In fact, New York City and Las Vegas are the two coolest cities in the United States, tied for the No. 1 spot in our annual measure of America's Coolest Cities.
Full List: America's Coolest Cities
To compile the list, market research company Harris Interactive conducted an exclusive poll for Forbes. In July Harris asked 2,104 adults from across the U.S. which of the 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country were "the coolest."
New York wins with singles
New York, NY, has topped the list of coolest cities for three years running--it's sharing the top spot for the very first time. The fact that it attracts 47 million visitors annually shows that Americans regard the metro highly. New York isn't only the country's largest city; it's the one with the most restaurants, museums, sports venues, bars and theaters. Few could deny that it generates buzz around the globe.
It turns out that what you think is cool may be influenced by whether there's a ring on your finger. Of the single people polled, the largest percentage thought New York was the coolest city, but married people gave the title to Vegas.
Vegas bucks the trend
Times have been tough in Las Vegas, NV, and the city is suffering a real estate crash that's among the worst in the country. But the entertainment mecca still welcomes 36 million tourists per year--and the city's relaxed laws around gambling and other vices add to its sense of danger and excitement.
Las Vegas has a reputation for attracting pensioners who come to while the day away at slot machines. But in fact, respondents between 18 and 34 years old thought Las Vegas was cooler than New York. A full 11% of that age group gave Sin City the "coolest" badge. Still, while they might imagine it to be a happening place, trendy young folks don't account for the majority of visitors to the city. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the average age of vacationers in 2009 was 50.
The heat is on in Miami
Impressions about how hip a place is are tough to change. Most of the cities on our list have seen their coolness ranking change little over the past four years. But 5 of our 10 coolest cities--Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami--saw perceptions improve over last year.Miami took the biggest big leap in coolness, moving from 19th place in 2009, to ninth place this year. In the past decade, the city has increasingly been recognized for its cutting-edge art scene, and hip galleries have proliferated. The 2002 introduction of Art Basel, an annual contemporary art festival that originated in Switzerland has helped force art-lovers around the world to grudgingly acknowledge the city's status as a high-culture taste-maker.
It's not clear whether recent news about basketball superstar LeBron James' defection to the Miami Heat did anything to affect the city's coolness factor--but if the team goes on to perform as well as many observers suggest, it can only help the city's reputation.
Coolness is a state of mind
Coolness is elusive and hard to define. To see whether perceptions of coolness matched up with reality--or at least how much fun a city offered--we compared coolness rankings against the number of bars, nightclubs, restaurants, museums, galleries, live theater venues and sports stadiums in each city, using data from AOL City Guides.
Many of the cities perceived to be cool have one thing in common: an abundance of things to do. And in a lot of cases, a city's coolness ranking aligned nearly perfectly with the number of venues: The Minneapolis–St. Paul metro, for example, ranks 12th for the number of nightlife venues, and 14th on our coolness list. But there were notable exceptions to this trend.
San Diego made the No. 7 spot, even though it has only just over half as many nightclubs, bars and restaurants as Philadelphia, which came in at No. 24. Boston, Dallas and Atlanta didn't make the top 10, even though they rank 5th, 8th and 9th respectively for the number of museums, theaters, stadiums and arenas. And Detroit came in near the bottom of the list for coolness, at 36, even though the city is flush with galleries and concert venues--458 of them, to be exact.
But the biggest disconnect between the amount of available entertainment and how cool a city seems is found in Las Vegas. While it won out on coolness, the city only comes in 25th for nightlife, 27th for galleries and concert venues and third from last for museums and live theater venues.Full List: America's Coolest Cities
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