Greenwich Village and Chelsea

Home of writers, artists, bohemians, and bon vivants, the West Village is a unique section of the city where right angles and office buildings give way to twisting streets and historic homes. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the abstract expressionist painters Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning congregated here, as did the Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The 1960s brought folk musicians and poets, notably Bob Dylan. This primarily residential area lacks the blockbuster attractions in other parts of the city, but makes up for it with a warm local feeling and myriad small restaurants, boutiques, and coffee shops. NYU students keep the cafés full and the idealistic vibe of the neighborhood alive. The Meatpacking District, in the far northwest section of the West Village, has cobblestone streets that are gradually giving way from swinging sides of beef to swinging clubs, trendy restaurants, and chic shops.

Chelsea, the stylish neighborhood north of the Meatpacking District, has usurped SoHo as the world's art gallery headquarters and replaced Christopher Street in the West Village as New York's Gay Central. If it's art you're seeking, the high-profile galleries housed in cavernous converted warehouses are easily identified by their ultracool/cold, glass-and-stainless-steel doors. Many former warehouses, unremarkable by day, pulsate after dark and into the dawn as the city's hottest nightclubs. One-of-a-kind boutiques and pet-pampering salons along 7th, 8th, and 9th avenues are sprinkled among unassuming grocery stores and other remnants of Chelsea's immigrant past.