St. Pete gaining global fame as hip destinationST. PETERSBURG -The vibe has changed in this city once mocked as “God’s waiting room,” and the world is taking notice. “Miami has a rival for the finer things,” read the headline in a travel review last week by the British newspaper, The Independent. St. Petersburg, Fla. – not Russia – made The New York Times list of 52 destinations in the world to see in 2014, ranking the city among exotic and famed urban centers such as Dubai and Athens. A hip craft beer scene, trendy steakhouse in a renovated 1920s-era YWCA and, of course, a world-class collection of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí’s works were among the top reasons for a visit. “The Sunshine City” has reinvented its reputation, according to the Times. Sarah and Raphael Perrier saw it coming. Back in 2008, months after they opened Kahwa Coffee beneath a new condominium, Raphael told The New York Times that Miami and Paris were “done,” but “St. Pete is wide open.” In the past six years, the couple has witnessed a transformation in a city that once virtually closed by dusk. Once-empty sidewalks on Beach Drive are filled with foreign tourists dining at outdoor tables and formerly vacant storefronts on Central Avenue house art galleries and vintage home-furnishings dealers. “To see the change in the whole area, the whole downtown like that, it was really fast,” said Raphael Perrier, who has expanded Kahwa to six locations across the Tampa Bay area. “I think that it’s going to be pretty amazing in the next 10 years. We’re far from being done.” Developers agree. In the next year, 1,100 new apartment units will be finished downtown, nearly half of the total 2,900 that have gone up since 2000. Downtown’s momentum reflects a shift across the United States. Young, college-educated adults are departing the suburbs for once-abandoned urban cores. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of college-educated adults age 25 to 34 living within three miles of a central business district increased by 26 percent in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, double the growth rate in outlying areas, according to a 2013 report by the Brookings Institute. They’re looking for restaurants, shops, cultural and educational institutions and a vibrant street life. They prefer historic urban neighborhoods. They want to walk everywhere they can. St. Petersburg’s founders laid out many of these favorable amenities a century ago: the wide sidewalks on grid streets, artful Mediterranean revival office buildings and hotels, brick-street neighborhoods skirting downtown, and miles of publicly-owned green parks along the water, free of towering condos. A migration of younger professionals and entrepreneurs in the past decade, joined with the existing condo-dwelling retirees, has brought back the restaurants and street life. “We are just reflective of what’s happened in the country where people want to be in a livable downtown,” said St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce President Chris Steinocher.