Greenwich Village and Chelsea

Long the home of writers, artists, bohemians, and bon vivants, the West Village is a singular section of the city. High-rises and office towers have no business among the small curving streets, peculiar alleys, and historic town houses here, although a new boom in distinctive apartment living by designer architects has emerged around the west edges of the Village north to Chelsea. Primarily residential, the area also has many specialty restaurants, cafés, and boutiques with a warm and charming neighborhood vibe. Tiny as they might be, restaurants like The Little Owl and P*ong invite you to linger as do larger restaurants with outside dining areas.

Fertile doesn't even begin to describe the West Village's yield of creative genius. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, abstract expressionist painters Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning congregated here, as did Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The '60s brought folk musicians and poets, notably Bob Dylan. NYU students keep the idealistic spirit of the neighborhood alive, but polished professionals have also moved into the high-rent town houses. The Meatpacking District, in the far northwest part of the Village, has cobblestone streets whose original meatpacking tenants are being replaced by a different kind of meat-market life: velvet-rope clubs, trendy restaurants, and trendy-chic shops.

Overlapping the Meatpacking District to the north, stylish Chelsea has usurped SoHo as the world's contemporary-art-gallery headquarters. The west edge of the neighborhood has high-profile galleries housed in cavernous converted warehouses that are easily identified by their ultracool, glass-and-stainless-steel doors. Other former warehouses, unremarkable by day, pulsate through the night as the city's hottest nightclubs. Chelsea has also replaced the West Village as the heart of the city's gay community. One-of-a-kind boutiques and gay-friendly shops are scattered among unassuming grocery stores and other remnants of Chelsea's immigrant past.