Great smaller city/town Main Streets in the U.S. per Travel & Leisure Magazine

Photo of the intersection of Main Street and Liberty Street, Ann Arbor, from the American Planning Association.

Ironically, the "art-print" store visible in the right of the photo was there back when I was in college. I bought a print there for my dorm room wall within the first couple weeks of my first term.

See "America's Greatest Main Streets" from the May issue of Travel & Leisure.

Ann Arbor comes in at #10. When I was in college there in the late 1970s/early 1980s, Main Street and Downtown Ann Arbor were hurting. Downtown no longer functioned as a regional shopping destination for the more rural communities in Washtenaw County, and the local/small chain department stores were starting to fail, as they were in city after city across the country.

A few years before, a regional shopping mall, Briarwood, opened, which outshown and outpaced Downtown and its independent retailers.

Now Main Street Ann Arbor is back, but it is a fundamentally different "retail" experience, much more focused on food, specifically restaurants, and less on the purchase of goods that occurs in traditional retail settings.

More and more, commercial district revitalization is about food consumption, to the point where I think we need to reterm commercial districts something like eatertainment districts.

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The April issue also has a list of "America's best cities for hipsters."

1. Seattle

2. Portland, OR

3. San Francisco

4. New Orleans

5. Portland, Maine

6. Providence

7. Austin

8. San Juan, Puerto Rico

9. Philly

10. Denver

11. Savannah

12. NYC

13. Santa Fe

14. Chicago

15. San Diego

16. Minneapolis/St. Paul

17. Boston

18. Los Angeles

19. Nashville

20. Kansas City, Missouri