Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Eh, I would say that Philly and NY have somewhat similar development patterns. Of course NY is much denser, bigger and more apartment-oriented, but the metropolitan development patterns aren't THAT much different.
A town on the Main Line doesn't look that different from Westchester/Fairfield, South Philly doesn't look that different from Brooklyn, Rittenhouse Square could vaguely be some core neighborhood of NYC, etc. Of course if you know the two cities well the differences are obvious, but to outsiders Philly is kind of a grittier NYC mini-me.
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There are certainly similarities, as any cities of the age and in the region, have. I'm not suggesting that they are so vastly different that they look starkly opposite from each other or anything. They both developed dense laid-out grids (Philly 100 years earlier though, and featuring a central square with axial routes radiating out). However, if you look at the historical urban development of NYC and Philly through the 19th century, you do see significant differing patterns.
Philly was laid out as Penn's "greene country towne" from the jump, with settlers receiving 3 tracts (a city lot for living/commercial activity, a country lot for farming, and an industrial lot in between -- in "The Liberties"). And there were planned radial Pikes emanating out from the center city hub, which connected distant agricultural lands with the city. This fact, more than anything else, determined how Philadelphia would develop in the hub AND along those spokes from a very early period in its history. In effect, because of this hub & spoke design laid out over available land, Philadelphia became quite "suburban" for the time.
NYC had nothing like this. It was an island without a connecting "highway" network. Remember, NYC was Manhattan (and a small part of the Bronx) until the turn of the 20th century. Its grid was not laid out until 1811, with NYC basically just being cramped below 14th. But then, it exploded with intense development to go from 60k in population to almost 2M... and that's before it added Brooklyn and Queens. The very high density development of multi-story apartment buildings, boarding houses, tenements, and commercial structures, etc. to handle that explosive growth and jam that many people onto the island reflect the era. NYC "filled up" the entire island with a type of urban density not seen before.