When tourists come to the Big Apple, they look for landmarks from the Hollywood version of New York.  The tall slanted glass wall in the Met's African Wing from a scene in When Harry Met Sally.  The dark glossy night haunts and restaurants from Bright Lights Big City and Studio 54.  Tiffany’s hushed elegance from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  But New Yorkers, aka "insiders", are creating another, less glossy version of New York. Like most big cities, New York has many faces, neighborhoods and styles, and the best of these, like Chelsea, Soho and Nolita, aren’t movie-famous or about 80s excess and glamour; they’re enclaves where artists have created a haven for themselves and others have followed.

Soho, a cobblestone-laden area of downtown New York, once considered undesirable and unsuitable for any bourgeois fashion fiend, was the first to benefit from the artistic visions of the painters, designers and photographers that lived there on a shoe string. As fashion became hungry for new faces and change, mega houses like Prada and Louis Vuitton and mega museums like MOMA began to move in, creating exciting new stores and museums with an edge. Soho became more exclusive—the place to shop and live. Rents went up up up and artists moved out, bitter they had been pushed out by conglomerates. Looking for new hideaways, they moved northwest, into Chelsea and the meatpacking district. Old townhouses and factory warehouses were converted into loft spaces and indie galleries. Slowly the storefronts and restaurants began to emerge—small gourmet shops, bakeries and restaurants—de rigueur for those in the know.

After the Soho movement, it was cool to be a regular at the gallery openings or to know “Jeffrey” (the visionary who first brought a well-edited fashion boutique to the middle of what was then a neighborhood of un-chic meat stalls).  In these non-Manolo friendly cobblestone streets, Prada has just bought an old piano warehouse and Barneys has landed a branch of its fashion mecca, the Co-op.  Not far from the neighborhood biker/celebrity bar, Hogs and Heifers, Keith McNally, the master of chic exclusivity with his high-falutin’ Balthazar restaurant, has opened a French bistro, Pastis.  It’s part of the newest trend in New York restaurants—friendly, low attitude, high style eateries, places that know the velvet rope is passé.

Now, the residents that originally created such stylish Manhattan niches are slowly moving on, across the bridge to Brooklyn.  So far the buzz for restaurants and the anticipation of what’s to come has never been higher...stay tuned.