Major cities that are weirdly overlooked and nobody seems to care about

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by park123

I got my backpack opened and rifled through in Naples without my even noticing it within 10 minutes of leaving the train station, and this was in the daytime on a busy street. I'm not a typical looking American, am not fat, and didn't wear shorts or any obvious "tourist" gear. I'm from NYC and I felt scared to walk around the streets with my girlfriend after it got dark.

The seaside there (in the city itself) is pretty crap, the center has a dark and foreboding feel even in the daytime, and it's very dirty and rundown for a developed world city. The local culture seems pretty colorful though.

Outside of Naples, it's a totally different story. The Amalfi Coast and Capri are some of the most beautiful places on earth, Pompeii is obviously very interesting, and even Sorrento(?) was quite nice. Next time I will explore the region from Rome though.

After my first visit to Naples, my second visit was marked by another decidedly non-western moment, with random semi-intimidating guys blocking the road trying to exact informal "tolls" from motorists at highway exits...

I still love the area, though. Would love to go again.

[ue]

Originally Posted by niwell

Echoing the comments that Mexico City is viewed as an "It" city now, at least in North America. I feel like almost everyone I know (including myself) has traveled there in the past few years, stayed in more or less the same location and went to more or less the same bars/restaurants. And a few artists I know have gone down to do some work.

Interesting if it isn't viewed as such in Europe - I guess it's definitely a longer journey. And no slight on the city, it totally lived up to its potential and more in my opinion.

I think it really depends on who you're talking about. In specifically urbanist and avant-garde / indie / arts groups it's definitely the 'it' city of the moment and considered very "cool". But it is very off-the-radar to your average Canadian or American as a destination. For most people, Mexico is Cancun, Cozumel, and Cabo. Not that I think CDMX should necessarily be marketing itself to the masses like that but it isn't a destination like New York, San Francisco, or Chicago, despite being bigger than two of these three and the same size as the third.

Similarly, on the Montreal thing and geography, I have gotten in a few conversations with Angelinos about Montreal. Like in a lot of art / indie circles, people consider Vancouver and Montreal and kind of overlook Toronto. They know it's there (sort of like Mexico City) but it's not really considered as much. But Montreal is also popular with general tourists because of things like Old Montreal, Olympic Park, etc. which are a different category than tourists you may find at bars in Hochelaga or in restaurants in Verdun. For that latter category, Montreal is especially well regarded, and so is Mexico City, for that matter.

Anyways... to answer the thread...

In Canada:
- Hamilton
- Winnipeg
- Saint John, NB
- Kingston
- Quebec City (outside of Canada/the NE US/Francophonie)

In the US
- Philadelphia (relative to NYC/Boston/DC)
- Los Angeles (as an actual city, rather than beaches and theme parks destination, again outside of creative/arts circles which have picked up on LA)
- Providence
- Minneapolis (Denver and Portland get more attention)
- St Louis
- Cincinnati
- Buffalo

Elsewhere
- Riga
- Kyiv
- Minsk
- Rotterdam
- Brno
- Bergen
- Glasgow (relative to Edinburgh)
- Naples
- Poznan
- Johannesburg (similar to LA)
- Windhoek
- Santiago
- Quito
- Sao Paolo
- Mexico City
- Guadalajara
- Monterey
- Abu Dhabi (relative to Dubai)
- anywhere in India not Goa/Mumbai/Agra/Varanasi/Delhi
- anywhere in China not Beijing/Shanghai
- Nagoya
- Sapporo
- Ulan Bator
- Jakarta
- Adelaide
- Christchurch

The biggest off-the-radar city is probably Jakarta. Nobody really considers Indonesia beyond Bali.

[Shawn]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Anyone who has stayed in a downtown Montreal hotel on a Saturday night knows it is a party mecca for US kids from the NE. I have had more than a few encounters with them over the years. They come in all months as well. Even in the winter.

They are quite infamous for making trouble in Quebec City too.

This is 100% my high school experience, JMac's too if I remember correctly. You'd be hard pressed to find a graduating class from New England or upstate New York which didn't have at least one unofficial party trip to Montreal during the 90s.

[Shawn]

I'll second Providence as well. Here's a city which packs more urban punch and offers more dining/arts/entertainment options than other American cities/metros with 2-3x the population. Providence is more urban - and IMO more fun - than places like Columbus, Tampa, or any city in the Carolinas, Charlotte included. Honestly, Providence beats Austin in many ways.

Case in point: Federal Hill is more genuinely Italian than Boston's North End, and has a better collection of restaurants and live houses. Atwells Ave alone probably has better dining than entire states do. I genuinely mean that, too.

[dubu]

i didnt know montreal it was as popular as vancouver and toronto. or some say more popular. thats why these threads exist. the older people have a lot of knowlage.

[TexasPlaya]

Originally Posted by Shawn

I'll second Providence as well. Here's a city which packs more urban punch and offers more dining/arts/entertainment options than other American cities/metros with 2-3x the population. Providence is more urban - and IMO more fun - than places like Columbus, Tampa, or any city in the Carolinas, Charlotte included. Honestly, Providence beats Austin in many ways.

Case in point: Federal Hill is more genuinely Italian than Boston's North End, and has a better collection of restaurants and live houses. Atwells Ave alone probably has better dining than entire states do. I genuinely mean that, too.

I've only heard Providence mentioned in The Departed and naturally it was about Italians (the guineas) causing trouble for the Irish mob.

[ThePhun1]

I say Sao Paulo is overlooked. It's one of the hanful of largest cities in the world and clearly Brazil's alpha dog yet gets little hype except from people like us. Rio gets all of the love but is clearly the LA to SP's New York.

[ThePhun1]

Originally Posted by jbermingham123

Sacramento, Fresno, Riverside, and San Bernardino are all 1,000,000+ urban areas that are constantly overshadowed by LA, Bay Area, and SD

Riverside and San Bernardino? That's like say Stockton and Modesto are overshadowed by the Bay Area ignoring that the former two are in reality LA suburbs, Census Bureau be damned.

[giallo]

Lagos, but probably not for long.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by ThePhun1

I say Sao Paulo is overlooked. It's one of the hanful of largest cities in the world and clearly Brazil's alpha dog yet gets little hype except from people like us. Rio gets all of the love but is clearly the LA to SP's New York.

Rio feels like a combination of the best parts of NY and LA. SP feels like a combination of the worst parts of NY and LA.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Shawn

I'll second Providence as well. Here's a city which packs more urban punch and offers more dining/arts/entertainment options than other American cities/metros with 2-3x the population. Providence is more urban - and IMO more fun - than places like Columbus, Tampa, or any city in the Carolinas, Charlotte included. Honestly, Providence beats Austin in many ways.

Case in point: Federal Hill is more genuinely Italian than Boston's North End, and has a better collection of restaurants and live houses. Atwells Ave alone probably has better dining than entire states do. I genuinely mean that, too.

Providence also doesn't get much mention in pro or college sports, or in pop culture in general. So that also maintains its low-profile.

[Omaharocks]

^ Providence is nice, and sort of the northeastern sister-city to Milwaukee.

But I think Milwaukee, due to being in the midwest, and not directly between two major cities, falls off the radar even more.

[Maldive]

"Anyways... to answer the thread..." @ ue ... in the spirit of "write what I and others (think we) know", places where we've have actually lived or visited for a significant amount of time, some cherry-picked thoughts on part of your list. Sorry about a couple of teases sent your way ;-)

The Good: Some of the members of this thread's "overlooked" club obviously deserve some love, not so much for their skyscraper/built form (this is a skyscraper website), but for the often beautiful human fabric of places.

The Not-so-Good* (*mostly anecdotal, sometimes statistical): human realities and the physical city.

Canada
Hamilton - I've lived here for the past five years (after 3 decades in the Six), grew up a short drive away from here, worked here and saw the best Pink Floyd concert in history here (or so my friends have told me).

The physical city - like steel cities around North America (with the exception of Pittsburg's astonishing renaissance -bravo), Hamilton is ringed with the massive open wounds of rusting steel industry. Yet the city literally sits in one of the astonishing natural settings in the country (enormous Cootes Paradise, the Niagara Escarpment, beautiful beaches/sailing paradise... skip the weather jokes please). Pockets of its waterfront are being spruced up, there is a scattering of stunning neighbourhoods and it now has a couple of great streets packed with everything urban that one can love.

But it is one mean city. It is a dump (by a number of metrics, including tragic ones). Vacant and vast dilapidation worthy of the over-used American cliches.

Some reported human realities (some of which I have owned): opioid-related deaths in Hamilton jumped from 37 in 2014 to 122 in 2019 (70 per cent higher than the provincial average). In a decade, hospitalization rates for children with mental illness-related disorders leapt from 20 to nearly 200 per 100,000. Though home to one of the largest modern mental health hospitals on the continent, I see the unreported (and uncared for) forgotten on every downtown block. The homelessness is another five pages of tears, and I know I should STFU and do more (do try to help a bit) to make the "hammer" a place that many others love, but I don't.

Winnipeg
My birthplace and a hall of fame exporter of music, theatre, dance, art, film @ approximately 100 times (per capita) more than any english-speaking city on earth. I'll leave you to Google this.

The weather jokes are true and despite a few gems, its barely-built "big city" form basically sucks. If some sort of higher being is the architect of our urban landscapes, he/she should have built Calgary here

But the cultural juggernaut that is "the Peg", would never trade all this stuff to cowtown, for Nickelback and a few skyscrapers.

Quebec City
The few blocks that are the old city is so astonishingly beautiful, I can't believe Disney hasn't built a replica. Spoiler alert: most of what surrounds this (small by unparalleled in NA built form) is jaw-dropping. Not in a good way. I won't post a picture.

The very best of Quebec City is quite simply the people. 5 visits to the city yielded not a single Montreal/Paris style "chip on the shoulder" interlude, despite my horrible, stumbling fractured French (when you're old and English, you have been educationally warped by grammar not conversational French).

The US

Los Angeles
Give me a break. The hinterland known as the rest of the entire planet is overlooked compared to L.A.

I know this as a former resident, visitor (but ex-wife lives there), and audience member of the city's 60% international share of our eyes, ears, sports, entertainment, photo-streams and fresh water pipelines (a desert always wins though).

Buffalo

Talking Proud too, being a just north-of-the border teenager, crossing over weekly to be educated in under-age water-beer, wings, mind-boggling steaks and the legacy blessing of more American friends (past the legal limit for Canadian residents) than I found in any other U.S. city.

(Still) brutally nuked by aforementioned rust (thanks Bethlehem Steel), but making some headway and home to Albright Knox Gallery and some historical gems like City Hall. It's single 529 foot skyscraper (a brutalist stain constructed in 1847 I think) has had 11 different names and frankly deserves compassionate implosion.

But who gives a sh*t when Buffalo is home to 50% of the nicest 'mericans on the planet.

Elsewhere
^^^ Love your title of this part of your list.

Naples
As articulated elsewhere, a definite bucket list city/region for everyone (4 visits for me) and right next to the Amalfi Coast

anywhere in India
^^ LOL again.

Seven Bharat trips for me so far (and marriage to Bengali-Canadian)... Kashmir to Kanyakumari and east to west. The magical places and diversity of India would would fill a website 10 times the size of SSP. Tough to describe in a thread posting.

Home to a billion or so of the most heavenly human beings on this 3rd rock from the sun. And as every great city on earth knows, a generous exporter of some of their precious human capital. Heart.

[llamaorama]

Someone mentioned Mexico City...

I think Monterrey gets overlooked too, it seems like the most Americanized, least impoverished, most built up city in Mexico. Those things probably don't buy it much tourist appeal though.

[MolsonExport]

Some overlooked big cities that I have visited but that were better than I expected include Lyon, Lima, Naples, Lille, Bari, Suzhou, Wuxi, Yokohama, Hamburg, Glasgow, and Bogota.

[iheartthed]

I haven't been here yet, but I have heard good things about Córdoba, Argentina. The pictures look pretty amazing, too:



https://www.bestday.com/Cordoba-Argentina/Attractions/




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B...nce,_Argentina


https://www.phdmedia.com/argentina/c...ne-of-cordoba/

[craigs]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Providence also doesn't get much mention in pro or college sports, or in pop culture in general. So that also maintains its low-profile.

Providence is the cartoon skyline behind the Griffin house on Family Guy.


source


source

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by craigs

Providence is the cartoon skyline behind the Griffin house on Family Guy.


source


source

I don't watch that show (or any show of that nature), but is the family said to be living in Providence in the show?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Omaharocks

^ Providence is nice, and sort of the northeastern sister-city to Milwaukee.

But I think Milwaukee, due to being in the midwest, and not directly between two major cities, falls off the radar even more.

As a Canadian who lives a 7 hour drive from Providence and a 14 hour drive from Milwaukee, Milwaukee is way more prominent.

Off the top of my head for Milwaukee: Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, beer, the Brewers, the Bucks, the part-time home of the Packers when I was a kid, cheese and dairy products in general, Harley-Davidson, Germanic culture.

I can't come up with anything for Providence without doing a search.

[kool maudit]

Genoa