The general answer to your question is that you have it reversed. There will be a neighborhood like that. What particular neighborhood will be an accident of history.
The neighborhood in NYC couldn’t be Queens. Until the subways reached Queens in the early 20th century, the borough was as much suburban, even farming, emptiness as Long Island would be until the 1950s. Greenwich Village was surrounded by the buzz and density of lower Manhattan. It’s just a few blocks west of Broadway, which was then Manhattan’s main street, the home of its theaters and arts. But even those few blocks meant enough of a distance that rents and prices were far cheaper. Bohemian districts always evolve out of cheapness. Today’s Soho in Manhattan did exactly the same.
Union Square is San Francisco’s theater district in the heart of the old downtown. Height-Ashbury is a few blocks due west. Union Square and the Castro border on Market Street, SF’s Broadway, the latter only a few blocks south of Height-Ashbury. Both were really cheap in the 1960s.
Did the area that evolved have to be Greenwich Village? I doubt it. It could have been the West Village or a new named area could have coalesced. But wherever it was it would have the same basics. Density, cheapness, and propinquity.
How to explain Woodstock then? It’s still a variation on the same theme. The rich filled in the Hudson corridor between NYC and Albany from the 1600s on. The entire area became thick with huge homes of art patrons. A school of artists, the Hudson River School, grew out of 19th century Romanticism, which expressed itself in fervent landscape paintings. The Hudson is scenic, but mostly it was close to their patrons and to NYC and cheap and convenient.
Did it have to be Woodstock that became the art center? No. But some place did. I know nothing of Woodstock’s history but I’ll bet it followed the same pattern as everyplace else. Some small group who were influential and drew people to them settled there for no particular reason. Others went there because of them. A community evolved. This community lasted and became well known but otherwise started like a thousand others that we no longer remember.
Outside of San Francisco, BTW, is an exclusive all-male club where millionaire conservatives have since 1872 romped around in the nude and done unspeakable things to each other and the country. It’s name? Bohemian Grove.
You can apply the same principles to the European enclaves. I’ll bet large sums of fake Internet money that it’s true for places in Asia I’ve never even heard of. History is universal in most ways.
