Cosmopolitan small towns that aren't "college towns" (theater, restaurants)
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I want to second Cooperstown as well. Certainly it's based around baseball, but it's also a very nice village. Many people there work in the baseball industry but they seemed to all know each other when we saw them at the bar at night.
A town smaller than say 70,000 with a large university or college is going to be a "college town".
I don't consider several of the suggestions to be truly "small towns". Asheville proper is borderline, while I don't think Charleston SC qualifies as a "small town" in any way anymore.
Maybe 50k or less would be a better cut off.
The problem is, given city limits differ depending upon the area, you're setting arbitrary limits on small town.
I mean, Asheville has around 83,000 people. But because it's in the South, it has fairly broad city limits, which means it contains suburban areas pretty far out from the core. The downtown of it is no bigger than Burlington, Vermont, which is like half the size in terms of population (and admittedly a college town).
Lancaster, PA would be under consideration by your metrics I think. Franklin & Marshall College is there, but it has pretty low enrollment (2,200) and doesn't dominate the city. Parts of the city remain gritty, making it unlike a the typical "boutique town." But it's very similar to a big city in miniature, with dense rowhouses, gentrified neighborhoods, student neighborhoods, a gallery row, poor black and latino neighborhoods, etc.
Taos was a good suggestion for the west. Others are Moab, Utah, Park City, Utah, and Bisbee, AZ. Key West actually might work too. The basic rule is to find somewhere which was colonized by artists and hippies back in the 1960s. Keep in mind all of these areas tend to be expensive, and have virtually no jobs, so unless you've got a chunk of change saved up, and are retired or can work from anywhere, they're not going to be affordable places to live.
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