Hats off: A little too much street cred for New Era in Cleveland

The Plain Dealer reports that New Era has withdrawn certain baseball caps from the market in Cleveland. Why? Because these particular caps are decorated with “logos associated with local gangs.”

Activists said the baseball caps bore the names of neighborhoods as well as local gangs such as “Da Valley,” for Garden Valley housing project; “10-5,” short for the 105th Street gang called Waste-5; and “HVD,” referring to the street gang on Harvard Avenue.

A New Era spokesperson named Dana Marciniak basically has the company pleading ignorance and promising to be “more vigilant” in the future.

Marciniak said the company was unaware the neighborhood names were affiliated with gangs and removed the hats once they were alerted. She estimated 100 hats were made. A clerk at the Richmond mall Finish Line store said they were taken off shelves on Saturday.

“We make a lot of hats for different colleges, neighborhoods and groups,” Marciniak said, citing a popular Bronx hat as an example. “We get designs from different areas. We assumed some of the Cleveland groups were a reflection of the neighborhood.”

Leaving aside the amusing reference to “Cleveland groups” (“Gangs? We thought they were groups!”), the comparison to the Bronx doesn’t really cut it, since the Bronx isn’t a neighborhood, it’s a borough with a population well over a million. More to the point, nobody has to do any research to figure out that the Bronx is resonant geography.

I can’t find any images of the caps, and the story isn’t totally clear on this, but if New Era figured out that a particular housing project in Cleveland might be a good thing to tout on a hat, and that this housing project was locally known as “Da Valley” — well, it requires some effort to learn such things. And the whole point of a project like this is to make sure it’s done in a way that has some kind of deep local street cred, basically to communicate the idea that: Damn, New Era knows.

So it would be interesting to know a bit more about how the company gathered that information. Maybe it hired a Cleveland cool-guy, who neglected to mention the relevant geography/gang connections. Maybe a company rep just talked to hip-looking kids in the park or at the mall. Or maybe they just had an intern gather the information by cruising around MySpace or something.

Obviously not every expression of geographic pride signifies gang affiliation, but you don’t exactly have to be an expert on this topic to know that geography-gang connections are pretty routine. So while it’s possible that New Era’s research was incomplete, I suspect it’s also possible that, somewhere in the company’s street-cred supply chain, somebody simply decided the risk was worth it.

It might be easier to judge by the hats themselves, so if you see one, let me know. Perhaps they’ll be popping up on eBay soon?

P.S.: For a quick primer on New Era and its (fairly impressive, to date) street cred or authentic reputation or however you want to put it, see this earlier Consumed column.