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  #61  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 9:54 AM
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Asheville, NC is pretty fantastic.
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  #62  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 9:56 AM
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San Luis Obispo CA
Eureka CA
Santa Barbara CA
Laguna Beach CA (separated from OC sprawl by open land, self contained & walkable)
Ferndale CA
Eugene OR
Galena IL
Ithaca NY
Bend OR
Madison WI (perhaps a bit more than 150k metro)
Gettysburg PA
Athens OH
Athens GA
Oxford MS
Coronado CA (separated from SD on a penninsula)
Portland ME
Princeton NJ
Burlington VT
Salem OR
Ashland OR
Santa Cruz CA
Provincetown MA
Carson City NV
Annapolis MD
Victoria BC

Last edited by CaliNative; Aug 21, 2020 at 10:40 AM.
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  #63  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 11:37 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
What about Butte, MT?
I always thought Missoula was the most vibrant of Montana's small cities, but I have to admit I don't have any experience in person.

In general the issue with small western cities is there's really no intermediate level of density. Usually the downtown area isn't as wrecked by parking craters as in the Midwest, but as soon as you get out of it you get to streetcar suburban neighborhoods which are tree lined and packed with bungalows. Nice looking, but really a suburban rather than an urban vibe.

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Originally Posted by mville1 View Post
Reading, like York, certainly qualifies for this thread under the urban criteria and has the requisite population (88,350) the op laid out, but Reading and York's cores are not vibrant.

Both cities are still largely gritty, although downtown York has made some pretty big strides in the past 10 years with a slew of new restaurants, cafes, and shops opening up in restored historic buildings. Even the old Yorktowne Hotel is being renovated and turned into a Tapestry Collection by Hilton property. As the op stated earlier though, York and even Reading are quite far behind cities like Lancaster and Bethlehem in revitalizing their cores, but pound for pound Pennsylvania might have the greatest collection of small urban cities and towns in the United States. For example, even a town as small as Renovo (pop. 1,200), has streets and blocks of rowhomes.
The sleeping giant which hasn't been directly mentioned is Allentown. Biggest urban fabric by far - hundreds of blocks of rowhouses. It even has something resembling a CBD, along with commercial concentrations outside of downtown. Of course it's not particularly vibrant, but it's at least staying full like all of the small PA cities in the region as Latino NYC transplants replace working-class white folks.

Another non-vibrant, but interesting area are the different little boroughs of the coal region. You have all these mini-urban areas, like Manahoy City, Shenandoah, and Mt. Carmel. They're all spaced close together, like no one of them is more than a 15-minute drive from the next. Their residential vernacular is basically all wood rowhouses. And because the bottom fell out for NEPA coal in the early 20th century, they completely missed the boat on suburbanization, so it goes straight from rowhouse to wilderness. They are as dead as anything can be economically (not even attracting Latino migrants like places like Allentown and Hazleton) but kinda fantasize about them getting taken over by artists who want dirt cheap urban living and starting a local renaissance.
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  #64  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:11 PM
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Kingston, ON was the first to pop into my mind. The core is mostly driven by the nearby university however and less so a general populations desire for urbanism. Most people who live in the city live a pretty suburban lifestyle.

Victoria BC is a 300,000 metro and is hugely urban for such a small city. Like any city it has suburban parts but the urban part of it is massive for a metro its size.

Halifax also impressed me for its size, though it’s a bit too big for this thread.

Charlottetown is another good mention. Feels quite large for a town of 40,000 with several office buildings in the core and a healthy level of pedestrian traffic. Doesn’t really have much in the way of public transportation though.

Another Ontario one, not quite as good of an example, that I always liked was Stratford. A big theatre culture brings lots of tourists to a fairly large core that serves a town of about 30,000.

There are lots of large downtowns in small BC cities too. I always like Nanaimo and White Rock.

For a real funky one, take a look at Yellowknife NWT. It’s downtown is quite run down but absolutely massive for a town of 20,000.
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  #65  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:19 PM
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Originally Posted by DZH22 View Post
Lowell Massachusetts - Dense mill city with rivers and canals, lots of residential conversions in the huge old textile factories
Lowell is probably my favorite of the mid-sized non-metro Mass cities. Such a nice downtown, both in terms of density and layout. I feel like really only Lowell and New Bedford have turned themselves around, while Worcerster, Springfield, Brockton, etc continue to struggle.

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Scranton Pennsylvania - Denser and more expansive than expected, beautiful old architecture, Dunder Mifflin
While I love most small PA cities, I don't like Scranton (or the Wyoming Valley in general) all that much. For some reason rowhouses never made it that far up in PA, so you have blocks that look like this as soon as you get out of the urban core.

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Hartford Connecticut - Strong skyline and park system, Traveler's Tower and State House among the best in their classes
As a former Connecticut resident I couldn't disagree more with this. Hartford has made some strides, but it's honestly one of the worst cities in the country, largely due to mid-20th century urban renewal. They almost totally obliterated the historic urban core in order to build a bunch of office towers for suburbanites, ringed the whole goddamn thing with highways, and then there's a "no man's land" of largely parking lots and institutional buildings surrounding even that. The outer neighborhoods have basically no vitality either, with the northern ones poor and black, and the southern ones poor and Latino. The West End is still a little economically and racially mixed, but it's at the outer fringe of the city and the main commercial strip looks like this.

If Hartford ever comes back, it's got to be the neighborhood of Frog Hollow. There's still a mostly intact business district and some cool old walkups. No hint of a turnaround yet though.

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New Haven Connecticut - Dense, walkable, awesome pizza, feels like a standalone Cambridge (Yale vs Harvard)
Now this I agree with. New Haven, unlike most CT cities, mostly avoided the wrecking ball during the urban renewal era, and the downtown/Yale area plus East Rock and Wooster Square (home to my favorite urban block in Connecticut) form a pretty coherent urban core. The city has only gotten better since I moved away too - I think downtown has two grocery stores now.
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  #66  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:24 PM
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How much is Springfield MA really struggling? might be setting the bar too high here.
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  #67  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:33 PM
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Originally Posted by dc_denizen View Post
How much is Springfield MA really struggling? might be setting the bar too high here.
Springfield certainly isn't a vibrant city at least. The downtown isn't as badly urban renewed as say Hartford, but there's still a lot of parking craters and not that much of a dining/nightlife scene to attract people out of town. It also really lacks any definable gentrifying neighborhoods. Most of the people in the urban core are low-income people of color, and most of the (shrinking) white population is out at the suburban fringes of the city.

I will say that Springfield still has some good bones, like the rowhouses on Matoon Street and several different zones of walkup apartment buildings. It could revive into something quite interesting, unlike somewhere like Hartford, which is basically trying to build like scratch similar to say Charlotte.
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  #68  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:34 PM
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Marquette, MI is pretty good, with a strong, intact core. Too far north to get the interstate, pretty limited sprawl, and Northern Michigan University helps a lot.
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  #69  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:39 PM
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N i a g a r a
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o n
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t h e
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l a k e
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  #70  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 12:42 PM
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Originally Posted by strongbad635 View Post
N i a g a r a
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o n
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t h e
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l a k e
Stopped off there last year when coming back with the family from a week's vacation in Toronto. Cute, but ridiculously upscale. We were traveling with two picky kids, and had to look around forever to find somewhere family-friendly to eat in town. Finally found a pizza place off the main drag that worked.
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  #71  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 2:08 PM
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I love the mass small city downtowns:

Downtown Worchester:

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2633...7i16384!8i8192

Downtown Springfield (looks like stamford, but yeah the residential nabes look under-cared for

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.1026...7i16384!8i8192

dowtown Pittsfield

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4521...7i13312!8i6656

downtown Lowell -- looks like Boston

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.6457...7i16384!8i8192

downtown Lawrence - looks like Lowell but not quite as nice

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.7077...7i16384!8i8192
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Last edited by dc_denizen; Aug 21, 2020 at 2:21 PM.
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  #72  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 2:38 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DZH22 View Post
Portland Maine - Best all around, dense walkable maze of a downtown, hilly, harbor views, beautiful neighborhoods

Harrisburg Pennsylvania - Super dense, large buildings, beautiful historic structures, green dome state house, large river

Lowell Massachusetts - Dense mill city with rivers and canals, lots of residential conversions in the huge old textile factories

Portsmouth New Hampshire - Coastal goodness, dense, historic

Albany New York - A few blocks of downtown feel like a slice of a much larger city (such as my own, Boston), Empire Plaza is one of the all-time dystopian areas with massive scale

Scranton Pennsylvania - Denser and more expansive than expected, beautiful old architecture, Dunder Mifflin

Hartford Connecticut - Strong skyline and park system, Traveler's Tower and State House among the best in their classes

New Haven Connecticut - Dense, walkable, awesome pizza, feels like a standalone Cambridge (Yale vs Harvard)
Great list. If there's on thing New England and the Mid-Atlantic can lay claim to compared to any other portion of the US, it's having a fantastic legacy of high-quality, consistent urbanism at all scales. It's one of the best assets of the region (even though many smaller towns have hit harder times, the "bones" and fundamental structure for vibrancy and revitalization is still there).

Certainly not perfect in the impacts from "urban renewal" and de-industrialization department, but almost without exception, the smallest villages to the largest city were all originally built with great craftsmanship, walkability and mixed-used livability in mind.
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  #73  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 3:01 PM
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Originally Posted by dc_denizen View Post
I think this comment pertains mostly to the midwest and south.
I would absolutely disagree with that assertion, especially about the South. While the Southern US only has a handful of big cities, it has a great collection of small and mid-sized places that are with visiting while on a road trip. Some of the better ones (Charleston and Savannah excluded) include:

Asheville, NC - very touristy, but walkable and filled with breweries
Greenville, SC - easily one of the best small-city downtowns in the country
Chatanooga, TN - surprisingly urban with some great family attractions
Fayetteville/Bentonville, AR - home to U of A and Wal-Mart and the $$$ in the area is obvious.
Lexington and Staunton, VA - both smaller colonial cities with lots of charm
Lexington, KY - home to a mjor university, but a very nice town in it's own right
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  #74  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 3:48 PM
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Fayetteville/Bentonville have horrible urbanity. Almost entirely sprawl, despite the presence of a large university and Ozarks tourism.

Greenville has a reasonably decent core, but is also almost entirely sprawl.
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  #75  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 4:03 PM
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A lot of the southern cities mentioned have a decent downtown area, but in a lot of ways - like smaller cities in the midwest/west - they feel like "fake cities."

What I mean by a "fake city" is something which on the sidewalk can give the impression of a few blocks of busy pedestrian traffic. However, just out of sight, perhaps on the back side of the block, perhaps a few blocks away, there is an ocean of surface parking lots. There are very few actual residents within walking distance. The nearest intact residential blocks could be some distance away, and they're made up of low-density single-family housing. Sometimes there's not even a substantial job concentration in the downtown area. People drive there, park, and then walk around - which makes it not really fundamentally different from a suburban "lifestyle center".

Now, things are getting better here. A lot of smaller cities are converting old midrises to residential, and even building new apartments. Hotels with the proper urban form right in town make a difference too. But even when this is dealt with, the rapid transition from a mixed-use commercial district with streetwalls to residential neighborhoods with streetcar suburban density at best (single-family detached homes fairly widely spaced on lots) is very jarring.
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  #76  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 4:20 PM
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Greenville, SC immediately comes to mind simply because I was surprised at how urban and lively its center city is. Also St. Petersburg, FL (too big?), which often gets overshadowed by Tampa, has a lovely, walkable downtown.
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  #77  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 5:02 PM
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St Catherines, Ontario also seems quite fine.

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1579...7i13312!8i6656
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  #78  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 5:04 PM
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New York specializes in somewhat larger mid-range cities than mass

Rochester, NY has a beautiful downtown, say what you will about the larger economy:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1557...7i16384!8i8192
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  #79  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 5:09 PM
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isolated northern california, southern oregon cities with that funny mix of old hippies, extraction industry rednecks, artists, independently wealthy...good bones and vibrancy...
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  #80  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2020, 5:17 PM
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there are plenty of smaller ocean fronting cities with good to ok urbanity, like long beach for nys. if you like, i just happen to have a thread right here

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho....php?p=8893611
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