Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Yeah, there's definitely some predominately post-war areas within that blue zone of chicagoland
At the same time, because most of chicago's extensive commuter rail system was established in the 19th century, a lot of the older pre-war railroad burbs are missing.
A decent chunk of suburban chicago is actually quite old relative to the suburbia one finds in a typical sunbelt sprawler, but it didn't develop in concentric rings like automobile-fueled suburbia. In the pre-war era, the railroad burbs were tightly clustered around their individual commuter rail stations, radiating out from the city like strings of pearls. Then post-war, the expressways were built and all of the former open space in between the older railroad burbs was filled in with the typical auto-centric crap.
Most visitors to chicagoland get a sense for the metro area by driving around on the expressways, and from that vantage point one gets a sense that it's as forgettable and generic as metro area suburbia anywhere else, but if you take a trip on one of the more established commuter rail lines like any of the UP's or the BNSF, you get to see this whole other realm of suburban chicago as you travel through dozens of these older village centers first established in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
So blocking off entire chunks of area within chicagoland and calling it "pre-war development" is a rather imprecise way to go about it. A more finally grained map of that type would be A LOT more "blob-ular", and take considerably more time to create.
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Sure, I don't know Chicago well at all, unfortunately, but I have been to some of the areas included in that blue blob... and they are definitely post-war, and certainly not "inner city", as was claimed with these supposed "pre war, inner city" boundaries on these cities.
That was what I was really pointing out... the "
inner city" part of it. The pre war boundaries for this would be smaller for all the cities shown. And if we're talking
pre war development in general... then jeez, those Boston and Philly metro area blobs need to grow significantly... to even include some pre-Revolutionary War areas
