Metro Pulse/Gamut/Bobos

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Denial be damned, we're the ones of which David Brooks wrote

by Matt Edens

Call it a curious case of deja vu.

It was late last spring, one of those perfect East Tennessee Saturday afternoons we've had an abundance of lately.

My wife and I were in Western Plaza. She was gift shopping among the environmentally friendly products at Green Earth Emporium while I browsed next door at the Bike Zoo trying to rationalize spending hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars on a bicycle that I know, deep down, I am too lazy to ride. Later, my wife dashed over to the Fresh Market to buy some of their hormone-free chicken to slap on the grill while I made my way to the Gemstone video store. After browsing through their extensive selection of foreign and independent films, I settled on Amelie (being, quite naturally, far too sophisticated to be daunted by things like subtitles). Walking out, I noticed a group of pre-teen girls striking modeling poses in the window of Lilly's Bead Box—the store in Western Plaza where you can make your own jewelry. Investigating further, I spotted a friend out on the edge of the parking lot with a digital camera, taking pictures. It was a birthday party, she explained, and one of the girls in the window was her daughter.

And that's when it hit me, the uncanny realization that I've been here before. Not surprising—I've been to Western Plaza literally a hundred times or more. But the vision that flashed in my mind that afternoon was from a book: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. In it, there's a scene where author David Brooks describes returning to his hometown of Wayne, Penn., in the mid-90s. Wayne, an old Main Line suburb of Philadelphia was, for at least a century, a bastion of blue-blooded WASP-iness (The Philadelphia Story was set there)—a place of country clubs, horse farms and The Social Register. Not any more.

"The town," writes Brooks, "once an espresso desert, now has six gourmet coffee-houses." There is also a franchise of "one of those gourmet bread stores where they sell apricot almond or spinach feta loaf for $4.75 a pop" and a "Fresh Fields" supermarket where a big sign at the entrance touts the number of organic items on sale that day like a "barometer of virtue." And multiple stores that sell "hand-painted TV armoires, fat smelly candles...Moroccan crafts, Peruvian fabrics and Indian dressers." And, if you're shopping for fulfillment, there's "one of those places you pay...to decorate your own mugs and dishes" or "a gift emporium that hosts creative birthday parties to ensure that self-esteeming kids get even more self esteeming."

Bobos, it seems, have invaded Bearden.

Coined by Brooks, the term describes the modern upscale American world of Bourgeoisie-Bohemians: multi-degreed professionals who "have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos"—people who pursue career advancement with all the fervor of yuppies and crave personal fulfillment with all the self-actualization of hippies. It's a strange new juxtaposition. But then the Bobo world thrives on oxymoron. There are "management gurus," who trade on their "intellectual capital" in the "culture industry."

It's a new phenomenon—one that's still evolving. But it has already left a mark on the cultural landscape. Two scruffy hippies from Vermont are among the best-known entrepreneurs in America. A San Francisco-based clothing store, "established in 1969," dresses the nation's 20 to 40-somethings and a small Seattle coffee house is suddenly as ubiquitous as the Golden Arches.

Which brings me back to Bearden. As I write this—in Starbucks—there are six customers in the store. Four of us have laptops. The other two are reading today's New York Times.

And while the recent opening of the Starbucks franchise lends Bearden a semi-official stamp of Bobo approval, it's only the latest of the numerous Bobo-oriented restaurants and retailers that have put down roots in Bearden. Consider all the things you can buy today that would have been unimaginable a decade and a half ago: gourmet coffee, designer bread, $20 bottles of balsamic vinegar, $3,100 Danish Modern-style futon beds from Nouveau Classics. Bicycles that cost as much as cars ($8,000 for a custom-built frame, special order through the Bike Zoo) and hiking boots that cost more than bikes used to ($225 by Montrail at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports). Then there's tapas. Before Cha-Cha opened a year ago did anyone in Knoxville have the foggiest idea what tapas was?

Who buys all this stuff? Apparently you do. The Bearden area accounts for as much as 50 percent of Metro Pulse's advertising and 20 percent of distribution. (By the way, the nationwide proliferation of independent newsweeklies is another Bobo phenomenon. Every village needs its voice.)

And, if census data is any guide, folks in Bearden have little trouble affording $1,600 steel-and-glass Italian dining tables, $2,500 Cannondale road bikes or $349 Gore-Tex parkas from The North Face (The North Face logo is the Bobo equivalent of the Izod alligator). In the last decade two residential areas within Bearden—Westwood and Forest Heights—have posted huge gains in household income. The number of six-figure households has tripled, as have the number making between $75,000 and $100,000. In neighboring Sequoyah Hills and Westmoreland, the number of six-figure earners has almost doubled (while the number of folks in the upper five-figure range has actually decreased). Nor is this a case of the rich simply getting richer. Two-thirds of Bearden's residents and nearly half of Sequoyah's lived elsewhere just five years ago.

The area has seen an influx of the folks who make up the backbone of the Bobo class: Bearden, in the last decade, posted a 25% increase in the number of people with graduate and professional degrees. Sequoyah has seen smaller gains, around 15%, but just like household income, the less educated are getting scarcer: the number of adults with bachelor's or associate's degrees, or else no college education at all have declined. And, like most Bobo enclaves, the rising levels of education and affluence have been accompanied by a growing liberal bent in politics—even in a Republican stronghold like Sequoyah Hills. In 1980, Carter won 26% of Sequoyah's vote, compared with 38% for Clinton in 1992 and 45% for Gore in 2000.

The neighborhood is changing, to which the dwindling and aging membership of Cherokee Country Club attests—a victim of the same demographic shift as Cadillac, Buick, and the dying Olds. Even the doctors, lawyers, and accountants who are buying the old estate homes along the boulevard and elsewhere have a different outlook than their predecessors. So now Bearden is an area where, if it weren't for Saturn, hardly anyone under 50 would drive an American-built sedan and about every third car, it seems, has a Yakima roof rack. It's a neighborhood of kayaking software developers, stay-at-home moms with anthropology degrees, and Oak Ridge research scientists who host jazz programs on the local NPR affiliate. It's a place where the kids have names like Dustin and Evra and wear hand-made sandals ordered direct from the small Oregon-based company that makes them (the internet is both facilitator and disseminator of the Bobo lifestyle).

Why are they here? Because, well...it's nice: huge trees, great housing stock, good schools—Bearden and Sequoyah are two of the highest-ranking public elementary schools in the county. Plus there are great parks: Sequoyah and Lakeshore are two of the largest in the city system—and greenways, the quintessential Bobo amenity. Is it any coincidence that the city's longest continuous greenway starts in Bearden? And just as they can afford park accessories like the bike with the TIG-welded frame of super-light T-6 aluminum or the parka with double rip-stop nylon, supplemented with ceramic particles and polyurethane-coat welded seams (even if they have no idea what any of that means), they can also afford to buy into the area—despite the fact that home prices in the Bearden area have increased around 60-70% in the last decade.

And that high-priced housing stock is just a starting point. Remodeling is practically a religion, one that has split into several distinct denominations. There are the Teardowns—which have started cropping up in Sequoyah—where someone buys one of the small '40s or '50s Cape Cods or ranchers common in what were once the less upscale parts of the neighborhood, tears it down, and builds a much bigger house. A slightly less radical sect are the Doublers. They don't actually tear the place down, they just add on to it the necessities for modern living: three-car garages, massive great rooms, industrial-strength kitchens and the pantry, which by Brooks' rule of thumb, should be "larger than the entire apartment the owner lived in while in graduate school." Just around the corner from a friend's house in Westwood, the contractors are putting the finishing touches on a '40s Gothic Revival that has morphed into a sort of golf-course mini-mansion, minus the golf course.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Naturalists—folks who don't necessarily want to make the house any bigger. They just want to make it cooler. They buy one of those small, bland cape cods and hurl cedar, shale, and river-rock at it until it looks like Bill Gates' pool house. And then there are the Ironic Preservationists—typically younger Gen-X Bobos, who embrace the sleek mod houses from the '50s and '60s and fill them with retro relics and reproductions.

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of places with Bobos besides Bearden. They're the demographic driving downtown's revitalization. Same goes for places like Fourth and Gill. Some Bobos with truly advanced hairshirt tendencies seek out "real" places full of "real" people in overlooked areas east and south, where they try not to think about the fact that, by moving in, they have committed the mortal sin of gentrification.

But it is Bearden that Bobos are remaking most visibly in a physical and demographic sense. They're giving it a psychological makeover as well. Most Beardenites I know speak of "West Knoxville" as someplace else and will refer to Sequoyah as if it were just another center-city neighborhood like, say, Mechanicsville. One woman I know, who lives in Sequoyah, once told me "the city should just admit that Bearden is downtown." Which was weird considering she works for a public agency charged with center-city revitalization. Blindness to those sorts of inconsistencies is a hallmark of us Bobos (that's right, I'm a Bobo too, hairshirt and all). Consider the example of my friend that day in Western Plaza—the one whose daughter was enjoying the party at Lilly's Bead Box. She's an academic who lives in Sequoyah with her journalist husband. Standing there in the parking lot, I passed along my epiphany about Brooks, Bobos, and Bearden, even quoting the bit about "creative birthday parties for self-esteeming kids." She looked me square in the eye and said:

"I can't stand those people."

Then she scrolled back in her digital camera and showed me the used Volvo 240 she was buying her 17-year-old son.