pigeon-holing myselfinto one category . . . I’ve always been into things that are outside of what I know,like glass blowing, video art, and especially working here I’m exposed to that. Wehave other people who come from those backgrounds, and seeing that stuff is really,really cool, and I definitely think it has a positive effect on my design and my music.

Andre additionally valued the flexibility that Boom Cubed provides, similar to the flex-ible schedules available in the entertainment sector.

That’s the cool thing about Boom. Whenever I had to go on tour to Europe for threeweeks or a month, they’d let me go, as long as I told them in advance. I think thatI’m not making as much money as I want to, because I have the freedom to do whatI have to with my music, and it’s sort of a compromise that I have to make. I couldhave gone to look for a job somewhere else, but one of the reasons [that] I didn’tis because I know it would probably be a much tighter and more corporate cultureand I wouldn’t have as much freedom to do things I want to do.

This quote also indicates the drawbacks to such employment, including compensationlevels below industry standards (see Ross, 2003), belying the fantasy of media millionscreated by the dot.com bubble. Further, along with the freedom of flexibility comes thepressures of instability; many local tech artists were employed on a project-to-project basis,without benefits, and even full-time employees were highly vulnerable to being laid off. Infact, Boom Cubed no longer exists. Buzzbait has trimmed its workforce by two-thirds since2001, maintaining a currently precarious existence. Buzzbait founder Michael Weinbergmaintains that most of his former employees have succeeded as subcontractors, but he alsoacknowledges that opportunities in the tech sector are considerably more circumscribedin 2003 than they were in 2000, especially for those whose talents were somewhat nebulousto begin with.

SYMBOLIC SUPPORT

IDENTIFICATION

“Being an artist” often involves adopting a distinct persona. There is a recognizablelifestyle, including modes of dress and self-presentation. Neo-bohemia, like its modernistforerunners, is a setting in which “living like an artist” is facilitated, and a habitus amenableto creative pursuits is fostered (see Bourdieu, 1992). Indeed, many participants evince the

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habitus without making any art at all, unless one counts their aesthetic self-work as such.As one local painter said, describing Wicker Park’s “vital artist community”: “I say artist ina very general sense. I mean a lot of people are making art, or they’re involved in somesort of creative life. And a lot of people are here for the lifestyle if nothing else.” Mizruchiexplains the longstanding attraction of “pretenders” to bohemian affectations: “Becauseit is understood that some people in society can ‘get away with more’ than others, there isa tendency for pretenders to seek the cloak of protection associated with those committedto the tolerated lifestyle and thus derive sensual or material gains from this association”([1983] 1990, p. 14). But those individuals do indeed contribute to the production ofa vital arts community; they provide as well as receive local benefits. They do so in partby contributing to the “excess of definitions” (Sutherland and Cressey, [1939] 2003) fa-vorable to the life of self-sacrifice and creative commitment that even future stars musttypically endure.

Above we noted that material constraints attract artists to comparatively low-rent dis-tricts. Writing about the East Village, Christopher Mele states: “Because of their limitedeconomic resources and/or preferences for residing in alternative neighborhoods, thesegroups endure above average levels of crime, noise and drug related problems” (1994,p. 186). In fact, many local artists did not only tolerate these drawbacks. As Allen (1984)argues, neighborhood choices involve ideological preference as well as material expedi-ency; for artists, this involves a special attraction to the symbols of grit and decay thattransitional neighborhoods offer. Living in a district like Wicker Park thus also meets im-portant identity needs. Contemporary arts aspirants are familiar with bohemian traditionsin which artists occupy gritty urban neighborhoods. They have distinct ideas about whatliving like an artist should look like, and this in turn impacts what it does look like.

This theme can be read through traditions of Modern Art extending back to the FrenchImpressionists, particularly Manet, who staked a claim to the avant-garde by representingelements of the city such as bars and prostitution that had formerly been off limits to highart practitioners (Clark, 1999). Authors such as Nelson Algren, William S. Burroughs,Henry Miller, or Tama Janowitz celebrate an “authentic” urban landscape characterizedby grit, vice, and addiction in novels that also serve as instructional manuals for develop-ment of a recognizable, deeply mythologized version of the artist’s lifestyle. Even thoseneighborhood scenemakers who have not directly encountered these works (or the manyanalogous ones) are still exposed to their influence through the performances of theirpeers.

More is at work than just mimesis, however; neo-bohemia is not, as some might suspect,simply a shallow caricature of bohemias past, just another urban theme park. Individualsliving real lives with genuine commitments do actual creative work in Wicker Park. Ratherthan mere homage, the freighted embeddedness of Wicker Park’s neo-bohemian scene inthe traditions of past bohemias is crucial to its advantage as a site for the active, ongoingproduction of culture. Participation in the scene can be a key part of developing a creativepersona for participants well acquainted with these traditions, identifying with city streetsof the sort that nourished the imaginations of so many creative predecessors. By selectinginto the local scene of artists and hipsters, individuals signal their artistic commitment, tothemselves and others. They enact a series of identifications with the neighborhood spacesand the local community through residence and participation, and as Glaeser pointsout, “identifications are the building blocks of the hermeneutic process called identityformation” (2000, p. 9). Such identifications can be challenged, however, by advances in

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neighborhood gentrification, as well as by the dilution of the scene’s subcultural integrityas fame undermines its former exclusivity.

Remembers Alan Gugel: “From the point of moving into Wicker Park, I became a Chicagoartist.” This statement is not trivial; adoption of this persona is a precursor to a range ofactions that would otherwise be unlikely. Culture work is filled with uncertainty and disap-pointment; aspirants face both financial and identity risks in the pursuit of their vocations.Unlike, say, graduate students, who also make large sacrifices for uncertain rewards, artistsmost often lack even institutional affiliation upon which to peg their identities. Identifica-tion with bohemia’s traditions of the edge helps sustain necessary levels of commitmentin the face of this reality. It provides a model that incorporates the possibility of failure,at least in the short term. Thus the neighborhood does not just magnetize creative talent;it also nurtures crucial dispositions.

These identifications are likely to be especially important for young artists in the earlystages of their careers. Since they are unlikely to have their talent ratified by the mar-ket at this stage, other indicators must be called on to reassure them they are actuallyartists at all. Living like an artist, among like-minded souls, poor, unrecognized outsidethe local community, but presumably also imminent, gives shape to the fantasies of thenascent cultural producer. The local scene evolves its own status system, so those aspirantscan reap local status rewards in advance of, and often in lieu of, wider recognition. Inse-cure aspirants trade reassurances with one another in an implicit bohemian bargain. Theneighborhood’s increasing recognition through art fairs and media notices helps supportthe notion that neo-bohemian self-sacrifice is not all in vain.

The high rates of failure in Wicker Park (defined in this case not by aesthetic criteriabut rather by failure to find a market) resemble those found in a milieu of technolog-ical innovation, where a large amount of creative work is a condition for the relativelyinfrequent occasions when some innovative products make their way to market (Castells,1989). The system of compensation differs however, with technology firms bearing thecost of their workers’ material reproduction. Most participants in the artistic milieu arenot subsidized by the industries that will eventually reap a large share of the profits ofcultural production, and are not destined to achieve either material wealth or widespreadnotoriety. Artists, like entrepreneurs, enter into risky activities with uncertain (thoughpotentially extravagant) rewards. The artistic milieu offers a social structure providingnonmaterial rewards to compensate the would-be artist for his or her relative poverty andlife spent waiting tables, “quality of life” compensations revolving around values of aes-thetic self-determination and creativity, and involving an internal status system partiallyunhinged from issues of material compensation.

CONFLICTS AND CONTRADICTIONS

The coalescence of both material and symbolic attributes discussed above contributes tothe possibility of innovative work in Wicker Park. Their identification helps us to betterunderstand the attractions of particular places for a community of artists. One might betempted to view this as an example of community ecology, using the classic metaphor ofthe “Chicago School” of urban sociology (Park, 1952; Park and Burgess, 1921). However,despite apparent similarities, analysis of Wicker Park as a neo-bohemia in the postindus-trial city differs from conventional human ecology in important ways. Park and Burgess

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indicated the way that the competition for space generated regular divisions within thecity, self-contained “natural areas.” As numerous critics have noted, the ecological modelwas typically insensitive to issues of broader economic structure, and as such produced amodel of competition among social groups that misses important distinctions relating tothe mode of capitalist production (Burawoy, 2000; Castells, 1977; Gottdiener, 1985), aswell as to the disproportionate power of property-based elites in setting the terms of thecompetition for space (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Moreover, in later incarnations, eco-logical approaches to urbanism increasingly de-emphasized the competitive dynamics socrucial to earlier formulations, generating a more functionalist account that emphasizedcooperation and social stability (Hawley, 1950)—a move that perhaps reflected the height-ened perception of social stability achieved by the mature Fordist economy of mid century.Conversely, the concept of neo-bohemia implies an analysis of the historical specificity oflocal outcomes in terms of their relationship to both the internal pressures of the localfield and to the distinctive structuring influences of the current organization of globalcapitalist accumulation, with its new geography of social production and its specific val-orization strategies (including the elevated attention to the aesthetic dimensions of thecommodity). Thus, Wicker Park should not be considered as self-contained in the mannerof the Chicago School’s urban mosaic; local processes unfold in a contextual field directlyimpacted by extra-local forces.

The stability of a neo-bohemian neighborhood may be threatened by inherent tensionswithin the symbolic and material advantages that the local field generates. For example,exposing local artwork to a wider audience has often also meant heightened awareness ofthe neighborhood as a desirable residential site for more affluent urbanites, with corre-sponding increases in rents. Table 2 showed the tremendous increases in local affluenceand in local rents from 1990 to 2000. Gentrification may displace poor artists in the neigh-borhood and discourage new ones from entering. In fact, many argue that the vibrantarts scene traditionally located in San Francisco districts like South of Market and theMission was dramatically undermined by the speculative bubble in real estate that accom-panied the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s (Arnold, 2000; Borsook, 1999; Solnit andSchwartzenberg, 2000). Although Wicker Park’s rents did not escalate to such a dramaticextent, many local aspirants do report experiencing similar vulnerability in the face ofcost-of-living increases.

But at the same time, gentrification facilitates the growth of the local entertainmentscene that enhances employment opportunities for young artists. Moreover, many displayspaces remain fixtures of the neighborhood, although barriers to entry have risen alongwith rents. Today, Wicker Park remains a central organizing space for Chicago’s bohemianculture, even as many artists can no longer afford to live there. Artists have currently beendriven to the borders of the neighborhood, hopping on the train or the bus to work, play,and display. Thus many now find themselves excluded from living in a neighborhoodwhose character they continue to impact disproportionately. The community benefitsdiscussed above are weakened by this dispersal.

The symbolic benefits provided by the neo-bohemian scene are therefore compro-mised by the side effects of neighborhood notoriety. As Irwin (1977) notes, subculturalarticulations have limited “carrying capacities” that can be overwhelmed by an excess ofparticipants clamoring for inclusion. Given their desire to associate with the “fringe,” whilestill having access to galleries, good bars, and being able to attend school at the Art Insti-tute, it is not surprising that newcomers to Wicker Park soon resented those that followed

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and upset this balance. By 1994, such residents were far less quick to give newcomers thebenefit of the doubt. A Chicago Reader article cataloguing growing anti-gentrification sen-timent, entitled “The Panic in Wicker Park,” makes clear that the most noisily panickedwere usually residents who had themselves been there for only a handful of years at most(Huebner, 1994). Given that their own presence was heavily implicated in neighborhoodchange, they may have been enacting a version of what Rosaldo calls imperialist nostal-gia, “where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed” (1989,p. 69).

These conflicts also pit competing capital interests against one another. In an influentialformulation, John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) suggest that the interests of local“growth machines,” defined as property entrepreneurs, local political elites, and affiliatedprofessionals, conflict with the needs and desires of local residents. Sporadic expressionsof anti-gentrification sentiment in the neighborhood throughout the 1990s indicate thatmany residents do indeed view growth-machine strategies as inimical to their interests.Still, while gentrification may displace residents and undermine the integrity of the sub-cultural community, it also enhances visibility and employment opportunities. Moreover,the simple dichotomy of capital versus a presumably organic community like bohemiamisses the cleavages that emerge between different capital interests, largely because bo-hemia is so rarely considered as an input source in the complexly networked productionof cultural commodities. In Wicker Park we see contradictions in the accumulation pro-cess, as the growth-machine impetus toward producing ever-rising property values comesinto conflict with the culture industry’s interest in the reproduction and deployment of acreative labor force.

DISCUSSION

NEO-BOHEMIANS AS A CULTURAL PROLETARIAT

The irony of the new bohemia is that the resources sustaining local creative activity in factmay ultimately be more beneficial to interests other than those of the artists themselves,particularly in a financial sense. Property entrepreneurs benefit as neighborhood celebrityincreases the potential for extracting rent, and local entertainment providers benefit asit draws more—and more affluent—patrons into their orbit. These observations are bynow standard in the literature on gentrification and urban entertainment. In this article,I have suggested that capital interests associated with the production and distributionof cultural commodities also benefit, albeit in different and potentially conflicting ways.They do so insofar as the symbolic and material resources of the local field enable artiststo engage in creative work for deferred and highly uncertain compensation. Among theseaspirants, a relatively small number will eventually find themselves contributing moredirectly to culture industry output, as was the case during the 1990s in Wicker Park. Giventhe fickle market and high rates of failure, culture industry profitability may well rest onthis willingness and ability of artists themselves to assume research and development costs.In a sense, these communities are like a farm league from which some unknown numberof players and products will graduate to the “big leagues” of valorized cultural production.

As we have seen, economically self-sacrificing dispositions find support in the sociallystructured field of bohemia. The local construction of the cutting edge is a collective

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project, one maintained not only by local artists, but also by the putative local pretenders,and by local entrepreneurs who provide material spaces in which these sentiments coa-lesce. A local status system provides symbolic benefits, rewards of prestige that typicallyprecede market recognition. Beyond the symbolic benefits provided by a bohemian com-munity are material advantages. The comparatively low rents associated with a transitionalneighborhood allow young aspirants to occupy affordable space adequate to their needs.The presence of display venues for art and performance allow them to develop wideraudiences, and perhaps to attract the attention of culture industry gatekeepers. Further,local employment opportunities sustain these artists in the face of market indifference totheir creative work.

It is these local dynamics that undergird my analysis of neo-bohemia as a quasi-institutional site in the flexible processes of cultural production. New bohemias serveas sources of input, both of raw cultural products and exportable talent, into a globalizedchain of cultural production and consumption. I argue that they do so in a fashion ad-vantageous to culture industries; the ideological predispositions and material strategiesnurtured in the local field are exploitable by corporate behemoths in film, television, andmusic, as well as by the institutionalized fine arts market. Particularly vulnerable are thelarge number of aspirants whose strategic activities are crucial to making the scene, butwho will be excluded from the material rewards that such activities may eventually spawn.The surplus value of cultural commodities, like other sorts of commodities, is the resultof a social production process, but it is appropriated by only a privileged few. In WickerPark, a large number of cultural workers are not only alienated from the profits, but mustalso scramble to subsidize their own exploitation.

Notes

1 Pierre Bourdieu, in The Field of Cultural Production (1993), and Howard Becker, in Art Worlds (1982), both

offer incisive sociological critiques of the modernist myth of the “autonomous” artist2 For many, indeed most, of these artists, “early stages” would be all they would have.

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