Towns They Don’t Want to Leave - NYTimes.com:
AFTER graduating from Brown in May, David Noriega, a 21-year-old comparative literature major from Binghamton, N.Y., moved a few miles away from campus and began reading the books he didn’t have time for in college. While most of his classmates have started jobs in new cities, he is paying cheap rent, playing in a noise band, working on translating two Mexican novels — a voluntary extension of his thesis — and looking for a day job that’s “probably not motivating or career-furthering.”
“The graduation ceremony is this giant, expensive gesture telling you that you are done here,” says Mr. Noriega. “And yet I’m still wandering around the same spaces, passing the desolate main green, wondering what exactly it is that I’m doing.”
Mr. Noriega, faced with the pressure of graduation, is not alone in his decision to, more or less, ignore it. Come commencement, many linger for months or years, prolonging the intermediate stage between college and the rest of their lives
PROVIDENCE (pop. 175,255)
(BROWN; RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN)
Freshly minted graduates support themselves (and their art projects) with part-time jobs like milling soap, making cheese or working as nannies for professors’ children. They share cavernous spaces in converted 19th-century textile mills in working-class neighborhoods rapidly rising in value, often to the dismay of longtime residents.
“Providence used to be a place where graduates left immediately, but now it’s gotten to the point where people not affiliated with either university are moving here just to be near a young, creative community,” says Megan Hall, 26, a public radio reporter who graduated from Brown in 2004 and initially lived in a partially converted potato warehouse, where sacks of potatoes were routinely delivered to the building by forklift. “A lot of us can experiment with this really simple lifestyle. We’re not afraid of being poor.”
Ms. Hall still thinks about returning home to Portland, Ore. Most of her friends, she says, talk about leaving but never do. Last year, she and a friend made a radio documentary, “The Break Up Project Performance,” about the city’s incestuous dating pool, which begins with a teary-voiced woman complaining about"
