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In one of those glib, fast-moving pronouncement pieces that magazines are in love with, Details pronounces the suburbs hip in the November issue. The sidebar anoints Montrose as a worthy alternative to L.A. proper: "It feels more like a small town than a suburb—albeit one with a nationally recognized wine and cheese shop, Goudas & Vines." Excerpt from the main trend story:
To say all the cool people are moving to the ’burbs would be an overstatement....But in the past decade, the distinction between city and suburb has become blurred. “Commuter towns” in places like northern New Jersey, the eastern shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington, and Orange County, California—once considered cultural Siberia—are now filled with work-from-home hipsters who care about things like independent cinema and what Arianna Huffington has to say.[skip]
“From a cultural standpoint, cities are becoming less interesting and the suburbs are increasingly where the action is,” says Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History. “Partly because of the freedom the Internet gives us, but also because cities have become homogenized, inhospitable, and expensive beyond belief, people now live by the ethos of ‘everywhere a city,’ even if they’re in an outer ring, an outer-outer ring, or beyond.”
Next: Variety's Dade Hayes moves to the suburbs.
After decades of living in New York and L.A., Dade Hayes, an editor and author, recently did the unthinkable: He bought a house in Larchmont, New York, a mile from where he grew up. “When I was a kid, Larchmont was a sleepy town where the most interesting restaurant was probably Charlie Brown’s,” he says. “Now there are late-night martini bars, a singles scene, an indie movie house a town over—and all without the glorious urine stench you get in Manhattan.”