Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One
Detroit and Chicago literally have the same exact grid/streets and mile road system, these LA comparisons don't hold up, maybe the Detroit region is more centralized along the Woodward corridor instead of the waterfront but it doesn't have big random nodes all over the place like in LA. Earlier uptake of the automobile? where exactly do you see this in planning other than Chicago being larger at an earlier time? Pretty sure all cities dedicated themselves to the highway after cars were mass produced and the government pushed that sort of planning. There wasn't some timeline gap between Detroit and the rest of the country having cars because of the auto industry, that doesn't make any sense.
Chicago is also very SFH dominated, densely packed SFH detached neighborhoods exist very close to the downtown core, Chicago isn't very rowhousey which is obviously because of the great fire. Any difference in past density was probably negligible to the similar overall form although Detroit does have more old spacy mansion districts closer to the center of the city.
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My point was that Detroit was one of the later rust belt cities to begin booming. Cincinnati was one of the 10 biggest cities by 1830, St. Louis by 1850, and Chicago by 1860. Detroit only cracked the top 10 by 1910, which was even later than Cleveland and Buffalo (the same as Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh's late annexation of Allegheny City in 1906 means that 1/3rd of the core urban area was kept out of the count in earlier censuses. It wasn't until 1920 that Detroit grew to be the second-largest city in the rust belt, leapfrogging to being the fourth largest U.S. city. It certainly had at one point an "old urban" core, but it was basically a city of the streetcar and early automotive era, which expanded from a city of 286,000 in 1900 to nearly 1.6 million by 1930.
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