Recently, I came across an interesting article on the website ozy.com. It was titled Overlooked Neighborhoods: Little-known Gems in Well-Known Cities. The premise of the article was pretty straightforward. When we visit a city, we tend to keep to well-trodden paths. These can be restaurants we have read about in guidebooks, museums that are on everyone’s must-visit list, or a green space such as a famous park.

But dare to look beyond the tourist traps and our own comfort zone, and we will see that every city has lesser-known neighborhoods that are worth spending time in. This particular article identifies seven such neighborhoods:

• Abasto, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Bridgeport, Chicago, USA
• Narvarte, Mexico City, Mexico
• The neighborhood surrounding Reitarska Street, Kiev, Ukraine
• Břevnov, Prague, Czech Republic
• Little Five Points, Atlanta, USA
• Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati, USA

It is is an interesting list, albeit a little U.S.-centric. What I found particularly intriguing about the descriptions of these seven neighborhoods is that beer is mentioned as a key part of the urban fabric in four of them (Abasto, Bridgeport, Brevnov, and Over-the-Rhine). In the cases of Abasto, Bridgeport, and Over-the-Rhine, craft beer bars and breweries, in particular, are mentioned, while in the Břevnov neighborhood of Prague, the monks at the monastery there first brewed beer in the year 993. This makes it the earliest record of beer being brewed in the Czech Republic. In a completely separate piece on Pittsburgh’s overlooked neighborhoods, Kelly Abrogast, shines the spotlight on the city’s Troy Hill neighborhood. According to Abrogast, Troy Hill is Home to “some of the best beer you’ve ever had”. Troy Hill is home to Penn Brewery.

The fact that craft beer (whether in the form of craft beer bars or craft breweries) are considered a key contributor to interesting and vibrant neighborhoods does not surprise me in the slightest. In a 2016 piece in The Atlantic, James Fallows identified eleven signs that a city will succeed – one of those signs was the existence of at least one craft brewery. As noted by Fallows, “a town that has craft breweries also has a certain kind of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of mainly young (except for me) customers.” As Fallows correctly notes, craft breweries are a magnet for young people. As market research has demonstrated, it is the Millennial cohort who are driving the growth of the craft beer sector. A craft brewery or craft beer bar in a neighborhood attracts young people, not just from the immediate neighborhood, but from other parts of the city, and even farther afield. Beer tourism is increasingly popular, and craft beer drinkers visiting cities search out those neighborhoods with craft breweries and craft beer bars. A craft brewery opening up in a neighborhood is akin to putting up a welcome sign. It is saying to people, come check us out. This neighborhood is ok; good things are happening. In some cases, such as the Ohio City neighborhood in Cleveland, OH or the Lower Downtown (LoDo) neighborhood in Denver, CO, craft breweries (Great Lakes Brewing Company and Wynkoop Brewing Company respectively) were pioneer investors who kick-started the redevelopment of these respective neighborhoods. In other cases, such as the Pearl District in Portland, OR or the North Davidson (NoDa) neighborhood in Charlotte, NC the craft breweries and craft beer bars have followed other investment into the neighborhood. Whatever the sequencing of investments, many of these neighborhoods have had new life breathed into them.

According to Denver Public Library, “back in the 1980s, Lower Downtown Denver was what we called “a little sketchy” – a lot of places were boarded up, and ones that were open were populated by the underground crowd, drifters, punk rockers and late nighters. Today, the bustling restaurant – sports bar – brew pub district looks like the Seattle or Portland we all longed for, with a huge variety of food choices both native and exotic, all kinds of great beer, espresso, chocolate, and other delicacies, and a wide array of clothing and accessory stores, art galleries, and high-end lofts.”

Back in 2016, I spent a few days in Stockholm, Sweden. While there I visited the Nya Carnegie Bryggeret (New Carnegie Brewery). The brewery is in an old lightbulb factory in the Hammarby Sjöstad neighborhood. In the early 1990s, Hammarby Sjöstad was a run-down, polluted industrial and residential neighborhood that was considered unsafe by outsiders. By the time I visited it in 2016, it had underwent a remarkable transformation. As a result of significant investment, it was an attractive neighborhood with apartments, shops, offices and, yes, a brewery.

The example of Nya Carnegie Bryggeret shows that craft breweries often thrive in overlooked neighborhoods, but they can also succeed in overlooked buildings. Through the process of adaptive reuse, craft brewery entrepreneurs will take an old abandoned church, fire station, automobile dealership etc. and turn it into a vibrant craft brewery. Craft brewery entrepreneurs are attracted to distressed neighborhoods because real estate is often relatively inexpensive.

Some people living in an overlooked neighborhood, may like it that way. So they may not necessarily welcome a new brewery and other investment and the visitors that they attract. Rising property values may force long-standing residents out of the neighborhood. Along with my colleagues, Jay Gatrell and Matthew Lehnert, I write about this in an upcoming book chapter. The chapter looks at the historical evolution of Cincinnati’s Over-the- Rhine neighborhood. Despite once being dubbed the most dangerous neighborhood in the United States, residents of Over-the-Rhine had for decades been suspicious of outsiders and the change they sought to bring to the neighborhood. This suspicion manifest itself in the Over-the-Rhine Peoples’ Movement who fought against gentrification of their neighborhood. In the end, their cause was a lost one and millions of investment dollars later Over-the-Rhine is very much a changed and more vibrant neighborhood.

Further Reading:

Reid, Neil. Craft breweries, Adaptive reuse, and neighborhood revitalization, Urban Development Issues, Volume 57, Issue 1, pp. 5–14.

Reid, Neil, Jay D. Gatrell, and Matthew Lehnert. Leveraging brewing history: The case of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood”. In Thakur, Rajiv, Ashok K. Dutt, Sudhir K. Thakur, and George Pomeroy (Eds). Urban and Regional Planning and Development: 20th Century Forms and 21st Century Transformations, Springer: Dordrecht (forthcoming).

Reid, Neil and Isabelle Nilsson. From mill district to brewery district: Craft beer and the revitalization of Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood. Invited chapter for inclusion in Beer Places: The Micro-Geographies of Craft Beer, by Daina Cheyenne Harvey, Ellis Jones, and Nate Chapman (Eds).