Best Hipster Neighborhood in Minneapolis / St. Paul: Seward

Seward

2323 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55406

Last summer, Minnesota was named "Most Hipster State in the U.S." by BuzzFeed, a website that regurgitates all viral media it considers worthy of regurgitation. As BuzzFeed put it, while Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood is allegedly the hotbed of hipsterism, it is actually the Minnesota hipster aesthetic that Williamsburg hipsters seek to imitate. So what is the most hipster neighborhood within our hipster state? Well, if you use BuzzFeed's categories of analysis, it ain't Uptown, it's Seward. Consider first the "Lumberjack Look." Folks who live between Hiawatha and the Mississippi, I-94 and the Greenway are a veritable sea of fuzzy red-and-black-checkered blue-collaredness. Never mind that many of them are men of a certain age who have been rocking this look since the 1950s. And speaking of that Greenway, consider also the category of "Bike Obsession" — check! "Food Co-Ops"? The Seward Co-Op is always a hotbed for dudes in flannel, shopping for organic pomegranate seeds and hummus. And how do they get there? This is the Seward, not the Wedge, so they come by bike, not by gas-guzzling SUV. "Live Theater"? Better than that, Seward is home to the Playwright's Center. And as for a thriving music scene? Chances are your favorite local band practices in Seward, lives in one of Seward's charming (or not so charming) duplexes, or performs onstage (or on the bowling alley) at the Hexagon or Memory Lanes. Oh, and let's not forget this one important bit of Seward history: Our original Minnesota hipster Bob Dylan recorded portions of his acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album at Seward's Sound80 Studio, now home to Orfield Labs.

Source: City Pages