Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Joe Downtown: ‘The Simpsons’ take on cool hip with downtown crowd

Shaved heads, untucked Oxfords and fedoras – trademarks of the hipster – were satirized Sunday night on “The Simpsons” and laughed about Tuesday morning in downtown Las Vegas.

The joke wasn’t lost on the downtown community, which is growing and chockablock of the iPad-carrying, goatee-sporting and skinny-jean-wearing set.

A couple of 20-something dudes laughed about the episode Tuesday morning in Las Vegas’ own tiny slice of Portland, the Emergency Arts building at Sixth and Fremont.

With the slow migration of Zappos.com employees from Henderson into downtown, oodles of the young, smart and technologically savvy walk Fremont Street now, and The Beat, the coffeehouse in Emergency Arts, is their unofficial clubhouse.

“We’re not quite there yet,” laughed one of the guys.

“We’ll never be that extreme,” said the other.

If they do become that hipster, it could be curtains for downtown’s expansion – at least based on the Simpson’s episode, which was called “The Day The Earth Stood Cool.” When the New York Times calls out Springfield as America’s “coolest” city, the goateed set leaves, looking for another place that hasn’t yet been “played out.”

Not hipster, but cool

Cool in her own right but not a hipster, consultant Terry Murphy has a ringtone that lets everyone know where her allegiance lies. When her smartphone rings, “Downtown” by Petula Clark plays.

Murphy is vice chair of the Downtown Las Vegas Alliance.

Joe Schoenmann doesn’t just cover downtown, he lives and works there. Schoenmann is Greenspun Media Group’s embedded downtown journalist, working from an office in the Emergency Arts complex.

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