[kool maudit]

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.