This week’s travel dream: Wandering Paris’s hippest enclave

Youth culture in Paris is “finally catching up” with the rest of the world’s, said Kate Maxwell in Condé Nast Traveler. Ten years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find a good bar open past midnight in the City of Light. Today, a new generation of artists, Web designers, writers, and -fashion--industry types have taken over a huge swath of the city’s northeastern neighborhoods, and the “exuberant clamor” they’re kicking up doesn’t go to bed early. The plaid shirts, the gallery scene, and the artisanal cocktail culture may look familiar to anyone who’s explored Brooklyn or San Francisco’s Mission District lately, but “it’s not imitation,” it’s a new global generation creating the kind of environments they want to live in. And in Paris, the ’ipsters—as they’re called—are pulling it off in a way that’s “unequivocally, unmistakably French.”

Take hipsters’ affection for canals. Like the Regent’s Canal in London, Paris’s tree-lined Canal St.-Martin has become the scene’s main artery, its gray-green waters nicely complementing the patina of the iron bridges that cross it. But here the young women read paperbacks and wear peasant blouses like the figures in a Matisse painting, and the dark-eyed young men prop their fixie bikes against the bridges to eat paté and baguettes. All hipsters try to look thrown together, but these kids “take haute street style to another level.” Still, don’t expect the froideur of French stereotypes if you ask for directions. Even in the galleries of the 20th arrondissement, which is becoming a hotbed of new conceptual art, buoyant enthusiasm is in.

I didn’t even have to leave my lodgings to catch the neighborhood’s unique spirit. The bar at Mama Shelter, a “heavily stylized” hotel close to those galleries, was still lively when I returned one night at 1 a.m. A 9-year-old was playing foosball. “A brace of sprightly 75-year-olds” were laughing it up nearby, and the rest of the room was filled with “long-limbed lovelies.” Paris’s northeastern neighborhoods are “throwing the sort of party that everyone wants to get invited to. As it turns out, everyone is.”

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At Mama Shelter (mamashelter.com), -doubles start at $120.