The antiquarian Filter was notorious for fueling the “Missed Connections” advertisements on Craigslist. In fact, one Yelp reviewer admits she first visited the coffee house because she saw it come up again and again in the listings. Others were mortified by how tragically unhip the scenesters made them feel. You see, when Filter and hipsterdom met for the first time, it was love at first awkward instance of eye contact. Over time, however, hipsterdom grew complacent with the vanilla games of googly-eyes—instead finding in Filter a perfect place to rest its judgmental stare and rattle off snarky commentary. Abundant reviews on the Internet underscore this tension between the cool and the un-cool.
Some would note that this tension came to a head in July of 2007, when Filter closed up shop at the space it had leased, for five years, on the ground floor of the Flat Iron building. Bob Berger, the landlord and owner of the building (which is home to many artists), sold the space to Bank of America. Although the locals briefly griped about gentrification, the displacement occurred without any significant protest; owner Linnane has been cited as holding no grudge against Berger, demurring that gentrifying forces often aren’t immediately identifiable. One customer mentioned to me that he had met Linnane during the first few days of Filter’s re-opening, describing him as “too cool for school.” “Just because what he created is too cool for school doesn’t mean he gets to act too cool for school,” the customer explained.
While Filter’s charm once rested on the backs of its hip clientele, its present appeal would seem not to require a single hipster-brand hipster in its 3,500-square-foot space. Yet there is still a handful of customers immediately identifiable as such: it is hard, for example, not to notice a girl wearing an acid-washed denim romper over a sweater, black stockings with carefully-ripped holes, and grandmotherly glasses, accompanied by a young man with M.C. Hammer’s hair-do. As with the Filter of old, coming here is still as much about watching people and people watching you as it is about being a scholar, writer, or artist. The old ubiquities reassert themselves: Apple laptops, boxy black-rimmed glasses, superfluous scarves, and floppy haircuts. A new visitor, entering the lounge area from the coffee bar and fumbling with two book bags and an espresso, became a scene, scrutinized by deadpan faces until he found a spot to settle. While these looks are familiar (Ambling around the former Filter was like strutting across a stage), here they seem driven by curiosity rather than contempt.
On my second visit, I recognized a young man from the original Filter and overheard his conversation on the phone. “My favorite coffee shop opened up again,” he said, “so I have a place to do my writing.” Setting up camp on one of the larger couches, his hood pulled down to his brow, he sat for a couple of hours with a notebook and a pen and a feverish gleam in his eye. Plenty of patrons in plaid adorned the room in various states of mental effort. One man in his late forties or early fifties planted himself on a sofa in the center of the room, boasting a flannel shirt, jeans, a baseball hat, and chunky-soled work boots. A Hewlett-Packard laptop straddled his legs. He looked, reminiscently, like the real deal—donning the “costume” of the blue-collar hipster in earnest.
My informal bathroom wall survey “What are you reading?” was humored with a few responses over the next two days: Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation; poems by Mark Strand; Black Skin, White Masks, by the French post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon [...] .
Those without MacBooks sat, head in one hand, pen in the other, as they scribbled or annotated a novel. One man in a button-up shirt and a striped sweater had two books on the table (the fattest one open to the first few pages), an iPhone in his hand, and eyes that flitted like moths about the room for over an hour. This is what those who miss the old Filter most recall: a homey place in which to fill the afternoon or evening with people-watching, reading, writing, and thinking among similarly-minded folk. Seth Meyer, who frequented the Filter of yore when he was a student at Northwestern, explained that it had become his second home; for him the only coffeehouse worth loving is one that is part-library and part-social-club (though good coffee matters, too). Even on his fifth visit, however, he was still scrutinizing the new spot’s music. The playlist this week has not ventured into obscurity but has instead wavered bipolarly between the nostalgically familiar (Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon” and The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”) and the begrudgingly familiar (Lifehouse’s “I’m Falling Even More in Love with You” and Elmo & Patsy’s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”). Although it’s difficult to learn what band is tickling patrons’ eardrums behind tiny ear buds or oversized headphones, the gentle deflation of pretense here leads one to believe that “you’veprobablyneverheardofthem” would no longer be a popular answer.
