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View Poll Results: Which cities are more alike than not
New York City & Chicago 13 20.63%
Los Angeles & Houston 7 11.11%
San Francisco & Boston 13 20.63%
Atlanta & Dallas 14 22.22%
Austin & Nashville 27 42.86%
Charlotte & Indianapolis 8 12.70%
Denver & Minneapolis 18 28.57%
St. Louis & Memphis 4 6.35%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 63. You may not vote on this poll

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  #81  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:00 PM
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Originally Posted by kool maudit View Post
Looking at Steely's chart, for instance, we see that Cleveland was once a very large metro area comparable to San Francisco or Montreal.

The nature of its decay, however, which involved not only the removal of (many) physical structures, but also the removal of transit and human activity in general from large swathes of the city, means that its history as a very large metro has effectively been destroyed, and would not be apparent in basically any way to a non-city enthusiast visitor to SF, Montreal and Cleveland, save perhaps the existence of a few strangely large and elaborate institutional and apartment buildings in the outer city.



Very true, most older US cities have experienced a shocking amount "urbanism loss".

So while chicagoland was roughly 5x bigger than metro toronto in the pre-war era, the difference isn't nearly as stark in 2021 because chicago lost vast swaths of its high quality pre-war urbanism to urban decay. Toronto had very little "urbanism loss", on a relative basis, and as you outlined above, it was even able to build upon its functional urbanism in the immediate post-war era because vast swaths of the city weren't being wholesale evacuated by its own citizens

Here's a pic of 63rd and halsted (the "downtown of the southside") in chicago back in the day:


Source: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/stat...ebuilders.html



Unless you want to cry, do NOT go streetview it today.
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Last edited by Steely Dan; Mar 27, 2021 at 6:01 PM.
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  #82  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:02 PM
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Still, Chicago is hardly a borderline case. It was one of the five largest cities in the world in 1900! It is a true prewar giant, and not one that could be easily mistaken for something like Toronto.

EDIT: My god, though. Just checked the Streetview.
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  #83  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:06 PM
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Originally Posted by softee View Post
Toronto had over 500,000 people by the 1920s, and 1000,000 by the end of WW2, it's not that "new" and was a big city by North American standards 100 years ago.
That's being pretty generous as to the definition of Toronto. I remember a "Welcome to Metro" sign on Yonge, a block or two south of Steeles, that listed the population as around 1.1, 1.2 million in 1971.
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  #84  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:16 PM
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I think the greater urban areas switched places in the early '80s, independent of legal boundaries.
Even in the early 70s the trend was apparent. Québec's provincial policies at the time weren't helping them, either.
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  #85  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:18 PM
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I used to have a coffee table book from maybe 1976, a kind of Canadian atlas. The spread on Toronto had a big shot of the skyline, dominated by the TD centre, and the text introduced TO as "Canada's industrial metropolis". Montreal's spread had photos from the Old Port, and though it said the words "Canada's largest city", it was framed in such a way as to make this seem almost incidental.
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  #86  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:29 PM
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I will say this, as a kid in Texas, I knew where Montreal was, because of Expo '67 (I was fascinated by Moshe Safdie's Habitat) and the Montreal Expos team. I knew Vancouver because my mom grew up north of Seattle. When my dad said we're moving to Toronto, my reaction was "Where?"
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  #87  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:31 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
Very true, most older US cities have experienced a shocking amount "urbanism loss".
Which cities experienced the most "urbanism loss", might make an interesting thread.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bilbao58 View Post
That's being pretty generous as to the definition of Toronto. I remember a "Welcome to Metro" sign on Yonge, a block or two south of Steeles, that listed the population as around 1.1, 1.2 million in 1971.
One thing that's crazy about Toronto is that I'm old enough to remember when Detroit was the bigger city and metro. And I'm a millennial. I'm also old enough to remember when Detroit was bigger than Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, D.C., San Francisco, Miami, etc., but it doesn't hit the same lol.
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  #88  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:37 PM
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One thing that's crazy about Toronto is that I'm old enough to remember when Detroit was the bigger city and metro. And I'm a millennial.
Maybe, but I drove from Chicago to Toronto by way of Detroit in 1982 (the year after Millennials starting being born) and Toronto's development as a city was huge relative to what I experienced in Detroit. Detroit seemed like a lot of people with nowhere to go.
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  #89  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 5:48 PM
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Originally Posted by bilbao58 View Post
That's being pretty generous as to the definition of Toronto. I remember a "Welcome to Metro" sign on Yonge, a block or two south of Steeles, that listed the population as around 1.1, 1.2 million in 1971.
"Metro" already had a population of 2 million in 1971. Surprised they didn't update the sign for two decades.
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  #90  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:18 PM
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"Metro" already had a population of 2 million in 1971. Surprised they didn't update the sign for two decades.

I stand corrected, then. (The sign may have said 1.6 million) I'm also surprised the population has only added 730K to 800K in 50 years, then. Houston, the city I know best so I use for comparison, has increase 1.2 million during that time. The two cities have similar metropolitan populations.
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  #91  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:35 PM
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Originally Posted by kool maudit View Post
Still, Chicago is hardly a borderline case. It was one of the five largest cities in the world in 1900! It is a true prewar giant, and not one that could be easily mistaken for something like Toronto.
yes, probably due to sheer heft, chicago was able to hang onto more of its pre-war neighborhood urbanism than many of its rust-belt peers, despite considerable losses in parts of the south and west sides, like the 63rd/halsted example i highlighted.

i mean, the southside also has neighborhoods that weren't decimated like hyde park or bridgeport.







Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit View Post
EDIT: My god, though. Just checked the Streetview.
hey man, i warned you not to look




Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
Which cities experienced the most "urbanism loss", might make an interesting thread.
i think detroit is the fairly obvious answer.
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Last edited by Steely Dan; Mar 27, 2021 at 7:00 PM.
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  #92  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:37 PM
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The quickest and simplest way to get a sense for the relative sizes of pre-war areas is to look at metro area population figures from before the war.

1930 metro area population:
  1. New York ---- 10,901,000
  2. Chicago ------- 4,365,000
  3. Philadelphia ---- 2,847,000
  4. Boston -------- 2,308,000
  5. Detroit -------- 2,105,000
  6. Pittsburgh ----- 1,954,000
  7. St. Louis ------ 1,294,000
  8. San Francisco - 1,290,000
  9. Cleveland ------ 1,195,000
  10. Montreal ------- 1,023,000
  11. Baltimore -------- 949,000
  12. Minneapolis ------ 832,000
  13. Buffalo ---------- 821,000
  14. Toronto --------- 810,000



So toronto was certainly a "big city" back then, but in a different class than chicago.

Additionally, toronto's impressive commuter rail system has mostly been built up in the post-war era, so you don't find nearly as much of that older pre-war railroad suburbia like you see in chicagoland.
pittsburgh is the great sleeper of the twentieth century i’m afraid. good lord.
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  #93  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:41 PM
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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.
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
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  #94  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:41 PM
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A more interesting discussion would be: how have these pre-war areas fared over the last 70 years? Which ones have gained population vs lost population, or urbanized vs suburbanized? What are their current population densities and regional economic or cultural weight like? Which ones have preserved the greatest share of their historic built form?

Looking at cities in terms of being "pre-war" vs "post-war" is a reductive argument that ignores the very different ways that cities have developed since. Not all post-war is equal, nor is all pre-war. The current state of a city's urban core - as well as how their post-war suburbs have developed - is more relevant to their modern urbanism than the historic extents of their urban sprawl would indicate.

In the case of Toronto, while it hasn't followed the historical trajectory and urbanism of first-wave East Coast cities or Chicago; it's also just as distinct from that of Sunbelt cities. Toronto occupies a sort of niche within the "genres" of North American urbanism. I'd broadly characterize that one as being: those with healthy, centralized mid-size/intensity pre-war cores and successful post-war transit expansion, infill, and suburban TOD development. I'd probably include DC, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and maybe a few others in there as being their closest contemporaries in that respect.
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  #95  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:42 PM
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In terms of assets under control, there was a blip where Cleveland and Pittsburgh were really meaningful places on a global scale, places whose names held a type of weight in certain rooms in London. I guess they were maybe like... something like Shenzhen?
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  #96  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:47 PM
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pittsburgh is the great sleeper of the twentieth century i’m afraid. good lord.
Ha, yeah. It's quite fascinating from an urban enthusiast's persepective to explore the greater Pittsburgh region and to discover just how many damn, densely-urban mini-metropolises exist here.

The infrastructure that connects it all is incredible. And it's easy to realize how the city, as a conglomerate of so many linked industrial towns, was simply just built for so, so many more people than live in the urban areas now.

It's truly the first American heavy industrial metropolis.
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  #97  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:49 PM
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In terms of assets under control, there was a blip where Cleveland and Pittsburgh were really meaningful places on a global scale, places whose names held a type of weight in certain rooms in London. I guess they were maybe like... something like Shenzhen?
Certain weight?

The wealthiest men in the world were Clevelanders and Pittsburghers. The largest combined fortunes in the history of money were made in the two cities.
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  #98  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:53 PM
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I stand corrected, then. (The sign may have said 1.6 million) I'm also surprised the population has only added 730K to 800K in 50 years, then. Houston, the city I know best so I use for comparison, has increase 1.2 million during that time. The two cities have similar metropolitan populations.

Hasn't Houston annexed a lot of outlying communities though? The City of Toronto (formerly "Metro") hasn't grown in area since 1954. It was pretty much built out by the 70s, so the million or so residents added since have come through intensification.

Even still though, in recent years it was actually the fastest growing municipality in North America, after some stagnation in the 90s and early 2000s. Basically the population doubled from 1 to 2 million in the 20 years between 1951 and 1971, but it then took another 35 years to add only 500,000 more - but then another 500,000 have come in just the past 15 years.
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  #99  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:56 PM
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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.
yeah, i wasn't disagreeing with you, just clarifying.

that blue line on the chicago map definitely includes some post-war areas, and also omits most of the pre-war commuter rail burbs.

pre-war chicagoland was not a contiguous thing, there would've been lots of disconnected little blobs all over the place.
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  #100  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 6:58 PM
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Hasn't Houston annexed a lot of outlying communities though? The City of Toronto (formerly "Metro") hasn't grown in area since 1954. It was basically built out by the 70s, so the million or so residents added since have come through intensification.
houston is one of the poster children for growth through annexation.



city limits land area:

houston - 640 sq. miles

toronto - 243 sq. miles
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