About five years ago, Alex Hartman, then a 24-year-old, sat with a friend at the corner of Mulberry and Kenmare Streets in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan, engaging in one of the area’s noblest pastimes: judging strangers by the way they look.
All the apparently hip young men were wearing sort of the same thing, Hartman noticed. (Carhartt jackets, camo print hats, Salomon sneakers.) And they were all headed in the same direction? (Toward the storefront of Aimé Leon Dore, the purveyor of a certain early 2020s downtown New York guy uniform.)
What if there was a name for all these men, and what if their habitus could be dissected and mocked in the form of memes? Hartman, desultorily working a job in software sales, created an Instagram account, called Nolita Dirtbag — for just that type of guy — and started to post. And the rest is, well, very recent history.
Today, Nolita Dirtbag is the king of the arch neighborhood posters, with 161,000 followers who thrill to his digs at, among many other targets, people who have gone to Bard College, people who wear A24 merch, people who have patchwork tattoo sleeves, people who wait in line for coffee and who frequent members-only clubs. Now he is recognized when he goes out (in NoLIta and surroundings), and brands pay him for his discernment.
Yet, on a recent weekday, munching on a plate of chicken tenders en terrasse at the NoLIta-adjacent workhorse Fanelli Cafe, Hartman looked out at his kingdom and found it wanting.
“How long can you beat the dead horse?” he said, in a deep and sardonic voice. At times, he was even starting to irritate himself, he said.
Yet what annoys a young man may not annoy a slightly less young one. Hartman had just turned 30. After 884 posts, did he want to be the guy who was still doing this at 40?
“The dopamine receptors just get, you know, OK cool, 10,000 likes, nice” — here Hartman stuck his fingers to his head and made a buzzing noise, as if electrocuting himself. “So it’s like, that’s not hitting the same anymore.”
So what does hit, exactly? In November, Hartman will debut a media company called Dead Horse. It’ll start slowly: a talk show in which Hartman mock-scientifically analyzes whether guests are more millennial or zoomer, a hyperlocal news show with a Claymation host, a subletting service and a members-only video chat he’s pitching as Raya meets Chat Roulette.
(To be clear, the Nolita Dirtbag Instagram account isn’t going anywhere; Hartman says that, in addition to its wry street anthropology, he’ll use it as a way to point his audience toward his new ventures.)
It’s an ambitious move for a guy who has made a name for himself antagonizing Graza olive oil and people who call themselves “creative strategists.”
“I want to go like Rupert Murdoch mode if he wasn’t like a tiny little Australian chud,” Hartman said.
A cool Rupert Murdoch conjures visions — for those old enough to remember — of Shane Smith, who in the 1990s started a little in-the-know magazine called Vice, which puckishly mocked hipsters (they were still called that back then). Before Vice imploded, Smith turned it into a globe-bestriding media brand. Ben Dietz, a brand consultant who worked at Vice from 2004 to 2020, sees some similarities.
“What Alex has really nailed from the very beginning is voice,” Dietz said. “The New York specific type of guy noticing, you know, somewhat jaded, but also somewhat aspirational.”
(Dietz is in a consultancy partnership with Jacob Price, who is Hartman’s partner in Dead Horse.)
In other words, the sly friend you wish you had. And while it may seem contradictory to try to scale a social media account built on hyperlocal humor, Hartman’s sensibility seems to travel. He points out that he’s currently in a group chat with 30 other people who run the “Nolita Dirtbags of their neighborhood.”
But can ironic judgment sell? Here, Hartman may take a lesson from influencers turned businessmen of the past. Josh Ostrovsky made a name for himself in the early 2010s as the Fat Jewish, a larger-than-life downtown character and poster, before starting a wine brand called White Girl Rosé — named after the fact that the white girls of 10 years ago really loved rosé. It was gently mocking, and a massive success: Ostrovsky sold his beverage brand to Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2019.
Ostrovsky said that he was never that into wine, and that the joking distance was part of selling the product. “People like to be made fun of and want to be in on the joke,” he said.
No one could accuse Hartman of not being in on the joke. Sitting at Fanelli in a Knicks cap, a hoodie and a “Last Night Was a Cannes Film Festival Official Winner” T-shirt, Hartman, it must be said, was only a few degrees removed from being a NoLIta dirtbag himself.
“It’s not too dissimilar from what I wear and what I do,” he said. “But there’s power in the nuance. That’s where great things are made.”
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