The following cities officially passed 500,000 in 1920

[The North One]

Scranton is crazy, truly a lost major metro.

[Docere]

Scranton is quite the outlier, a polycentric industrial region. To a lesser extent that's true of Pittsburgh as well; although Pittsburgh was clearly the dominant city there were a lot of interconnected smaller industrial centers

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Yeah, UC (or whatever it's commonly called) is a major research institution flying a bit under the national radar. I was surprised too. I thought it was more like a Wayne State or a Cleveland State, but it's really closer to an Ohio State type school.

UC wasn't a state school until the 1970s. For the preceding 100+ years it was basically a community college.

Cincinnati's public college was supposed to be Miami University. The buyer of the Symmes Purchase back in 1790~ was ordered to reserve space for a public university but illegally sold off the land. Eventually what became Miami University was founded outside of the Symmes Purchase, about 40 miles north of the Ohio River.

Not sure if it's really walkable to the core tho bc there's a big hill between the neighborhoods. Technically, but not practically.

UC is about 300 feet above DT Cincinnati, in a similar way that Oakland (home to Pitt and Carnegie-Melon) is on a hill above DT Pittsburgh.

[mhays]

I'd call that walkable...but not if I want to show up not sweaty. My college was a couple miles away up a similar hill in Seattle. I took a bus up and walked back.

[jmecklenborg]

BTW Ohio's first two public colleges were Ohio University in Athens (1804) and Miami University in Oxford (1809). THE Ohio State University wasn't founded until 1870. Meanwhile, UC traces its roots to 1819 but as I already mentioned it was very small until the GI Bill and then didn't join the Ohio state university system until the 1970s. OU and Miami have a football and social class rivalry (Miami being preppy and OU being blue collar/hippie). Miami is the national HQ for several fraternities and sororities and expends a lot of energy upholding its tenuous claim to being a "Public Ivy".

[mhays]

Wikipedia has the Seattle metro at 706,220 in 1930. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area

Maybe one is the metro definitions at the time and the other is today's definitions?

[Docere]

Originally Posted by mhays

Wikipedia has the Seattle metro at 706,220 in 1930. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area

Maybe one is the metro definitions at the time and the other is today's definitions?

That's probably the population for current metro area, not as defined then. The Seattle metropolitan district had a population of 420,663 in 1930. Tacoma was separate then.

[Docere]

LA was the 36th largest city in the US in 1900. In 1930, it was the fifth largest city.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Docere

Scranton is quite the outlier, a polycentric industrial region. To a lesser extent that's true of Pittsburgh as well; although Pittsburgh was clearly the dominant city there were a lot of interconnected smaller industrial centers

Right, Scranton, while it was "big," was never truly a centralized "big city". It was more a string of mining towns, sort of a mini-Ruhr. Wilkes Barre is almost as important, and there are a bunch of other towns.

Scranton's relative decline seems to have been halted as it's now exurban NYC, with the furthest reaches of cheap sprawl, upcoming commuter rail, as well as mass Hispanic migration from NYC proper and adjacent towns.

Scranton proper is kinda weird. It's completely intact, with practically no visible decline, but it also feels 50 years behind and no gentrification. You could film a 1970's movie with little effort.

[Yuri]

I remember Scranton-Wilkes Barre and Wheelling-Steubenville since my teenager years back in 2000 or so. I found fascinating how big they were in 1920 and 1930 and how they lost population since then. If they had grown at same pace with the national average they would be big metropolises today.

As I'm an enthusiast of big Northern cities, I loved to rank US metro areas between 1900-1970.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Scranton's relative decline seems to have been halted as it's now exurban NYC, with the furthest reaches of cheap sprawl, upcoming commuter rail, as well as mass Hispanic migration from NYC proper and adjacent towns.

It's well over a 2 hour drive and a hundred miles from Manhattan even as the crow flies. There is zero exurban developmental connecting them, in what world does Scranton have any attachment to New York???

How many people are going to take a 3 hour commuter rail? It's also nowhere near ready and probably wont be until the 2030's if ever.

[jmecklenborg]

The schools with 50,000+ students don't necessarily feel any bigger than those with 20,000 (or perhaps some with 10,000). A lot of the flagship state schools in the midwest were established out in the country (even if the cities have come to surround them) and have a lot of extra space for their agricultural programs. For example, OSU has this ridiculous farm field right in the middle of the city:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Oh..._ep=EgoyMDI1MDgxOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Meanwhile, relatively small Ohio University (about 15,000 students) feels very big because it is older and much more compact. Freshmen and Sophomores must live in the dorms and few are allowed to own cars, so there is tons of walking. Also, since everyone lives in the dorms for two years, people have way more "dorm memories" and all of the random friendships that come out of happening to live on the same floor as someone when you're 18-20 years old.

I do think that the U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon area is probably the most compact and walkable "midtown" area in the United States that doesn't have rail transit. I have the sense that UCLA might be on a similar level but it's getting a subway station soon. That area of Pittsburgh is definitely more intensely urban than the area around the University of Cincinnati. The UC area wasn't super-dense in the prewar era and the school has done everything it can to turn what was a streetcar area into drive-to urbanism. All of the new student housing has structured parking and very few UC students walk around or ride the city buses.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Docere

LA was the 36th largest city in the US in 1900. In 1930, it was the fifth largest city.

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Similarly, Chicago was the 92nd largest city in the US in 1840, with a paltry 4,470 people (essentially just a small little frontier village).

By 1870, a mere 3 decades later, it was officially the 5th largest city in the nation, and in reality it was probably already the 3rd largest because Brooklyn hadn't yet amalgamated into NYC, and was ahead of Chicago, and St. Louis likely cheated on the 1870 census in a vain attempt to try and "stay ahead" of upstart Chicago.

Chicago exploded out of nowhere; the industrial revolution's supreme example of an "instant city".

Growth like this is responsible for a big part of the difference between Canadian and American cities, IMO. So much of American urban history has been characterized by extreme booms & busts - there are cities that have gone from barely existing to being some of the largest in the world in a matter of decades. Oftentimes, these have then been followed by periods of stagnation or decline. But as a result, each of these city's civic identity is largely characterized & tied to a specific era of urban design; whether that be the late-1800s/early-1900s planning & architecture of Chicago, LA's early-automotive era design, or the late-20th/early-21st century suburbia of Dallas or Houston.

Canadian cities meanwhile have been shaped by more gradual-but-constant growth. There are ups and downs of course, and some have grown more than others, but the list of largest cities mostly hasn't changed much over the last hundred+ years. The outcome of this is that urban growth has been more haphazard and layered; and it can be hard to pinpoint a specific urban identity for each - eg. somewhere like Toronto is as much a late-1800s Victorian city as it is a mid-century sprawler or post-modern city.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by The North One

It's well over a 2 hour drive and a hundred miles from Manhattan even as the crow flies. There is zero exurban developmental connecting them, in what world does Scranton have any attachment to New York???

In a world where you already have lots of competing commuter bus lines, and hundreds of millions are being spent connecting the two via commuter rail. It's 90 min. to PA, not 3 hours. And they're laying track already, on the NJ side, around Andover, NJ.

I wouldn't ever live there, but some people have no issue with supercommuting. Lots of people commute from NE PA, including my bagel guy. There are all these cheap sprawl developments in the woods.

Also, it doesn't mean people are commuting from Scranton to Manhattan, it means some people are commuting from somewhere along the route to somewhere else on the route. NE PA is dirt cheap and NY-NNJ are very expensive, so people move to (say) Pike County and work in (say) Morristown.

And most people aren't commuting obviously, they're just moving there bc it's cheap. The Hispanic population moving to all those NE PA towns is generally not commuting to anywhere in NY or NJ. Thankfully they're reviving these towns, which would be in deep trouble absent the influx.

[nito]

Originally Posted by Crawford

In a world where you already have lots of competing commuter bus lines, and hundreds of millions are being spent connecting the two via commuter rail. It's 90 min. to PA, not 3 hours. And they're laying track already, on the NJ side, around Andover, NJ.

I wouldn't ever live there, but some people have no issue with supercommuting. Lots of people commute from NE PA, including my bagel guy. There are all these cheap sprawl developments in the woods.

Also, it doesn't mean people are commuting from Scranton to Manhattan, it means some people are commuting from somewhere along the route to somewhere else on the route. NE PA is dirt cheap and NY-NNJ are very expensive, so people move to (say) Pike County and work in (say) Morristown.

And most people aren't commuting obviously, they're just moving there bc it's cheap. The Hispanic population moving to all those NE PA towns is generally not commuting to anywhere in NY or NJ. Thankfully they're reviving these towns, which would be in deep trouble absent the influx.

Long distance commuting in North America (outside narrow elements of the NEC) is far less of a viable prospect because of the poor quality infrastructure.

Scranton to Midtown Manhattan by bus/coach is 2hrs 40mins. Lake Hopatcong to Hoboken is anywhere from 1hr 20mins to 1hr 43mins, and that’s just 43 miles down line, Scranton is a further 90 miles down line. Even if not heading to New York City, the travel times are going to be too much of a stretch.

[mhays]

In most regions it'll be by car...some crazies drive two hours twice a day.

[iheartthed]

Scranton won't ever be a bedroom community of NYC but it probably already is a "spillover" community. As a spillover it will be populated by people with strong ties to NYC who left to seek greener pastures (lower cost of living, more space, slower pace, etc). A small number of spillovers will be daily commuters to NYC. A larger number of spillover people will spend a lot of time going back and forth to the city (from weekly to monthly) but are not daily commuters. Spillovers also tend to maintain community ties to the old neighborhood (think Tony Micelli's character on Who's the Boss?).

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

Long distance commuting in North America (outside narrow elements of the NEC) is far less of a viable prospect because of the poor quality infrastructure.

Scranton to Midtown Manhattan by bus/coach is 2hrs 40mins. Lake Hopatcong to Hoboken is anywhere from 1hr 20mins to 1hr 43mins, and that’s just 43 miles down line, Scranton is a further 90 miles down line. Even if not heading to New York City, the travel times are going to be too much of a stretch.

You have this backwards. Long distance commuting is EXTREMELY common in North America. Far more common than just about anywhere else in the world. It's relatively less common in the NEC and particularly in the New York City region -- unless you live near a train line -- because it takes far more time to travel a mile in the New York metro than any other place in North America.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

You have this backwards. Long distance commuting is EXTREMELY common in North America. Far more common than just about anywhere else in the world.

My sister-in-law commutes from Northville area (suburban Detroit for nonlocals) to Lansing. Half her office isn't from Lansing area. Americans very commonly supercommute, largely bc of car culture, job hopping and giant high speed roadways everywhere. And Michigan has very low variability in regional housing prices, so it isn't a cost thing.

But that has little to do with the demographic changes in older small towns in NE PA, which are really driven by NY-NJ Hispanics seeking cheap housing. The sprawl near the Delaware Water Gap is the real commuter belt, which is why Pike County, PA has been part of the NYC MSA for decades now.

But those now Puerto Rican and Dominican towns like Hazelton obv. aren't commuter-driven, they're households primarily looking for cheap housing and small business opportunities. It's a lot easier to open a Dominican hair salon in Wilkes Barre than in the Bronx or Paterson.

[DCReid]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Scranton won't ever be a bedroom community of NYC but it probably already is a "spillover" community. As a spillover it will be populated by people with strong ties to NYC who left to seek greener pastures (lower cost of living, more space, slower pace, etc). A small number of spillovers will be daily commuters to NYC. A larger number of spillover people will spend a lot of time going back and forth to the city (from weekly to monthly) but are not daily commuters. Spillovers also tend to maintain community ties to the old neighborhood (think Tony Micelli's character on Who's the Boss?).

I wonder if it is also becoming a PA retirement haven for the Northeast corridor like Allentown has. Delaware is a highly preferred state, but it is expensive.