Dispatch from the Garden Clique
May 2023, social critique
I’m sitting at the long stone table at Vital, a climbing gym in Williamsburg, flanked by millennials on Zoom calls. It’s warm, and a dry breeze ushers in a fresh herd of gym-goers through the open doors.
Four years ago, I moved to New York for school with all the excitement I could carry to a new and lively environment. However, the burnout was almost instantaneous. It felt like I was hitting walls of people that didn’t quite dance to the same tune – partying all night, or studiously socialist. Then I started hanging out in Williamsburg and the gym, and I thought: “This is where I like it. It’s like a slice of California in a run-down Brooklyn warehouse. It’s real,” or so I thought. Now, sitting across from me is a man on a record label call, wearing an athletic fishnet tank top and a silver chain fit for a bulldog. Outside a woman in a leather jacket and New Balances with a yoga mat is mounting her beater bike while holding a coffee and gripping a cigarette between her teeth. “Brooklyn is turning out to be the last three days of Burning Man,” rings in my ears as I look around the table at the thirty-something-year-olds gassed up on climbing chalk and kombucha. This was no longer home.
I was in search of folks that had a temporary run-in with New York, who bonded over the eventual exodus from the subway with its pizza rats. These people lived in the city for work or school, read poetry on their down time, goofed around on citi bikes on weekends, hated the word ‘upstate’ (but went hiking there nonetheless), walked from the top down at the Gugenheim, dressed up to go to dinner for no good reason, and fled the city at the mention of the word ‘adventure.’ I christened them the ‘Garden Clique.’ And ironically, these people were not found in New York, but on the way back to it.
I met my first Gardeners my freshman year on winter break in Tahoe. I was invited to go skiing with my brother and his friends and we piled into a borrowed Tesla and hit the slopes. The seven days we were in there, we slept in bunk beds without warm clothes in a single room with a microwave and pizza pockets because we couldn’t afford much after buying plane tickets and ski jackets. The next winter the same group of friends and family flocked into Tahoe again, but this time we had learned our lesson. Our wardrobes changed for our one year reunion, and no matter the city or the slippery slopes, we wore the same shoes, the same thermal socks, and the same down jackets. The following summer, while on a trip to Acadia, we stopped at L.L.Bean’s headquarters and the Duck Boots never came off my brother’s feet again.
In the beginning I was embarrassed wearing my soiled pants, dusty socks, and gardening shoes coming back into Penn Station. I wore what I needed to and from school in the city, and it was okay. No one seemed to notice the weird cycling jersey with suit pants on laundry day. And then, I realized there were more of us. On the subway, I spotted a lanky young man clad in yellow Keen water shoes, raw denim jeans, a casual white shirt, and the most uncasually perfect middle part. The outfit was understated yet assertive, suggesting a life away from the city, attested to by his out-of-place slippers – a revival of the ‘poor look’ of 19th century bohemia. On the street, a woman wore a dark plaid scarf as a balaclava under her headphones, maroon corduroys, some expensive watch, and a pair of beaten black Hokas. Salomon sneakers were the weathervane to a Gardener until everyone and their mother started buying them in pastel colors. And a Gardener could not be caught dead in a pair of Blundstones. There were certain brands and products that made me and my Garden Clique nod in understanding, like Mammut beanies and Snowpeak windbreakers, and then there were the disapproving glances at Patagonia vests. It was something of an instinct that taught us how to recognize a fellow Gardener in the urban jungle, and it boiled down to the pairing of professional clothing with a few oddly athletic cameos poking out like turds in a punch bowl.
I saw a notion of resistance in the Gardeners I found on the subway, streets, or in restaurants. We were not replacing our recreational clothing with pieces that belonged with loafers or wool coats. Instead, we took pride in finding ways to style our beaten clothes and shoes with fine jewelry and well groomed hair, and it was near-stupidly dandy how we kept particular pieces of our wardrobe in constant rotation. It was as if the clothing meant for ‘away from the city’ was a memento to the different lives we lived paddling through muddy water or descending into a canyon. I believe we kept the Gardener clothing on throughout the year because we were afraid of losing the personalities we became with them on.
The Garden Clique I am describing is by no means a fresh phenomenon in our society. Long before I was born, the Beat Generation had started the ball rolling as a group of well-educated young folk that moved from place to place traversing the U.S., looking for places to put down roots for their philosophical thoughts. The Beats, like my Garden Clique, huddled in New York as they went to school, forming lifelong bonds of conversation in East Village cafes while talking about what the rest of the country could offer them. Flipping through On the Road, I was washed over by the sense of disorientation Jack Kerouac described. He was on the road to all the places that seemed right, yet none of the towns and cities his characters found quite fit. San Francisco was once the fluid haven beatniks like Ginsberg and Kerouac found themselves in before ultimately moving on. I was drawn to the Beats because they wore simple attire which was not influenced by the roaring fashions around them, and they carried academia around like a curse that gave them life. I see much of the Beats’ frustrations in the Garden Clique: the ambivalence of wanting a higher education as well as a sort of restless longing for a simple life that would never be quite simple. Their eventual departure from New York reminds me of Andre’s monologue from My Dinner with Andre thirty years later:
I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”
Much like the Beatniks, my Garden Clique has trouble putting down roots. One of the most common topics two Gardeners could begin with was “Where do you see yourself moving when you leave New York?” The inevitable escape is not a plot twist, and it is each Gardener's answer that spurs the others into debate. Many talk about Vermont being close to the Tri State for work; New Hampshire has also become a popular contender; Northern California was always on the table; but perfectly weird Austin has always been the winner. If ever the Garden Clique were to describe its haven, Austin would be the closest thing – a warm liberal city that treats itself like a town, woven through with nature and leisure. It is where people that I describe have been escaping to for decades since the 80s. But modern day Austin is ever so slightly turning into the stone table of the self proclaimed hipsters of Vital. Founder of The Austin Chronicle and SXSW, Louis Black describes Austin as “creative, cooperative, noncompetitive, green, and politically plugged in.” And Henri Herbert from the Jim Jones Revue mused: “I could show up here, not trying to take things but to give things, and I would become a part of this beautiful community.” These were the things I wanted to hear about the places I would settle in after graduating. I want to take my degree, along with the Gardeners I had met along the way, and find a place that doesn’t not know the acronym ‘FiDi’. But Black’s final thought on the beauty of Austin was: “We succeeded. And we made this really wonderful place that everybody came to, which then wrecked the core idea.”
Being a Gardener means wanting the best of both worlds. Austin was a textbook example of building an urban structure into a healthy ecosystem, but the second word got out, people inevitably came and crashed the party. In some ways, we are a generation of snobs, unwilling to mix with the older generation of hipsters who have outgrown the youth culture they started. We are well-educated kids who need the structure and stability of a metropolis: the networking, the cash, and the institutions. But we don’t want to shake the hand which feeds us these opportunities.
The new Austin on my horizon is Upstate New York, and I often hear about the wonders of Beacon and Storm King across the Hudson. Recently, a furniture designer told me of his three-year plan to relocate somewhere up there, close enough for a quickie into the city, but just far enough from the bustle. Like Austin, Upstate is not a new discovery. More than ten years ago the ancestors of my Garden Clique, the hipsters of Bushwick, were already well on their way to leaving the steadily rising prices of Brooklyn for townhouses in Dobbs-Ferry or Hastings on Hudson. The difference between the hipsters of the 2000s and the Gardeners of the 2020s was age and attitude. In 2013 almost all the Bushwick ‘fugitives’ interviewed by the New York Times were not leaving because they were tired of the Big Apple. They hopped on the Metro North bandwagon because of the exponentially rising prices of real estate and the want to start families without raves from downstairs neighbors. These were the millennials that escaped the sterility of Vital, and moved to see real rocks – as opposed to plastic rainbow ones – outside their windows. My Gardeners, however, are two decades younger than those Bushwick hippies, and we want out before our neighbor’s ayahuasca even starts. It is the constant agitation of New York, over stimulation whenever we step out the door, and panicked phone calls every time commotion breaks out on the subway. We need to leave because we were not built for the constant ruckus and grime of New York; we were too pampered by our liberal Gen X parents. With that in mind, Upstate sounds like a viable option, until we realize that none of us would survive for long living in a two-street town. There is a reason why our debates on where we’d find ourselves in a few months or years never come to a conclusion. Because despite all the stresses of New York, we aren’t grown up enough to find ourselves without our local bodega around the corner just yet.
The truth is Gardeners are afraid of succumbing to the influences of the city, and we know that if we buy into the pretty lifestyles of Manhattan, there might not be a way out in the foreseeable future. Yet it is a paradox, considering our areas of study and chosen occupations. As a design student, I feed off what a city offers by way of culture and diversity. We geek out and find our friends at the Guillermo Del Toro show at the MoMA, or at Spike Lee’s talk about sledding in the 60s in Fort Greene Park. We secretly adore our time in cities because they give us reason to learn and run about chasing eccentric threads of information. No matter how ecstatic we feel wading through a river, our voices rise above the glistening stream to talk about Dalí’s phobias or the Spam Jam in Minnesota. There is a reason why returning to New York always brings new friends and fresh plans. It is because we find ourselves on an eternal cycle of fleeing the city, just to return in search of the exasperations that sent us packing in the first place.
Only a couple weeks are left before my first summer after college begins, and somehow my Garden fantasies seem farther away than ever. I am realizing that none of my clique has crossed the finish line of moving away from the city that holds us. Perhaps the reality of my subculture only exists within a city anyway, and the Garden Clique phenomenon will evaporate the second we find ourselves living with new complaints in smaller towns. How baffling to think the Garden Clique could just be one of Kerouac’s pit stops before starting afresh in search of an ideal that would eventually lead back to the city.