Look into the past and the future looks awfully similar.

I found my copy of alt.culture, a little guidebook to what was hip and emerging in 1995. It was prescient in so many ways! It predicted the stratospheric rise of the Internet! (I'm only half kidding, it was one of the first books to treat the Internet as something other than a niche community.) It was caught up with the rise of alternative rock! Actually it was published just in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death so it still viewed alternative music and music with underground roots but also realized it was quickly being co-opted. That's one reason why this entry on Wicker Park is kind of hilarious. The other thing about that entry is that even way back then, when the neighborhood was actually kind of (but not terribly) "bad" the suburbanites were still flocking to Damen, North and Milwaukee. The only difference? Now all the suburbanites live at Damen, North and Milwaukee.