Hells Kitchen

Midtown's a nice enough place to work, but you wouldn't want to live there, right? Wrong. Midtown West is becoming more and more resident-friendly, with numerous new condos drawing full-time residents (as opposed to tourists and suits with short-term leases).

The revitalization started with Hell's Kitchen, a once dangerous and rough-and-tumble nabe -- see "West Side Story" -- that earned its name with good reason. Semi-successfully rebranded as Clinton, the neighborhood now draws young professionals and the creative class who have slowly turned the area into a sort of north Chelsea.

As the real-estate market boomed, so, too, did Hell's Kitchen's fortune, spreading new condos into derelict areas like West 42nd Street, where the Orion condo building at Ninth Avenue reaches 61 stories. Prices started at about $500,000 for a studio. Amenities include free breakfast -- perhaps indicating that the area isn't quite "there" yet -- but more change will come with the development of the Hudson Yards.

Even the tourist mecca of Times Square got its share of the condo boom: 1600 Broadway on the Square, which looks directly onto the TKTS booth, opened in 2006, with studios starting at about $725,000.