I read something a while back, no idea what the source was or how to find it now. It discussed the effect that the Internet and other instant communication methods have had on the development of scenes. It focused specifically on music scenes but I think the concept can be applied to any sort of scene. The premise was, that prior to the internet, scenes reached a certain stage of development before being recognized or even noticed by the world at large. Nowadays, no such development is possible, as soon as there is anything at all worthy of attention, anything that can possibly be monetized, anything worthy of a few million hits on Youtube, that 'anything' is plastered across every aggregator on the net, obsessed over for 2 weeks and then forgotten. So perhaps the place you're looking for exists only in the past.