Is hipster just all young people, now?

 

Pretty much anyone that wears short pants.

Is hipster just all young people, now?

 

Pretty much anyone that wears short pants.

 

Hey, I wear short and I'm not damn hipster!

No, but those shorts do make you look hippy.

No, but those shorts do make you look hippy.

 

The hipster scene in Portland has come full circle. Keep in mind this is a small city without the economic wealth/diversity of New York, San Francisco, or LA. I always thought it was weird it became such a hipster haven. I think Portland is what could happen to the Three C's, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo in the near future. This also ties into peak education pretty heavily if you delve into the stats. I think most hipsters are what Peter Korn calls "the wrong young creatives." Some key snippets:

 

(P)retirement's new frontier

Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 | Written by Peter Korn |

Study focuses on city's young creatives -- economic saviors or slackers?

 

Underemployed by choice

Thirty years ago, one in four people moving to the Portland area had a college degree. In 2010, according to Jurjevich’s study, three of four new migrants held a degree. Portland’s ability to attract and retain young, college-educated residents during a period when the city lost jobs has the PSU researchers scratching their heads.

 

For more than 50 years, Jurjevich says, people in this country consistently have moved to places where they were more likely to get jobs. Not now, and not in Portland. Jurjevich calls it “a new frontier in migration patterns.”

 

Thirty years ago, one in four people moving to the Portland area had a college degree. In 2010, according to Jurjevich’s study, three of four new migrants held a degree. Portland’s ability to attract and retain young, college-educated residents during a period when the city lost jobs has the PSU researchers scratching their heads. For more than 50 years, Jurjevich says, people in this country consistently have moved to places where they were more likely to get jobs. Not now, and not in Portland. Jurjevich calls it “a new frontier in migration patterns.”

 

Those new migrants are coming to Portland and staying despite the fact that they are making 84 cents on the dollar compared to college grads in other U.S. cities. On average, a college-educated young Portlander makes about $8,000 less per year than a counterpart in Seattle doing comparable work.

 

The PSU report notes that young college-educated Portlanders have an unemployment rate 20 percent to 30 percent higher than the average for the nation’s 50 largest metro areas...

 

All of which raises the possibility that Portland, in attracting young creatives coming for the lifestyle, and not for jobs or earning potential, has attracted the wrong young creatives. Maybe the young creatives who are going to start new businesses and create jobs for others have settled in Seattle and San Francisco...

 

No desk jobs

Daniel Casto, Jones’ roommate, says he knows plenty of unambitious people in Portland. Casto, 23, moved to Portland a little more than two months ago from Ohio. He’s been working as a waiter/cook/counter person at a Vietnamese sandwich shop. So far, his English degree hasn’t translated into a better- paying job.

 

Casto is convinced there is some self-selection taking place among the educated young who move to Portland.

 

“I know plenty of young people who are all very excited about their real-life jobs at desks doing things,” he says. “Those aren’t the young people moving to Portland.”

 

Portland has the perfect setup for lifestyle-oriented young people, according to Casto.

 

“The thing about moving here is, why would you want to work at a desk all day when you can come here and live very happily on $1,500 a month, eating the best food you’ve ever eaten and hanging out at the coolest bars?” he asks.

 

Casto says that traditional ambition even carries a social stigma among Portland’s young creatives. He and Jones agree that talking about a business degree in an eastside bar would be “really uncool.”

 

“If I’m going out to meet people socially, I don’t play up the idea that I’m trying to be industrious and find a super good job,” Casto says.

 

FULL ARTICLE (probably the best article about Portland hipsters yet)

http://portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/115042-pretirements-new-frontier

^

I can live on $1,500 a month in Dayton pretty easily....but its because BoBo lifestyle consumption hasn't caught on here yet (aside from Yellow Springs).  Doing the same thing in Chicago would be pretty tough, since "hipster" is sort of a marketing thing and prices go up when places/things become "cool" and 'in'. 

 

  I think it says a lot about Portland that you can have a sort of affordable bohemian lifesytle on the cheap.    You can have it on the cheap in Cincy, too:  Northside!

 

I sort of like this.  This living for life vs living to make more money/gain higher status/power.  Man, maybe I should move to Portland?

 

 

...I think Portland is what could happen to the Three C's, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo in the near future....

 

...or is ALREADY happening in Louisville. 

 

From the article:

 

"....Jurjevich developed a “demographic effectiveness measure” that basically grades cities on their ability to attract and retain young people with college degrees. Portland ranks No. 2 nationally, behind only Louisville, Ky....

 

Verrrry interesting!

 

I can assure you something is going down in Louisville.  This young adult/cutlural transformation thing down there is really obvious to an old-time with a long memory of the place, like myself.

I think it says a lot about Portland that you can have a sort of affordable bohemian lifesytle on the cheap. 

 

Portland is cheap, a mere fraction of San Francisco, and cheaper than anything on the California coast. It's cheaper than Seattle too. Due to Portland's low density, it can stay cheap for a longer time (but the hipster insurgency will eventually jack rents like it has in other desirable cities).

 

I don't think Portland is much more expensive than Columbus, and you probably get more bang for buck. Pound-for-pound, it is more expensive than Cincinnati though. Cincinnati is ridiculously cheap when you consider the excellent job market there. It's amazing its population isn't exploding right now. Cities on the Pacific are really cut-throat compared to Cincinnati or Columbus. There is a price to pay for desirability, and it's not always housing.

 

Someone moving to Portland from Cincinnati or Columbus could be giving up a lot of opportunity down the road (obviously not the same case for kids from Dayton, Toledo, or Youngstown). Careerists move to San Francisco (highest rents in America, record housing shortage), Los Angeles (somewhat high rents, car-dependent), or Seattle (high rents, terrible weather). Portland is a lot different. It's cheaper, has better weather, and is more livable. Its desirability is obvious.

 

To quote a transplant I know, "I could be living in Ohio making $10 an hour, hating my boss, hating my co-workers, and struggling to pay rent, or I could move to Portland, make $10 an hour, and actually like my boss and co-workers."

Yeah I pay less to live now in an 1870s-era brick townhouse in Cincinnati, a mile from downtown, than I did 10 years ago living in a basement apartment that flooded twice in Athens, OH. 

 

I gave a tour of depressed historic areas in Cincinnati to a writer from a travel magazine and his eyes were bugging out at how cheap everything is.  They have those things you can scan with your phone on the realtor signs now, and we passed an 1870's-era mansion on Dayton St. and he asked how much that house was.  I said $40,000.  He got out and scanned it with his phone and it was listed at $43,000. 

There's nothing wrong with embracing the youthful lifestyle but at some point you do have to grow up.

 

wasnt there a media flurry a few years ago  about something called the "Peter Pan Syndrome"....

So, C-Dawg, have you been to Portland? 

 

I'm sort of curious about this place.  From what I've read it sounds sort of odd...the "cool areas" are actually east, on those flatlands across the river from downtown?  The place sounds superficially sort of blah compared to Seattle, which has those lakes and bays and hills to give it interest.

 

@@@

 

I think "cheap and old with character" is what sells Louisville to that young creative set.  I recall talking to this young lady who relocated to Louisville from Austin, and she was telling me that was what sold her on Louisville...that Austin didnt have the same old housing stock, that it was more suburban (she made it  it sound like Sacramento, a bit...sprawling sunbelt place without much older stuff).  That Louisville had the cool hipster thing but was ALSO cheap and had great old houses to live in.

 

 

 

Yeah I pay less to live now in an 1870s-era brick townhouse in Cincinnati, a mile from downtown, than I did 10 years ago living in a basement apartment that flooded twice in Athens, OH. 

 

I gave a tour of depressed historic areas in Cincinnati to a writer from a travel magazine and his eyes were bugging out at how cheap everything is.  They have those things you can scan with your phone on the realtor signs now, and we passed an 1870's-era mansion on Dayton St. and he asked how much that house was.  I said $40,000.  He got out and scanned it with his phone and it was listed at $43,000. 

 

 

43k on Dayton St.?! That street has some incredible housing stock. However, who knows, that house could need a lot of work on the inside.

 

Portland is not cheap. Yes, it's the cheapest city on the West Coast but still much more expensive than any of Ohio's cities.

The OTR thread on the bro-ification of the neighborhood gave me the idea of contrasting the moving densities of populations of both hipsters and bros in map form and figured this was the best place (just slapped it together).

 

 

The Short North, just northeast of the Arena District, lost a lesbian bar and saw the bro-est bar in the neighborhood open in that space, while way up in Old North Columbus a bro holdout (Sloopy's/Miani's) in hipster occupied territory closed and re-opened as a hipster music joint (where I imagine residents are grateful for less meatheads pissing and puking in their yards and alleys). Bros seem to thrive in very dense concentrations like High St next to OSU and the Arena District, while hipsters spread themselves out, Old North Columbus (includes Washington Beach/Summit St) and Peach District aside, they gather in small isolated pockets of the city: Carabar and environs in Olde Towne East and Dirty Frank's in Downtown. You can be sure when Liz Lessner's spot opens in Franklinton they will claim the neighborhood in the name of hipsterdom and no doubt that bros will filter further north in the Short North than they have.

Someone should do a taxonomy chart of gentrifiers. Could be really funny.

I'd take hipsters over bros any day of the week.  Twice on Saturday, as it turns into Jersey Shore across the hall from me at 3:00 AM.

^^^ You all have some weird names for neighborhoods in Columbus... "Olde Towne East"? Sounds like a suburban strip mall off of 71... "Franklinton"? Sounds like a place just south of Northern Kentucky...

 

Not trying to be mean... I mean, Cincinnati has some strange ones too: Over-the-Rhine, East Westwood, and South Cumminsville (Cumminsville is now Northside, so there is no Cumminsville... just a South Cumminsville).

I don't remember Old Towne East having the extra Es, but sure enough, it does now.

 

Frnaklinton used to be a separate city which dates from the late 1700s.

er, Franklinton.

>bro holdout (Sloopy's/Miani's) in hipster occupied territory

 

 

Ah yes, now Ace of Cups.  We went there after a (hipster) wedding this summer, but it got too crowded, and the bride and groom didn't even show up, opting instead for The Union, which I came to find out is a gay bar.  Who goes to a gay bar on their wedding night? 

I'd take hipsters over bros any day of the week.  Twice on Saturday, as it turns into Jersey Shore across the hall from me at 3:00 AM.

 

Seems like a lot of bros have tortured souls.

The OTR thread on the bro-ification of the neighborhood gave me the idea of contrasting the moving densities of populations of both hipsters and bros in map form and figured this was the best place (just slapped it together).

 

 

The Short North, just northeast of the Arena District, lost a lesbian bar and saw the bro-est bar in the neighborhood open in that space, while way up in Old North Columbus a bro holdout (Sloopy's/Miani's) in hipster occupied territory closed and re-opened as a hipster music joint (where I imagine residents are grateful for less meatheads pissing and puking in their yards and alleys). Bros seem to thrive in very dense concentrations like High St next to OSU and the Arena District, while hipsters spread themselves out, Old North Columbus (includes Washington Beach/Summit St) and Peach District aside, they gather in small isolated pockets of the city: Carabar and environs in Olde Towne East and Dirty Frank's in Downtown. You can be sure when Liz Lessner's spot opens in Franklinton they will claim the neighborhood in the name of hipsterdom and no doubt that bros will filter further north in the Short North than they have.

 

^ looks like a war!

I don't think I technically know what a "bro" is. Is that like a stereotypical frat boy or something? If that's the case, it sounds like I'd prefer to live amongst hipsters, too, I guess. I live by literally every kind of person--all of my neighbors are literally a mix of everything you could imagine (I have an apartment near Indianola and Hudson area) and I feel so happy and at home living in such a mixed environment. There's every race, students, older people, young people, white collar, blue collar, gay, straight, or however else you could group people but everyone is very friendly to each other and I think when you live in such a mixed environment, you're less attune to someone near you being foreign or different to you. Quite frankly, you just don't really give a sh!t because you're desensitized to it and that's the kind of environment I like for some reason. Always loved the anonymity and indifference towards other's lives that you experience in the city. I'm not sure why and I'm not sure if that's even a good or healthy thing, lol!

The OTR thread on the bro-ification of the neighborhood gave me the idea of contrasting the moving densities of populations of both hipsters and bros in map form and figured this was the best place (just slapped it together).

 

 

The Short North, just northeast of the Arena District, lost a lesbian bar and saw the bro-est bar in the neighborhood open in that space, while way up in Old North Columbus a bro holdout (Sloopy's/Miani's) in hipster occupied territory closed and re-opened as a hipster music joint (where I imagine residents are grateful for less meatheads pissing and puking in their yards and alleys). Bros seem to thrive in very dense concentrations like High St next to OSU and the Arena District, while hipsters spread themselves out, Old North Columbus (includes Washington Beach/Summit St) and Peach District aside, they gather in small isolated pockets of the city: Carabar and environs in Olde Towne East and Dirty Frank's in Downtown. You can be sure when Liz Lessner's spot opens in Franklinton they will claim the neighborhood in the name of hipsterdom and no doubt that bros will filter further north in the Short North than they have.

 

^ looks like a war!

Spot on!

 

Well, I couldn't really see Hipsters moving away from this area (Old North/University District, etc). I mean, you have Handy Bikes/Once Ridden Bikes, independent restaurants, an indie Drug Store, Hardware Store, Record Store, Dirty Dungarees...the list goes on. It's too well established to be a Hipster's paradise I think. I see it more as a paradise for anyone who appreciates originality though, personally. I don't see the "Hipsters" around here moving out any time soon, even if "Bros" infultrate the area more.

Groups like this existed in the 90s but didn't have universally accepted names.  My hippie roomates called bros "hat boys" since they usually wore a Cocks hat.  The people my roomates liked were all hipsters, but no word yet existed for them.  To me they were just people-who-all-shopped-at-the-same-store. 

Bros can live almost anywhere, but congregate anywhere there's a chance of getting laid. Ones that live in sprawl get a ton of DUIs.

It always amazed me when I lived in C. Winchester, when I'd occasionally go to a bar, the number of people who drove home at closing time after being sh!t-faced drunk. It's a close-knit kind of community too but everyone just kinda pretended that it didn't happen.

Groups like this existed in the 90s but didn't have universally accepted names.  My hippie roomates called bros "hat boys" since they usually wore a Cocks hat.  The people my roomates liked were all hipsters, but no word yet existed for them.  To me they were just people-who-all-shopped-at-the-same-store. 

 

A lot of bros do wear baseball hats. Bros vary between cities just like hipsters vary between cities. A San Francisco bro is nowhere near as bad as an Ohio bro, despite the fact they dominate the city. I've never had any trouble here dealing with the bros since they're much nicer than back in the Buckeye State. I think most of the hipsters are nicer too (though not the trust fund ones). Ohio can get very Jersey Shore-ish, at least Northern Ohio (blame PIB). There is a lot of overlap with the guido thing. Ohio nightlife has way more than its fair share of douchebags...and meatheads! There are so many meatheads in Ohio, it's mind-boggling. That was always the biggest problem in Athens- all the unfriendly meat douches. A lot of bar fights happen just because people are looking for them.

 

*Ohio is the only place I've been called a yuppie before. I was dressed nice in Uptown Maumee once, and some douchebag hipsters outside Village Idiot yelled "yuppie" at me. I learned to stay away from Maumee, and stick to Toledo and Perrysburg. People in California don't do that kind of crap since they're not looking to fight. People are just looking to get laid, and fighting is stigmatized. Ohio doesn't have that stigma against fighting. I remember people cheering before fights broke out.

 

I think that's why Ohio has so much of this bro vs. hipster thing. The fights that got most the cheers were always bro vs. hipster.

Why do bars have parking lots? For designated drivers? Yeah right...

C-Dawg, you just missed the really good years for meatheads in college. In 2000 college everybody thought they were Fred Durst.

^I'd imagine the early 2000's were terrible. All that nu metal and chinstraps! In Toledo, that stuff lives on...

Everlast flashback!

>Seems like a lot of bros have tortured souls.

 

There's no doubt about that. I've always thought a lot of them are actually gay and the hyper-masculinity is at once a effort to trick their families, coworkers, and straight bros while actually advertising their "hobby" to fellow closeted Fred Durst gays. Then there's the whole matter of personal trainers, who have all kinds of issues (we need a "seriously, what's up with personal trainers?" thread).  But as for hipsters, I don't have the sense that many if any hipsters are doing the hipster thing to disguise homosexuality. 

 

 

>I think that's why Ohio has so much of this bro vs. hipster thing. The fights that got most the cheers were always bro vs. hipster.

 

The Catholic schools in Cincinnati turn out huge numbers of these guys whereas the whites at public schools, who were more often of Appalachian origin, almost without exception went wigger.  It was in 87 or 88 when the wigger thing started, and it was in full force by 1990.  It was basically born whole as it really hasn't evolved since then.  A lot of those guys were metal guys until one day they turned their caps around and bought overalls with one strap hanging down.  So in Cincinnati the division between Catholic and public schools was marked by bro versus wigger. 

 

Where I grew up, the teenage social structure was dominated by the wiggers. That summer of 88 or 89 when it hit, one guy up the street moved his weight bench out on the driveway and helped the kid across the street from me cut a t-top in his Olds Ninety-Eight.  About a half dozen guys in the neighborhood bought those first generation Bazooka tubes and the guy with the 98 had a pair of 15's in his trunk and another pair in his back seat, then started carrying a gun. They didn't even know any black people and were copying everything they saw on rap videos.  We spent a lot of time playing pool in the basement with Cypress Hill playing.  It was totally ridiculous.   

 

I knew one guy on the street went from metal to wigger to Grateful Dead in the span of about 4 years.  It culminated with him buying a VW Jetta and saturating its rear surfaces with dancing bear stickers. 

 

Ahem, let's use the proper PC term- Whafrican American.

That summer of 88 or 89 when it hit, one guy up the street moved his weight bench out on the driveway and helped the kid across the street from me cut a t-top in his Olds Ninety-Eight.

 

I thought that was just a West Side thing.

>Seems like a lot of bros have tortured souls.

 

There's no doubt about that. I've always thought a lot of them are actually gay and the hyper-masculinity is at once a effort to trick their families, coworkers, and straight bros while actually advertising their "hobby" to fellow closeted Fred Durst gays. Then there's the whole matter of personal trainers, who have all kinds of issues (we need a "seriously, what's up with personal trainers?" thread).  But as for hipsters, I don't have the sense that many if any hipsters are doing the hipster thing to disguise homosexuality. 

 

 

>I think that's why Ohio has so much of this bro vs. hipster thing. The fights that got most the cheers were always bro vs. hipster.

 

The Catholic schools in Cincinnati turn out huge numbers of these guys whereas the whites at public schools, who were more often of Appalachian origin, almost without exception went wigger.  It was in 87 or 88 when the wigger thing started, and it was in full force by 1990.  It was basically born whole as it really hasn't evolved since then.  A lot of those guys were metal guys until one day they turned their caps around and bought overalls with one strap hanging down.  So in Cincinnati the division between Catholic and public schools was marked by bro versus wigger. 

 

Where I grew up, the teenage social structure was dominated by the wiggers. That summer of 88 or 89 when it hit, one guy up the street moved his weight bench out on the driveway and helped the kid across the street from me cut a t-top in his Olds Ninety-Eight.  About a half dozen guys in the neighborhood bought those first generation Bazooka tubes and the guy with the 98 had a pair of 15's in his trunk and another pair in his back seat, then started carrying a gun. They didn't even know any black people and were copying everything they saw on rap videos.  We spent a lot of time playing pool in the basement with Cypress Hill playing.  It was totally ridiculous.   

 

I knew one guy on the street went from metal to wigger to Grateful Dead in the span of about 4 years.  It culminated with him buying a VW Jetta and saturating its rear surfaces with dancing bear stickers. 

 

 

Good stuff on the w***** thing.  (See I can't even type it without white guilt.)

 

Having gone to one of the uppity high schools in Cincy's northern 'burbs during the times you mention, your recollection is amusing for its accuracy and nostalgia.  I played sports in HS so I really didn't have any interest in identifying too strongly with either side.  But I will confess to sporting a mullet one year and replacing it with a fade the next.  So sue me.  White guys can channel their inner Kid N Play or Big Daddy Kane.

I remember a lot of dudes started channeling Brian Austin-Green and Marky Mark. But before that were the white guys with the mullets, sweaters/sweater vests, mustaches, gold chains and British Knights. I will note that the schools I went to at that time that actually had significant black student populations had none of them while the 99% white school I moved to had tons. The way they talked about visiting "the 'hood" was ridiculously melodramatic. "Damn, you gotta watch yourself in the 'hood..." "Think about what would happen if you walked down the street in the 'hood..." "There's drive-by's all the time..." Their trips to the 'hood usually consisted of once a month trips to the South Side or The Bottoms (as the floodable part of Franklinton was called at the time) to see their uncle or whatever when of course nothing happened. Then back to the ribbon development or trailer park in Pickaway County to talk about how 'hood they were for visiting those parts of town.

Anyone read "The Last Bohemia" yet? Word is it's a decent book that rips apart hipsters and their effect on New York City. What's funny about this author is that he sounds like one of the early Brooklyn hipsters. A hipster who moved to a hipster neighborhood attacking other hipsters who moved to a hipster neighborhood...

 

The Last Bohemia

Scenes From the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn

by Robert Anasi

 

It was inevitable that somebody would write a book about the two-decade cycle of change that transformed Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from a no-man’s-land of abandoned factories and boarded-up storefronts to today’s hipster mecca.

 

“The Last Bohemia,” by University of California- Irvine literary-journalism professor Robert Anasi, is the first book to tackle this topic and will hardly be the last. For that we should be thankful. Anasi’s book is awkwardly written and petulant — an extended, cred-mongering “hipsters ruined my neighborhood” grumble.

 

Anasi first moved to Williamsburg in the summer of 1994, and the book is rife with reminders of how early to the party he was: “For a change, I was the square — a colonial administrator paying a visit to a native tribe,” he writes of a bar turned “illegal performance space” called Gargoyle.

 

The neighborhood attracted aspiring filmmakers, artists and writers — “perfect fodder for a rough neighborhood — young and cocky and willing to live on scraps,” Anasi writes. They looked past junkies nodding off in apartment doorways, prostitutes plying their trade at truck stops and occasional gunshots in order to live cheaply and freely.

 

Police were nowhere to be found: “Cops didn’t show up when you got jumped. Cops didn’t investigate burglaries. This was poor, ethnic Brooklyn and you were on your own. The trade-off was that the cops didn’t bother you.”

 

That began to change in the late 1990s, when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s quality of life campaign helped shut down much of Manhattan’s vibrant nightlife — most notoriously via his deployment of cabaret laws dating from the mid-1920s — moving nightlife’s cutting edge across the water. The most compelling part of “Bohemia” chronicles Napoleon, a southside Williamsburg Dominican-American house-music devotee and ex-barber who began frequenting a desultory café called The L before opening his own nightspot, Black Betty, in 1999. But outsiders moved in even faster: By the late 2000s, Anasi writes, “The neighborhood had become a parody of itself, a bohemian theme park.”

 

CONTINUED

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/attack_of_the_hipsters_NXOTZVELk5Tojp3TTvTNhO

Their trips to the 'hood usually consisted of once a month trips to the South Side or The Bottoms (as the floodable part of Franklinton was called at the time) to see their uncle or whatever when of course nothing happened. Then back to the ribbon development or trailer park in Pickaway County to talk about how 'hood they were for visiting those parts of town.

 

Everyone I know who actually lives on the West Side still calls it The Bottoms. It seems like the only time I hear people refer to it as "Franklinton" are people on here or in news articles. What you said is so true through, haha.

I too will accede to jmeck's narrative, though in the actual city of Cincy things got a bit more mixed up (especially because Walnut Hills and Purcell had their own set of weird cultural combos going on - a lot of black metal heads and not so many bros - more pure nerds and geeks).

Yeah Dave I need to refine my comments, which were made several beers into the evening.  It was different on the east side because there were several public schools, especially Sycamore, that were quite preppy, whereas Elder and LaSalle did have quite a bit of the wigger thing going on.  There were a lot of low riders and car stereos at those schools. 

 

Freshman year my bus transferred at LaSalle.  What this meant was students from my all-boys high school had to hang out in the parking lot of a rival all-boys high school for about 10-20 minutes every morning, an obvious recipe for disaster.  There was somebody who drove a black low rider truck with neon green highlights who apparently drove to LaSalle 45 minutes early before school every day to get the closest and most prominent parking spot for the truck.

 

One day John Mardis, who always sat in the last rows and so was last to get off the bus, decided to throw a pencil at it from the bus window, setting off its VIPER alarm.  I had already gotten off the bus and so was nearly caught in the crossfire as several LaSalle students came over to the back of the bus, yanked open the emergency door, and were within a step or two of pounding Mardis when the assistant principal or some other authority figure appeared from somewhere and put an end to the incident, with the VIPER alarm still going through its cycle. 

 

Actually I forgot that the girls from MacAuley transferred with us, so they were witness to all this too.  They also got to see me wipe out on the ice one morning while carrying a trumpet case. 

 

Oh man, the mini truck scene. Lots of black jean shorts and white mini truck event t-shirts. People never respected those things nearly as much as sports cars, muscle cars or even mud trucks -- I don't think people could relate to them.

^ what's to respect with a bed full of speakers and a 4 cyl under the hood. The Neons underneath were cool though. I saw more than my share of senior pictures with mini trucks...

 

We had Mustang 5.0 posse around Youngstown  in the early 90's. You could find about 20 of them parked in one of the parking lots of RT 224 in Boardman every Friday and Saturday night.

If you go to a classic Mustang show, there's always one or two dudes with those weak late 80's ones.  They never draw any kind of crowd!

Ha! My buddy called me about a year ago to tell me he bought an '87 Capri that he was going to renovate. I had to fake my enthusiasm.

 

Now, a mid to late 80's IROC-Z......Oppa Kingston style!

^ So would it be ironic enough if a hipster drove a beat 5.0 (with cheese-grater tail light covers)? Or an IROC-Z? I think it would be...

 

 

 

 

 

 

AJ, I can't wait until you have a "American Beauty" style mid-life crisis and your wife comes home to a 87 IROC-Z in the garage. Or maybe start wearing skinny jeans too.

 

You know what IROC stands for? Italian (or Irish or Iranian depending on your city) Retard Out Cruising.

 

Edit: Capri? Yuck..After the Mustang body they assigned the name to those 2 seater Austrailian convertibles.

AJ, I can't wait until you have a "American Beauty" style mid-life crisis and your wife comes home to a 87 IROC-Z in the garage. Or maybe start wearing skinny jeans too.

 

 

This

 

plus this

 

plus this

 

equals this

 

Circa 1997 my roommate's fat sister drove a circa 87 Capris with one headlight permanently raised.  She weighed more than the car.