Where have all the hipsters gone?

where have all the flowers gone?

Williamsburg, Brooklyn may well be recognized as the "influential hub of hipster culture" but the corner of St. Viateur and Casgrain, in Montreal's Mile End (Canada's hipster capital), is hot on its heels.

Hot on the heels of a falafel sandwich from The NEW Green Panther, I headed further east on St. Viateur Street than usual last week and discovered the most amazing NEW bohemian micro-neighborhood.

Of course, I fear an imminent hipster invasion.

Like all hipster hoods, the area is in an old working class, industrial one known as the schmatta (garment/textile) neighborhood and used to be populated by Eastern European, Greek and Portuguese immigrants.

These days it's full students, artists, eccentrics and a few remaining Hassidic Jews. 

While creeping gentrification is a concern, the micro-neighborhood still features a slew of traditional social clubs as well as an old Polish church. (Though it must be noted that said church does, in fact, play host to a hipster music festival.)

St. Michael's

It's a special blend of old and new. 

Much like the hispter itself.

Appropriated from the 1940's jazz scene and used by hepcats cooler than the cat's pyjamas, the term hipster was originally used to describe "a generation (...) suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleamed from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on the street corners on Times Square and in the Village (...)--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction," Jack Kerouac.

With the hipsters leaving Brooklyn for cheaper and more bohemian domiciles, how long will it be before my new favourite micro-neighborhood gets invaded and loses its delicate balance - and cool?   

crooklyn brooklyn

But back to my falafel sandwich and whence it came.

Vegan and organic, The Green Panther is "a fresh, dynamic project whose main goal is to develop a more sustainable way of living in today's urban reality by supporting and creating local alternatives, though the use of organic produce (local when available), recycled materials and by raising awareness." 

The sandwich I shared with the Original Mile End, or OME, hipster contained an addictive mix of falafels, cabbage, carrots, pickles, sauerkraut and tahini. 

 the OME hipster

We enjoyed it outside, in the sun, at the corner of old and new.