Has your city ever been featured in a National Geographic article?

[Evergrey]

There was an article about Orlando in a recent issue of National Geographic that made me think about this...

It seems like NG used to do a lot more articles on world cities and cultural regions back in the 80s and early 90s... whereas they seem to have drifted to more of an environmental focus in the past decade... which is less interesting to me...

I remember reading a fantastic article that captured the provincialism of early 80s Philadelphia... and I remember a great article on Milan around 1991 which featured a photo of this billboard featuring a voluptuous Italian model that I still can see in my mind's eye lol...

My comfortable home region of Central Pennsylvania was featured around 1996 in a rather nostalgic piece...

and my current city of Pittsburgh had a feature article called "Stronger Than Steel" in 1991... which documented our transition in the wake of the steel collapse... that article fascinated me as a young boy... certainly was a major reason why I became so obsessed with this city... the sadness and decay... yet hope for for a new spring... the will of the city to truly be stronger than the steel that built it...

and then we were featured in one of those brief ZIPUSA pieces in 2003... which took a look at the culinary delights, quirky shopping and bustling nightlife of the Strip District...

what about you? I remember reading quite a few city articles but can't remember them right now...

[pj3000]

My hometown, Erie, was "featured" back in the 80s. The magazine profiled it in a photo montage about rust belt industry. Also back in the 80s, the magazine supposedly rated Presque Isle State Park's sunsets among the most beautiful in the world. Sunsets off of Erie are beautiful day after day, with the sun sinking down into the water, and just enough pollution in the air to provide color scattering! I've never actually seen these ratings by NG before, but I've certainly heard people talk about it as if it's fact... seems a bit urban legendy to me. But who knows?

As for my current city of residence, New York... obviously it has been featured.

[volguus zildrohar]

I have a 1964 issue on the booming city of Los Angeles complete with foldout map and damn...talk about your time capsule.

[Latoso]

Yes, it was.

[mhays]

Seattle was a long time ago.

It's great what NG does on the natural topics, but the cities are why I'd buy it again if I ever do.

[Evergrey]

Yes, it was.

I believe I remember seeing an article about 15 years ago devoted solely to the Hancock tower.

[hauntedheadnc]

We made the cover of the National Geographic travel magazine, if that counts.

[volguus zildrohar]

You did, Evergrey. It was in the February '89 "Skyscrapers" issue that is religious text to folks 'round here.

[holladay]

Too bad I wasn't alive to read NG back in the day-day... So I can't comment on how the coverage has changed but just in the last six months NG has had articles on Manchuria, Dubai and Orlando. That's a story about every other month so I'm not complaining... although who couldn't use more?

[muppet]

^it used to be 2 or 3 places per issue. In the 70s they had up to 10 articles and 8 places, but the new readership seems to have a shorter and shorter attention span as they get younger, and less interested in places :(

[Avian001]

Minneapolis-St. Paul was featured in the early 1980's. If you go the the NG website you can download pics of your city from their archives. Here's one of Minneapolis' Spoonbridge and Cherry (http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/713), by Claes Oldenburg:

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4224/spoonbridgeng01xa7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[bryson662001]

It seems like NG used to do a lot more articles on world cities and cultural regions back in the 80s and early 90s... whereas they seem to have drifted to more of an environmental focus in the past decade... which is less interesting to me...

.

I finally cancelled at the end of 2006 for that reason. My collection goes back to the '60's but the last several years are so boring I don't even read them anymore. That being said, their city profiles, while interesting, were always so rosy and upbeat that they had limited value.

[rockyi]

I have a 1953 copy of N.G. stashed away someplace that shows the Quad Cities then thriving farm implement industry. I also remember an article in the late 80's or early 90's that was about minor-league base ball stadiums and had a large, two-page photo of Davenport's beeeeeautiful John O'Donnell stadium, on the mighty Mississippi.

[South]

Nairobi, Kenya was featured in the National Geographic in September 2005:

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0509/feature2/index.html

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0509/feature2/images/ft_hdr.2.jpg

[Jersey Mentality]

Why dont they do the brief zip code articles in the end anymore. I know they didnt run out of interesting ones to do. They were just getting started, but I think they a few bland ones, namely Cary, North Carolina. You could even go to thier website and offer zip codes for then to do and suggest why they should.

[holladay]

^haha...the Cary, NC one is the only one I specifically remember...

[Steely Dan]

not only has my city been featured in national geographic, my very own home was featured on the cover of the june, 1967 issue.

http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/4922/marinacitynp4.jpg


i feel special.

[Saddle Man]

Austin was on the cover in the very late 80s I believe.

[Boris2k7]

Yes,

"Calgary, Canada’s Not-So-Wild West." National Geographic - March 1984, Vol. 165, No. 3

I have a copy of it in my basement. It was made just after the oil crash in 1983.

[Chicago103]

I believe I remember seeing an article about 15 years ago devoted solely to the Hancock tower.

Yes an entire article devoted to the very building I now live in.

[BnaBreaker]

Yes an entire article devoted to the very building I now live in.

You lucky dog!

[bobdreamz]

yes NG featured Miami in the early 80s when the city was going through one of it's worst crisis with the Mariel boatlift, the cocaine wars and the racial riots yet featured the new skyscrapers on Brickell Avenue.....they were kind to us during that time.

[Chicago103]

not only has my city been featured in national geographic, my very own home was featured on the cover of the june, 1967 issue.

http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/4922/marinacitynp4.jpg


i feel special.

Interestingly that article appears to be about the State of Illinois and not just Chicago.

[PhilippeMtl]

Montreal appears a couple of time in NG.

I just found an article with Google. The title is so cliché...

Montreal, a Touch of France
By Keith Bellows

I called Montreal home for 20 years and return several times a year. I can't help it. No city is more romantic, more lovely, more cultured, more cosmopolitan, or has more spark and élan than Montreal. This is a touch of France less than 50 miles from the U.S. border.

Come to Montreal and walk with me for 48 hours. Down leafy Sherbrooke Street past galleries filled with Inuit sculptures. Through the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, up past the châteaus and Victorians of Mount-Royal, to a park where in winter there are sleigh rides, skating, bunny-hill skiing, and the best views of the city. Along St-Laurent Boulevard (known as "The Main"), a Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Arabic, Cantonese, Yiddish, and Russian smorgasbord of slightly tatty markets, fabric shops, and restaurants where just about everybody's Old Country origins live on. Take a morning constitutional on rue St-Denis, Montreal's Left Bank, its Hipster Central, where a parade of the très fashionable puts New Yorkers to shame. Walk east into a Parisian landscape of corkscrew stairways and anorexic homes painted a riot of imponderable colors.

Then, for a true sense of Montreal's otherworldliness, explore the crazy-quilt fairyland of streets flanked by stately, story-steeped buildings in the Old City. Here the air hums with the clatter of horse-drawn carriages—calèches—and the chatter of French.

Then take in the parkland along the St. Lawrence, ribboned with bike and roller-blade trails, or step into a futuristic view of the past at the Pointe-à-Callière Musée d'archeologie et d'histoire de Montréal; here, where Montreal was founded in 1642, you'll find a hands-on, witty history of the city with, as befits its status as a tech mecca, a great multimedia show.

As you explore this world of the old, you must appreciate that Montreal has always been a city to celebrate the new. "I grew up in Montreal constantly reminded of the past," a friend living in Geneva once told me, "but I return there to get a sense of the future."

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.

[PhilippeMtl]

Double Post, sorry

[Xelebes]

None for Edmonton. =/

[PhillyRising]

not only has my city been featured in national geographic, my very own home was featured on the cover of the june, 1967 issue.

http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/4922/marinacitynp4.jpg


i feel special.

Do the towers still light up like that at night today????

[Chicago103]

Do the towers still light up like that at night today????

No they dont, I wonder why they looked like that back then, perhaps every balcony had the same colored lights on it. Today many of the residents have their balconies lit up in various colors but there is no uniform look to it.

[MonkeyRonin]

I remember a Toronto article from the 70s.. the wy they were talking about it sounds much like an article about Dubai would today. heh.

[Defiant6]

Wichita was in the early 80s when the were showcasing Kansas.

[Jaborandi]

Toronto x 2

[ComandanteCero]

this month's issues highlights one of the more famous mega-slums in Mumbai.

[Visualize]

National Geographic Adventure has ranted and raved about Boise a few times. Citing that the best of the wild west is within city limits.

[Pillsbury Doughboy]

Atlanta was featured in the late 80s as Southern boomtown. It was an excellent article and quite extensive.

A few years ago my zip code here in Augusta (30904, also home of the Augusta National) was featured.

[MolsonExport]

I miss the style of Nat Geog in the 60s/70s. Got 4 shelves full of back issues, which I still love to thumb through.

[murman]

None for Edmonton. =/

WRONG. Edmonton was covered in the late 70s or early 80s.

[i_am_hydrogen]

My zip code, 60614, was featured in one of the "ZipUSA" articles.

"Life By The Tracks" By Shane DuBow

It seems so improbable, that a heavy urban rail line could feel so cozy and unharried, so curious and human, as if built more for neighborly voyeurism than transit. And yet, for a fare of just $1.50, a ride on one of the last of Chicago's elevated train lines grants these trackside views: a young woman in a pink bathrobe steaming espresso; a young man in trim khakis feeding a baby; a great many suits waiting on the platforms, digging into newspapers, checking on their Cubs; and then a long, slow blur of flower-box gardens and second-story decks, all passing so close that rider and resident might intimately converse—or even touch—were it not for the roar and rush of the "L." This is Chicago's most celebrated mode of transit, a 110-year-old relic whose enduring downtown run has helped revitalize the neighborhood of Lincoln Park.

Read the full article (w/ pictures) (http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0205/feature7/?fs=www3.nationalgeographic.com&fs=plasma.nationalgeographic.com).

[Paul in S.A TX]

San Antonio in July 1976.

[ikcyzrteip]

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0209/feature2/images/oe_main.2.jpg
The Chicago River, which once flowed east and emptied into Lake Michigan, now flows west into the Des Plaines River via the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and empties into the Mississippi River.

The Wayfaring Waters of the Windy City

By Cassandra Marie Profita

The city of Chicago has gone a long way to preserve the sanctity of its freshwater reservoir. More than a century of urban ingenuity has gone into transport and treatment of the city's wastewater, and the job still isn't done.

Chicago's eight million people draw 2.4 billion gallons (9.1 billion liters) of fresh water from Lake Michigan every day, none of which will ever return to the Great Lakes. Instead, the water will wind its way through a descending network of tunnels, canals and riverbeds that draw the water away from Lake Michigan and eventually into the Mississippi River, in keeping with a treatment system that began in the nineteenth century.

Full Article-magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0209/feature2/online_extra.html - 14k

[MonkeyRonin]

Got 4 shelves full of back issues, which I still love to thumb through.

But can that beat this? Heh, I've got issues here dating back over 50 years. ;)

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/3402/ngbx7.jpg

[OfCourse]

Yeah.

I think it was the late '90s. The whole Rio Grande Valley was featured, specifically the towns San Benito (where I was born) and Olmito, Tx. From what I remember, Nat'l Geographic was down there because of all of the migrant workers and because Olmito was classified as the poorest city in the US.

[glowrock]

The Denver suburbs were the focus of an article on suburban sprawl in I believe 2001 or 2003... ;)

Not exactly anything in a good light, but then again, suburban sprawl sucks! :)

Aaron (Glowrock)

[MplsTodd]

Minneapolis-St. Paul was featured in the early 1980's. If you go the the NG website you can download pics of your city from their archives. Here's one of Minneapolis' Spoonbridge and Cherry (http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/713), by Claes Oldenburg:

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4224/spoonbridgeng01xa7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

I agree that cities are not featured as often as they used to be in NG. As an urbanphile, I always enjoyed reading NG for the articles and photos of different cities around the world (which was very eye opening in the days before SSC and SSP).

Regarding the Twin Cities, I think there were two profiles: one in around 1976 (I think Thomas Abercrombie was the writer) and a second appeared in the '80s as Avian said.

PS: The above photo is not from the early '80s

[KevinFromTexas]

Austin's been featured atleast twice that I know of. Back in 1986 and 1988 when they were doing the Texas Capitol restoration and replaced the old statue atop the building. The issue had a 3 or 4 page spread with pictures of them removing the statue and the construction and placement of the new one. There was also an issue in 1922 that has a blurb about tornados and Austin was shown with a very famous picture of a tornado over the Capitol building. There's probably more also, but I know for sure about those since I have the copies.

[MolsonExport]

But can that beat this? Heh, I've got issues here dating back over 50 years. ;)

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/3402/ngbx7.jpg

Well, thats pretty good. I once had all issues dating back to 1962 (but goddammit, I had some in storage and they got tossed out! :hell: )

I've got about 300 or so issues today, hit-or-miss on the dates.

[Comrade]

Salt Lake City was featured in February, 2002 as it was getting ready to host the 2002 Winter Olympics.

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2002/02/01/feature/images/ft_hdr_20020201.5.jpg

Wedged between snowy peaks and its namesake lake, this fast-growing oasis is ready for its Olympic debut.

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2002/02/01/html/ft_20020201.5.html