Check Out This 1995 Encyclopedia Entry About Wicker Park

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 9, 2012 2:30PM

We recently unearthed our 1995 copy of alt.culture, a purported encyclopedia of the emergence of the underground into pop culture. In the publisher's words:

America in the 1990s is witnessing the biggest youth culture gold rush since the '60s. By 1992 a series of seismic events registered: Generation X, Nirvana, Slacker, and Lollapalooza sent shock waves into the mainstream media and turned the spotlight on a whole network of thriving subcultures, from comics to raves to body-modification. In alt.culture, Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice have created a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy for our times; the ideas and fashions, the heroes and villains that have shaped a generation.

It also attempted to explain what the internet was ("alt.culture is the first non-computer book to treat the Internet as a fact of life") and how it was swiftly going to take over the world.

In some ways the book seems quaint in its attempts to explain indie culture yet in others ways it's a little offputting how little has actually changed since those days! take, for instance, the entry pictured above about Chicago's own Wicker Park. Sounds awfully similar to what the neighborhood is still like today, right?