Hartman grew up just north of Westchester, and explains that, until recently, he’s been doing “a pretty good job at the company – like enough of a company that I’d have to go to Salesforce and all all the things that I hate.” Running a vibrant Instagram account has led to a couple of opportunities — helping brands execute their digital strategy here, creating freelance memes there. income, but Hartman nonetheless considers himself a “big seller” to make some money through sponsored posts and collaborations with brands like M Jewelers.
That’s part of why we’re talking: Hartman has his vision for the future. He’s hyped about a collaboration he’s working on Talk Mini Studio. He jokes about franchising his niche meme site and starting a “conglomeration” of pages for different cities around the country. He has a lot of ideas, some of which require anonymity: “I also wanted to do longer format content in front of the camera and bring some of these ‘comments’ to life in different ways, ” he explained. He also wanted to get into the consulting space.
Hartman started creating memes and posting them to his Nolita Dirtbag account in 2021. One of the first articles to gain traction was a simple white background post with “IMMÁ PEE ON THE FLOOR” in the same font as the logo. Aimé Leon Dore. His timing couldn’t have been better: this was right when all the pent-up boredom, aggression, and horror of the New York pandemic seemed to manifest in lower Manhattan.
Hartman’s account takes its name from one of the acronyms for New York, which means more than just the set of streets or neighborhoods it describes: Northern Little Italy. The name itself dates back to the 1990s, when brokers were looking to rebrand and attract large sums of money to neighborhoods believed to be marred by crime and oblivion: SoHo, Tribeca, NoHo. The city that Hartman records is a long past. New York City has long been an expensive place to live, but recently, with rents reaching all-time highs, it has become completely unaffordable for most people. It’s completely post-apocalyptic, no longer the quirky, seedy place that has long been haunted by historians and pop culture enthusiasts. Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Jean-Michel Basquiat have been replaced by people who have the ability to look like they know what’s fun and exciting — but that doesn’t mean they themselves to be cool and interesting.
More than anyone else, this is Hartman’s subject. I just let him describe them: “The guys with the linoleum carpenter pants splashing. Likely wearing crop tops, maybe they were wearing hoodies — there are different levels. If an AI created it, they would also wear a pair of Salomon or Asics and a Western Hydrodynamic Research hat. Then there’s the ironic camouflage,” he said, rolling his eyes toward the flap on his own head, which was in disguise. “Obviously 90% of this is self-deprecating. I’m always joking with stupid things. “
