America's Best Crunchy Towns
Grow your hair out, start a granola company, and get really into jam bands
One of my dark secrets is I’m actually really in love with crunchy towns. You know what I’m talking about: some burg, usually along the east coast, generally populated by old hippies, students from the nearby liberal arts college, former students who went to the nearby liberal arts college, dropped out halfway through sophomore year, got a job at the local sandwich shop, and ended up sticking around for the last ten years. These towns exist out west, Berkeley being the most notable despite how the entire Bay Area feels like one gentrified dystopian nightmare to me. I still go there and play the “Crust punk, hippie, or both” game that is one of the defining traits of these places, and I’ll count it as long as that continues. Gainesville also feels just crusty enough, but that’s only because I’ll always consider it the place that made it seem OK for punks to grow beards when I was a teenager, and it’s also got a sizable amount of white dudes with dreadlocks. But the best crunchy towns are almost always located in one of the states that make up the original colonies. I visited one of my personal favorites last weekend, Asheville, North Carolina, and I found myself once again thinking I could never leave NYC, but if I did, I’d end up in a crunchy town.
I’ve been obsessed with Asheville ever since I read the writer Aaron Cometbus lived there for a time. He wrote about it in some of his zines and made it seem like a wonderland up in the mountains of North Carolina. If you aren’t familiar with Cometbus, he was in the band Crimpshrine, icons among pop punk aficionados and also one of the great “Punk, hippie, or both” bands. They were punk, but they were dirty enough and taught an entire generation to dumpster dive, so I imagine some people might have been confused upon first seeing them. In the 20 years since I first went there, the place has undergone changes (not to mention the horrible flooding it experienced last year), but it never feels too drastic. There’s a crystal shop and a Mellow Mushroom pizza on the main drag, which tells me there’s still some weird in that old Southern town. They also have the Moog Museum and Ragtime Vintage, a shop that deserves to end up on any “Best Vintage Stores in America” list worth its Made in the USA denim. I copped two pairs of ‘90s Ralph chinos and a great pair of old Carhartt pants that somebody Grailed would try and charge me three or four-times more for, but I ended up shelling out $75 for everything. Stuff not being too expensive is a sure sign of a crunchy town. Sadly, Berkeley is a little pricey these days, and it’s got an Artichoke Pizza, so I think I’ll end up removing it from my list next time I go there.
People also might think upstate New York in the Catskills is a wonderland of crunchy towns, and they used to be, but these days the area around Kingston feels like a retirement village for people who like to talk about all the crazy nights they spent hanging out in Williamsburg circa 2006 and the vintage shops are always too pricey. Also, it just doesn’t seem that crunchy. It’s more local, organic, aughts artisanal feeling, almost like Los Angeles for people who don’t have any dreams of breaking into showbiz and who like gloomy weather. Northampton in Massachusetts is crunchy as hell, one of the few places you can see somebody in a Phish shirt asking for change alongside a person with a Crass patch holding the crotch of their filthy jeans together. The fact that it’s the home of Smith College, a school that would literally make Tucker Carlson’s face start to melt if he ever set foot on the campus, only adds to its crunch factor. The region’s Five Colleges combined is sort of like the Voltron of crunchiness, but it’s not the epicenter.
No, that honor belongs to the Green Mountain State, Vermont. Where else could old Jews from New York City go to either become woke ice cream millionaires or win a senate seat and make taxing millionaires and billionaires central to his political mission? You’ve got Ben, Jerry, and Bernie, but you’ve also got Phish. The produce in Vermont? Generally incredible. And while this doesn’t necessarily add to the state’s crunch factor, Myer’s makes my favorite Montreal-style bagels and it’s in Burlington, not Mile End. Makes me a little proud to be an American.
As a person who wouldn’t define himself as at all crunchy, I’ve tried for a long time to figure out what exactly it is about crunchy towns that I’m so attracted to, and I figured it out while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 film Slacker. I was reminded of how the town it’s set in, Austin, Texas, is one of those places along with San Diego, Portland (Oregon), and Detroit that I’ve seen sizable chunks of people I’ve considered cool at some point in my life flock to. Obviously, Williamsburg and Silver Lake are both on that list, but since they’re in New York and Los Angeles, it’s not like they were hard to find or these overlooked gems. But for a time, Austin had this feel of “the next Seattle,” a term I despise but am old enough to have heard used plenty of times that it’s still stuck in my head as an indicator of “This place will be ruined ASAP.” It was where people went to start bands, make art, play SXSW, sit on porches drinking Lone Star and not worrying about having to pay too much rent, and, be “weird” as the city’s tagline likes to boast. And man, it was pretty fun…until it wasn’t. Friends started getting priced out, SXSW turned into some big corporate wank fest and not a fun time discovering new bands, and the tech bros started moving in. The whole area feels like it’s becoming Elonland. I don’t want to go anywhere populated with people who like complaining about “woke culture” and who think Cybertrucks look cool.
But watching Slacker made me realize something: Austin was never quite crunchy. I mean, it definitely had crunch. A place that could serve as homebase for both Willie Nelson and Butthole Surfers certainly had something special going on. But I think for a place to truly be crunchy, it needs to be in a colder climate, and I think the town itself needs to be older and full of older buildings. Austin was incorporated in 1839, so it’s old, but I mean Revolutionary War-era old. There’s just something about a place that hasn’t totally buffed out the fact that it’s 250 years or older that adds to the crunchiness. The best crunchy towns are along the East Coast, and I hope they’re around forever.
Bring back the crunch! Give us ALL the crunch. Spread the crunch around. And yes, what a tote!
As a native of Austin and a former resident of Madison and Olympia, I think you're right about Austin not being truly "crunchy." This sounds like a cousin of my lifelong complaint about people who call Austin "not really part of Texas." (People who say that usually haven't spent very long here or have managed to confine themselves to one or two neighborhoods near campus.) Asheville is great. My brother owns a bookstore and coffee shop there (Daymoon). Every time I visit him, I have this moment where I want to move there. Then I remember that I love my hometown with all its contradictions. But still, the pull of a smaller town with four actual seasons is strong.