Adding More Color to Gabriel’s Garden: the painter Cedric Michael Cox beautifies another corner of Cincinnati with his work.
Cincinnati Frequent Transit Map Raising Money for a Second Printing: just that; help support this map.
The “Old” Christian Moerlein Brewering Company – What Still Exists: a fascinating look at the Northern side of Over-the-Rhine.
Etsy Find of the Week: Sugar(ed) Occasions likes our personalized seed bomb wedding favors.
Brooklyn Rebounds as the New Bohemia: everything about this article makes me angry.
Midwesterners Bring State Fair Fare to New Yorkers: tomorrow in NYC.
Os Gemeos in Boston: the São Paulo-based twins unleash their latest amazing mural in Boston’s Dewey Square.
Department of Everyday Visualingual 
Yeah, that Brooklyn article is pretty rank – even for USA Today.
This is really the least of the article’s issues, but Do the Right Thing was set in Bensonhurst? Really?!? Ever heard of fact-checking?
Haha, I know! I think it is now safe to say that Brooklyn has gone mainstream. Its demise is nigh.
Doesn’t Coney Island have a lot of the “Midwestern Fair Fare”?
Have you seen Portlandia? It’s so over!
Quimbob, it’s different…
Never seen it but just looked it up on youtube. Brooklyn is so over!
Thanks for ruining shell art!
Haha! This has been a most enjoyable thread of comments. I’m not sure which is more ridiculous: hipsterism or articles like this one. It’s fun to count the number of times the words “hipster” and “pioneer” are used when ‘someone in the know’ (like USA TODAY) describes gentrification. Then, there’s always a list of oddities like “artisanal pickles” and “occasional valet bike parking” that makes its way into the article in order to show just how indie the scene is. I saw there was a mobile glass blowing truck at Walk on Woodburn (which is cool IMO)…I bet that oddity will make it into a future list about how cool Cincinnati is. It’s all kinda fun from an armchair psychologist’s perspective.
That article is poorly written and, while I regard USA Today to be at the level of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which is to say that I don’t really take it seriously, it hurts to read the smug generalizations, breathless hyperbole, and blatant revisionism.
I don’t quite have the level of rage that some do about hipsters [read this for a good example of rage]. I tend to view them in roughly the same way as any ethnic group that moves into and transforms a neighborhood.
The main difference is that ethnic groups carved out distinct neighborhoods for themselves, whereas hipsters are creating a lot of sameness: ___ food concept, artisanal ___, ___ fusion wine bar, bicycle-powered ___. In a quest to be more unique, these gimmicks become more similar in my mind, and the neighborhoods lose their distinctness. This “Brooklyn brand” really just seems like a concentration of the same sorts of things you see in a lot of cities nowadays; the big difference is that Brooklyn makers and entrepreneurs often incorporate the place name into whatever they’re doing.
And then you have this “journalist” dismissing knishes and lox as odd?!? How about reflective of a people in a place, much like artisanal pickles reflect hipsters in a gentrified neighborhood? Coney Island is [well, was] tacky? What’s with the judgment call? I’d say it was accessible and attractive to a certain kind of population, much like bike valet parking is accessible and attractive to hipsters, their priorities and budgets.
I have my own ambivalent relationship to Brooklyn, which I tried to articulate here. So, I don’t entirely disagree with this article, but it’s like an outsider dissing your family — you have to defend them, even if they drive you crazy.
Good points. I just feel hurt that shell art is being ruined for so many and nothing is being done to abate the crisis. Also, city guides that treat neighborhoods like zoos and inhabitants like animals rub me the wrong way. The changes in Brooklyn have been remarkable though.
One more thing, which is maybe just a pet peeve of mine: I take issue with the casual use of the rhetoric of colonization and settlement — terms like pioneer, frontier, and homesteading. Save it for when you’re actively discussing issues like physical displacement or cultural obliteration, which could potentially be part of a discussion of gentrification.
I feel ya.