Creating Hipsturbia in the Suburbs of New York →
Alex Williams profiles a trend of people moving from Brooklyn to the Westchester river towns for the New York Times:
A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.
Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”
You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
I love living in the suburbs, but I think people might get the wrong idea if they read too literally into some of this. If there’s some mass exodus from Brooklyn, I can’t really tell. And the suburbs don’t feel “hip” to me at all — I didn’t even recognize this description of my own town until it was named at the end of the third paragraph.
(Alex interviewed me for this article. There’s a quote from me near the end.)
Hip or not, we love living here. It’s a fantastic place to live peacefully, raise a family, and still have a great commute to Manhattan (but, as anyone who’s ever gone between them will tell you, commuting from Westchester to Brooklyn every day would suck). You don’t get the city’s night life, huge restaurant selection, or dating pool, but you get a lot that the city can never offer.
Most young people living in the city don’t even realize that places like this exist with reasonable commutes.