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My first reaction is to want to say "Detroit", same way I'd say, without thinking, Philly for Northeast's 2nd city and Orlando for Florida's 2nd city (when maybe depending on the metric, it could well be respectively Boston and Tampa, haven't checked lately). However, I can see at least three candidates depending on the metric. For prewar downtown skyscrapers, Detroit; For sum of prewar urbanity, St. Louis; On paper, using today's data, Minneapolis. All things considered, the latter is probably the winner. I love old architecture but it's illogical to draw such a solid line there that it would dwarf actual data for density and walkability. |
Minneapolis is the easy answer for me.
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German Village is a legitimately great, finely-scaled, old urban neighborhood. The brick cottage vernacular is unlike anything else I've ever seen in the United States. Most of the streets and sidewalks are paved with brick or stone. The only real flaw is it lacks a well-defined business district, but scattered storefronts are peppered throughout, making it plenty walkable. Columbus's greater downtown area is underwhelming given the level of new investment in the metro area overall. There's still lots of blocks dominated by parking and low-slung commercial buildings on its fringes. The real densification of Columbus is taking place north of Downtown, along N High Street all the way to University District. This is a pretty impressive corridor. However, it's less than three miles long, and still has some big gaps. There's some nice historic residential neighborhoods on either side of it, but they're more or less built at streetcar suburban densities. Outside of these areas, there's not really all that much, and it is rather akin to Indianapolis. Quote:
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I'd also note that Milwaukee's overall density is helped tremendously by the Latino neighborhoods in South Milwaukee, which are not really all that urban in terms of built vernacular at all. |
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If I had a gun to my head then I'd probably say St. Louis's surviving wedge would be the best combination of traditionally urban+functional.
Minneapolis is the most functional but isn't really urban at all in a traditional sense, it's like saying Houston is urban, it means nothing to an urbanist. And that awful skyway system knocks off a lot of points for their downtown. Cincinnati's downtown+OTR area is small and surround by spaghetti junctions and parking garages behind the main corridors, it's not very functional for live+work even though it has the best urban "look" at the street level facade. Metro Detroit probably has the most urban nodes of all of them but they're not well connected right now, give it another 10 years when regional transit gets figured out. Pittsburgh seems to be in the same position as Cincy and it's very disconnected as well. This is a pretty generalized surface analysis. |
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First, a well-preserved, dense downtown area with extremely minimal usage of sufcace parking lots for a rust belt city. Second, a "ring of ruin" basically surrounding downtown on all sides where traditional urban form was either destroyed or all-but destroyed. Lower Hill, Uptown, Strip District, North Shore, Station Square, etc. All of these areas are seeing massive new investment today, but it's very much "urban light" in the modern sense and won't hold a candle to what was lost. Third, a series of very-well preserved, finely-grained, traditionally urban neighborhoods which are found on the North Side, East End (including Oakland) and South Side. Altogether it makes for a very large swathe of urbanity, but the lack of cohesive traditional urbanity between them and downtown is palpable. Still, the overall scope of this grouping is way larger than Cincinnati, and it's way more intact than anything remaining in St. Louis. |
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again, young people forget that, for example, the central hough neighborhood had 30k sq mi density 1940s-60s (hard to imagine looking at it today) and that cle had two other downtowns, at e55th and e105th, the latter of which, while in ruins, was still there in all our lifetimes, until fairly recently when the cle clinic tore what remained down. :( and cle and east cle had plenty of cheap all brick apt buildings along with large old warehouses that were still around in my childhood, but most of which are gone now. see the movie antoine fisher for the best most typical example. midtown cle today is just clear cut of these and a tabla rasa for redevelopment. so yeah that is not always the pretty brick look you are referring to, but it was still plenty brick and urban. :cheers: below are a few examples, but you can look at more of these cle styled pre-war apts here: http://toursbyjoshwhitehead.blogspot...partments.html and more about another cle downtown here: https://clevelandhistorical.org/item...our=43&index=7 https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6131...2dd1ae377d.jpg https://nextcity.org/images/made/sla...860_571_80.jpg https://nextcity.org/images/made/sla...400_935_80.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-01p9mzrRlP...0/DSC02251.JPG http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vzfeJTl07Q...0/DSC02249.JPG http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--WNBVNTUpA...0/DSC09879.JPG https://clevelandhistorical.org/file...bacf781ab1.jpg |
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here's st. louis at the 2000 ft scale: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6160.../data=!3m1!1e3 the north side of st. louis is completely cropped out, along with the far south side which is historic enough to have had an ironclad drydock/shipyard on an out of site on the map canal/tributary. neighborhoods like this are nine miles west of downtown: https://goo.gl/maps/DK4zpSUg98MNxSpb7 st. louis has some decent scale and a massive mostly intact area...i think the perception of intact st. louis gets totally out of whack due to the legit scale of abandonment. |
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i routinely walk 5 miles into the central west end from my pre-war suburb through unbroken urbanity (or through forest park), not crossing an expressway or any kind of abandonment, along a route like this: https://goo.gl/maps/Hcw8X2LW5AeSmzxJ7 sometimes going through the loop, sometimes not. i used to do similarly unbroken long walks in south city.
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Though I wonder if it's just my Pittsburgh perspective, where commercial districts are just more lively, concentrated areas of activity due to the topography separating them from each other... |
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a lot of people leave town on weekends in the summer but it picks up a lot into the autumn. not sure what the deal was in your case...there are most definitely lulls in st. louis like that, though. |
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Everybody is in their cars. And the culture of that is quite strong in the midwest. People are dumb and threw away their cities so that they could sit in a gasoline powered machine all day long |
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While Walkscore isn't the best method for determining urbanity, I think it shows the differences between the cities 90%: Pittsburgh - 5 (25,895), St. Louis - 0 (0) 80%-89%: Pittsburgh - 10 (47,000), St. Louis - 7 (34,801) 70%-79%: Pittsburgh - 8 (35,515), St. Louis - 16 (78,675) Pittsburgh has more people living in highly walkable neighborhoods, but if you expand it to semi-walkable (which is what 70%-79% mostly is) St. Louis pulls ahead. This is also reflective of the differences in the "heat maps" of the city, where Pittsburgh has a well-defined walkable core (absent some areas of rugged topography and blight, like the Hill District) while St. Louis has these little nodes scattered all over the place. |
Just got caught up on some of the discussion here for the last few days and wanted to comment on some Chicago observations and Dearborn Park specifically. . .
By the mid-1960s Chicago was on it's way down. . . everything surrounding downtown, including parts of downtown, were basically heavy industry or rail yards - no residential to speak of. . . there was a serious concern that Chicago's population would empty out like similar cities in the midwest. . . in the spirit of urban salvation there were projects such as Marina City, Sandburg Village, Outer Drive East, Presidential Towers and yes. . . Dearborn Park. . . by the late 1970s Chicago was a rough town and not just out in the 'hood parts either, it was rough all over. . . Dearborn Park was - in part - a reaction to that, a development that would keep families in the city center (on a former rail terminus I might add). . . and for the most part it worked. . . all through the 1980s and 1990s there was very little activity in the South Loop and DP served as an anchor for future development. . . That it turns inward on itself is a product of the times and would not have been developed any other way. . . it's essentially a low rise version of London's Barbican. . . Back to the regular discussion. . . . . . |
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