Meet the “Dirtbag” Skewering New York’s Hyper-Gentrified Downtown Scene

Over the last few years, the Instagram account Nolita Dirtbag has become moderately notorious for its hyper-specific focus on a particular kind of person: the titular Nolita Dirtbag. The ND can be male or female, young or old, famous or anonymous. What really matters is that they partake of a vibe that is almost unavoidable in 2022: they’re on TikTok, or have considered ordering an espresso martini, or pair their Nike Dunks with trashed Carhartt. The Upside Pizza on the corner of Spring and Mulberry has become one of those spots popular among the crowd Nolita Dirtbag skewers—frequented by people for whom ordering a slice isn’t so much a way of life as it is a small event, something you post about to your Close Friends on Instagram. Which makes it fitting that it’s where the person who runs the account has asked me to meet. I’ve been told to look out for “the dude with the wide pants and the gross mustache,” which is to say: I’m waiting for @NolitaDirtbag, and all I know is that they’re a Nolita Dirtbag, too.

That is, in some sense, core to the account’s 50,000-follower appeal: at this specific moment in this specific part of lower Manhattan, “that dude with the wide pants and the gross mustache” describes…pretty much everybody. The guys that line up outside at Aimé Leon Dore. The ones strolling around in Bode, and also the ones in Balenciaga. The folks semi-ironically scarfing down sausage and peppers at the Feast of San Gennaro. And, of course, the account’s proprietor, a tall, slim figure who materializes in front of me and introduces himself as Alex Hartman. He’s wearing a pair of Eckhaus Latta jeans, a black Lacoste polo underneath a denim jacket, and black penny loafers with white socks. More Nolita Dirtbag-adjacent than pure Nolita Dirtbag, if we’re picking nits.

Hartman grew up just north of the city in Westchester, and explains that, until recently, he was working "a pretty corporate job—like, corporate enough that I had to input shit into Salesforce and all that stuff which I hated.” Running a buzzy Instagram account has led to a few opportunities—helping brands with their digital strategy here, freelance meme making there. (“Insane collection of words, ‘freelance meme making.’”) Nolita Dirtbag isn’t yet his prime source of income, but Hartman nonetheless considers himself a “huge sellout” for making some money through sponsored posts and collabs with brands like M Jewelers. “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” he jokes.

That’s part of why we’re talking: Hartman has his sights set on the future. He’s hyped about a collab he’s working on with Small Talk Studio. He jokes about franchising his niche meme page and starting a “conglomerate” of pages for different cities all across the country. He’s got plenty of ideas, some of which require losing his anonymity: “I also want to do longer-format content in front of the camera and bring some of this ‘commentary’ to life in different ways,” he explains. He’d also love to get into the consulting space.

Hartman started making memes and posting them to the Nolita Dirtbag account in 2021. One of the first to gain any traction was a simple white background post with “IMMÁ PEE ON THE FLOOR” in the same font as the Aimé Leon Dore logo. His timing couldn’t have been better: this was right when all of New York’s pent-up pandemic boredom, aggression, and horniness seemed to express itself in lower Manhattan.

Hartman’s account takes its name from one of those New York acronyms that comes to stand in for more than just the set of streets or neighborhoods it describes: North of Little Italy. The name itself dates back to the 1990s, when realtors were looking to rebrand and draw big money to neighborhoods thought to be tarnished by crime and neglect: SoHo, Tribeca, NoHo. The city that Hartman documents is long past that. New York City has long been an expensive place to live, but recently, with rents hitting an all-time high, it has become downright unaffordable for most people. It is fully post-gentrification, no longer the weird, seedy place that has long been obsessed over by historians and pop culture geeks. Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Jean-Michel Basquiat have been replaced by people that can afford to look like they know what’s cool and interesting—but that doesn’t mean they themselves are cool and interesting.

These, more than anyone else, are Hartman’s subjects. I’ll just let him describe them: “Guys with the paint-splattered canvas carpenter pants. Potentially wearing a crop top, maybe they’ve got a hoodie on—there are different levels to it. If an AI was to generate it, they’d also be wearing a pair of Salomons or Asics and a Western Hydrodynamic Research hat. Then there’s the ironic camouflage thing,” he says, rolling his eyes towards the lid on his own head, which is camouflage. “Obviously 90 percent of this is making fun of myself. I make fun of shit all the time that I’m into.”

Nolita Dirtbag’s popularity might be hard to understand if you don’t live in New York, or if you don’t mainline social media. Everything about it is insider baseball, from using cop memes in order to #stopthemadness of people ordering espresso martinis to poking fun at the hosts of Throwing Fits for “being 35 years old and thinking it’d be a cool idea to start a menswear podcast.” But its insiderness seems to be resonating: the account lent its name to a local eatery’s take on the drink that legacy media decided was the “drink of the summer,” the Dirty Shirley—and then Hartman found himself making an anonymous appearance on the podcast he’d been taking shots at.

Geographically speaking, the account isn’t just limited to Nolita. “I would break it down into three groups,” Hartman explains. “You have West Village cronies, the big brain Substack writers in Dimes Square, and the slightly grown-up, hypebeast adjacent dudes in Nolita.”Hartman spends a lot of his time in these neighborhoods but lives in Brooklyn, spending just as much time in Williamsburg (“it’s full of Australians now for some reason), Bed-Stuy and Bushwick. Mr. Nolita Dirtbag, it turns out, has an eye toward someday moving to Greenpoint. “I feel like it's a bunch of people that just turned 30 that used to live in Bushwick for 10 years that just got enough money to move there,” he says.

These fine-grained observations are at the heart of the account’s appeal, and also its broader relevance: sure, he’s been making niche memes, but Hartman has also inadvertently helped document a very specific time and a very specific place. If you live in a city where big money is rolling in and the things that made the place great are being pushed out, you probably know a few Dirtbags of your own, too. Places like Chicago, Austin or Oakland are hardly immune to it.

In this sense, Hartman’s account—along with other notable podcasts, meme pages, and Substack newsletters—is part of a lineage. I think of these folks as being in the same vein as publications like Spy, Peter Kaplan’s New York Observer, and aughts-era Gawker. Hartman and his peers are filling a void left by those gossipy, shit-talking publications of yesteryear. And to do that, you’ve got to be in it to some degree. That means that much of their output is necessarily New York City bubble stuff. And sooner or later the bubble either pops or begins to stretch out past the tri-state area.

As Hartman and I walk through his stomping grounds, we bump into a crew of people in gear from Noah. A few of them haven’t even bothered to take the tags off. They all know Hartman, and he tells me that, among some locals, it isn’t a secret that he’s behind the account. Losing the veil of anonymity feels like the next logical step, he explains, especially given that one of his goals is to be on camera. He’s got a lot of “ridiculous” stuff he posts with his face on his private account that he thinks would be fun to bring to a wider audience. He doesn’t care much about the mystique, if there is any, behind the account remaining anonymous. He’s aware that, in the worlds he calls home—New York City and menswear, basically—things come and go, and trends and tastes change. But for the moment, he’s filling a void. Part scene reporter, part humorist.

“I think my whole account is about things having a shelf life to some degree with certain crowds,” he says. “So, of course, a certain ‘edgy’ factor will wear off over time.” By this point, we’ve made it to our destination: another pizza place. This one just barely on the outskirts of Nolita.