The National Trust has named the hipster coast — Brooklyn’s East River waterfront, along whose shores and uplands live countless hipsters — to this year’s 11 Most Endangered list. Maybe cultural creatives won’t guard the historic urban fabric.
(Photo is of the Panorama, not of the real city.)
west north 
I don’t think the cultural creatives are ones funding the multi-billion dollar riverfront development. As usual, they plow the fields for the developers to plant.
Sure, I’m being snide as usual. They’re the enablers for the destruction, though, and apparently don’t have the clout to save the “gritty” urban environment that they supposedly prize. There are surely enough of them that they could be a potent political force, but since hipsterdom (like hippiedom before it) is merely a matching set of high-stakes consumer choices, actual political mobilization appears well nigh impossible. I’d love to be proven wrong, of course.
You’re not that far off I guess. I’m reading “The Suburbanization of New York” right now, so I’m still trying to figure out if the latest wave of urban development is something that can actually be controlled or if it’s really a product of the corporatization of American culture, and is basically a societal change that is really only avoided in small cultural patches…