Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
it's interesting hearing some people here list non-downtown locations as the "heart" of their city.
from my perspective in hyper-centralized chicago, that just seems very foreign to me.
like "how could the heart of a city not be in its downtown?"
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Yeah, it seems like any downtown should be the true "heart" of a city.
In the case of Pittsburgh, it's weird because downtown is very dense and active during the day, but it's still a triangular "fortress"... with rivers on two sides and a big hill on the other side (and a mess of 1960s highway design if the hill isn't enough). Functionally, it's been a small island for work for a long, long time. Downtown is simply disconnected from any neighborhoods and difficult to get to. Historically, it never had much of a residential component, and while it's growing now, still doesn't in comparison to other cities.