The 15 Hippest Places to Live

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Soon-to-be-hot: The Pike/Pine Corridor, Capitol Hill's grittier neighbor, holds less appeal for chain stores and hence features quirky book stores, dance clubs with up-to-the-minute music, and even a playful sex shop called Toys in Babeland.

8. Olde City
(Philadelphia)

At dusk the UPS trucks pull out and pedestrian traffic takes over this warehouse district near the riverfront shared by artists and wholesale dealers. There's a neighborly village feel here; the sculptors are on a first-name basis with coffee shop clerks and loading dock foremen. On occasion, the whole neighborhood has pulled together to fight proposals for corporate-franchised restaurants.

Soon-to-be-hot: More adventurous hipsters have migrated across the freeway to Northern Liberties, a factory zone with huge lofts and old rowhouses that can be had for a song. It can feel a little isolated—there's no grocery store nearby, not to mention a bistro or record shop—but the recent arrival of the Lion Fish coffee shop and the Silk City Club diner foretell the coming of more hip infrastructure.

9. Commercial Drive
(Vancouver)

Longtime home of lesbians, Italians, and both "Red" and "Green" revolutionaries, The Drive looks, at first, like any other slightly-down-on-its-luck blue-collar neighborhood. But a stroll down the street—which, despite a name that sounds like a freeway frontage road, is actually a classic urban shopping district—turns up Rasta shops, topless bars, old Italian coffee shops, and feminist bookstores. When a new Starbucks outlet opened here, someone scrawled "Die Yuppie Scum" across its front.

Soon-to be-hot: Mt. Pleasant, a more somber quarter of Victorian architecture and loft space, is where the artier crowd hangs its berets.

10. Whittier
(Minneapolis)

Once stomping grounds for the famed proto-grunge band, The Replacements (their Let it Be album cover pictured the band on the roof of a classic south Minneapolis two-flat), Whittier and its marginally ritzier neighbor, the Wedge, still bustle with flannel-clad kids, many of them in art school or start-up bands (or both). The City Council member representing Whittier is a regular at the local rock clubs, and a Wedge bowling alley exhibits performance art.

Soon-to-be-hot: Across the Mississippi from downtown, artists and attendant hipsters have descended upon the Northeast neighborhood, a Polish and Ukrainian stronghold. Eastern European culture is holding its own against the advance of the avant, with the under-30 crowd trying to keep up with the over-60s on the dance floor at various polka bars.

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