Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

I live in a hipster building. I came to realize the fact coming home on the J or L train. I would always see these kids: the boy who dresses like Joe Strummer (complete with fedora), the kid wearing white loafers and too tight cords, the girl with the bleached asymetrical hair cut and surgically attached pod'phones, get on the train in Manhattan. Hipsters, I would sneer to myself and expect them to get off the train at Marcy or Bedford, but they wouldn't. When the J train would make express stops and bypass Hewes and Lorimer, they wouldn't seem nervous, like they'd missed their stop. Then they would get off at my stop and we would both start walking west, and the first one to make the right onto my street would look over their shoulder to see who was following them. (This is a bad neighborhood; people get mugged, you know.) We'd reach my building, not holding the gate open for each other. It happens all the time.
I've seen a lot of weird behavior. I'm no one to judge really, anybody who's lived with me can tell you that, but there are somethings even I find off putting. The other night as I was heading downstairs to get my laundry, I passed a man on the stairs holding a swaddled bundle. There are no babies in this building, I thought. He glanced up at me, both surprised and worried and hugged the the thing closer as if he were afraid I would wake it up. I tried to walk quietly so as not to disturb the "baby." As I passed him on the landing, I saw a dog's head poking out. WTF?