Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Charleston has a gorgeous core, but the really attractive stuff covers at most a square mile. It probably has about as much pre-auto fabric as random older Northern cities like Kingston, Portland and Lancaster, but almost no one visits or moves to these places for urban charm, and magazines don't rank these places above Paris as travel destinations.
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I don't think this is quite fair. The total land area of the majority white neighborhoods in the south of the peninsula (everything south of the Septima Clark Parkway, save Eastside, which is still black) is close to two miles. Still, it's a small core overall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
And that also has me wondering if you put say, Kingston, in say Alabama, would it be a hot city? If Charleston were say in NJ would it be a backwater?
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I would say yes in both cases. The South has such a lack of walkable urban places that people really play up what they do have. To the point where people talk about the "urban bones" of Birmingham, which has a dreadful, dead downtown. Plus places like Kingston (though they have a bit going on) tend to languish because there's so many other cute walkable towns with 19th century architecture up and down the Hudson Valley.