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Hipster is from the 1950s. He was educated, well-employed -- writer, artist, actor -- out of the mainstream. NYC hipsters lived in Greenwich Village (now the West Village). Many favored the non-gentrified Upper West Side. They wore tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, read Russians, avant-garde Brits and Americans. They flirted with left-wing politics, rejecting Communism, but liking Socialists or Trotskyists. They haunted MOMA and small film spaces like the Thalia on West 96th. Mainly white, hipsters loved classic and modern jazz by African-American artists: Lady Day, Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, the Modern Jazz Quartet, even Duke Ellington. They drove European sports cars, not necessarily for speed or power, but for artful handling in city traffic. Some hipsters rode Italian motor scooters, like Vespa or Lambretta. Back then hipsterdom was a male culture. Many original hipsters were closeted gay men. A woman became a hipster only by partnering with a hipster dude.

Around the beginning of this millennium, young artists, finding southern Manhattan too costly, migrated across the Billyburg Bridge to northern Brooklyn, bringing the old, almost-extinct East Village culture with them, and, not really knowing anything about Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side a half century earlier, revived the word hipster. It has no relation to the original meaning, except to cite a group that isolates itself from, or considers itself better than, the mainstream.

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