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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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  #61  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2021, 7:58 PM
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Originally Posted by Doady View Post
People often like to compare Toronto to much older, historic US cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, especially Canadians trying to hype up Toronto. But I've always argued that Toronto shouldn't be compared to those cities, because in reality Toronto is not historic, it is a much newer city built largely in the automobile era. Even the City of Toronto proper is mostly car-dependent, post-war sprawl - just cul-de-sacs and strip malls everywhere and little rail access. Even before considering the 100% sprawl of neighbhouring Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, etc., just considering the city proper, the City of Toronto has more in common with the City of Naperville than it does with the City of Chicago. Considering the metropolitan area as a whole, Toronto is much more akin to Sunbelt cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix than it is to Chicago and any northeastern US metropolitan areas.

Here is what most of the City of Toronto looks like:
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7585...7i16384!8i8192

Naperville:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7540...4!8i8192?hl=en

See also: TORONTO: LOS ANGELES OF THE NORTH

The pre war, inner city of Boston:


Philadelphia:


Chicago:


Toronto:


I agree broadly, though the idea of Toronto not being historic is dependent on context. From Western Canada, Toronto does feel old -- not quite Montreal old -- but still fairly old. I'd imagine Toronto would also have this impression to someone from Arizona or Texas or Utah.

Interestingly, you omitted the one NE city that I think could compare to Toronto -- Washington. They're both around the same population (6 million+) and while they do have notable pre-WWII urban fabric, they overwhelmingly grew after WWII. But, their suburbs are more transit-oriented. Toronto's more so, but in US contexts, DC has strong transit into suburban areas with notable TODs. So while they're both newer, they retain some oldness, and that which is newer isn't exactly like Phoenix or Jacksonville.

Even Montreal, which feels older than Toronto by a considerable margin, really wasn't all that big until the early 20th century. American cities were considerably larger during the Victorian era. Canada's first big urbanization push was 1900-1930, as the country industrialized later, and never had the railway suburbs of the UK or US. They went from having everything in walking distance of work (thus smaller footprints) right into streetcar suburbia and then automobiles. But with car ownership being lower, Canadian cities remained more amenable to transit.

Los Angeles and Toronto also feel like they're of a similar age.
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  #62  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 12:21 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post
People often like to compare Toronto to much older, historic US cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, especially Canadians trying to hype up Toronto. But I've always argued that Toronto shouldn't be compared to those cities, because in reality Toronto is not historic, it is a much newer city built largely in the automobile era.
I agree totally. One really big difference between Chicago and Toronto is that Chicago has a lot of neoclassical, Beaux-Arts, "City Beautiful" elements in its early design and planning. Obviously a VERY ambitious city from the get-go. Toronto, on the other hand, seems to have been caught by surprise by its growth. I'm not saying Toronto isn't, or wasn't, also ambitious. That was apparent even 50 years ago. But it doesn't feel like it was laid out on a grand scheme. Chicago does.
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  #63  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 12:28 AM
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Growing up across Lake Ontario in NY, Toronto always struck me as younger/ newer looking.
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  #64  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 12:42 AM
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Originally Posted by JManc View Post
Growing up across Lake Ontario in NY, Toronto always struck me as younger/ newer looking.
We used to watch Channel 4 news from Buffalo in the winter to see what our weather would be like the next day. Buffalo always got blizzards a day before us and twice as bad.
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  #65  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:05 AM
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Originally Posted by ue View Post
I agree broadly, though the idea of Toronto not being historic is dependent on context. From Western Canada, Toronto does feel old -- not quite Montreal old -- but still fairly old. I'd imagine Toronto would also have this impression to someone from Arizona or Texas or Utah.

Interestingly, you omitted the one NE city that I think could compare to Toronto -- Washington. They're both around the same population (6 million+) and while they do have notable pre-WWII urban fabric, they overwhelmingly grew after WWII. But, their suburbs are more transit-oriented. Toronto's more so, but in US contexts, DC has strong transit into suburban areas with notable TODs. So while they're both newer, they retain some oldness, and that which is newer isn't exactly like Phoenix or Jacksonville.

Even Montreal, which feels older than Toronto by a considerable margin, really wasn't all that big until the early 20th century. American cities were considerably larger during the Victorian era. Canada's first big urbanization push was 1900-1930, as the country industrialized later, and never had the railway suburbs of the UK or US. They went from having everything in walking distance of work (thus smaller footprints) right into streetcar suburbia and then automobiles. But with car ownership being lower, Canadian cities remained more amenable to transit.

Los Angeles and Toronto also feel like they're of a similar age.
I keep forgetting about Washington. It's impressive what it is has achieved growing mostly in the post-war and automobile era. But no one ever talks about that. It is such an anomaly in the USA, especially the northeastern USA.

I don't want to emphasize the post-war/suburban nature of Toronto too much, but at the time I think people emphasize the pre-war Toronto too much also. Toronto is old compared to Western Canadian cities (except maybe Winnipeg...), but the pre-war core is tiny compared to those US cities, representing a small part of even the central city, let alone the whole urban area. The maps I drew probably not 100% accurate, as Crawford pointed out, but hopefully it gives at least some idea how new Toronto is.

Non-Canadians may not know, but for most of Canadian history, the #1 city in Canada was actually Montreal. Toronto being #1 is just a recent thing. Montreal is older, and certainly it feels older.

Of course, many cities have old, abandoned industrial areas in the core that are being reclaimed for big box development, as iheartthed gave an example of. Toronto is no different from Chicago in that respect. But a central city that was mostly built from the ground up for the automobile, within an urban area that only started booming in the post-war era, I think that is more comparable to a Sunbelt city than to a Rustbelt/Snowbelt city.

Last edited by Doady; Mar 27, 2021 at 5:02 AM.
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  #66  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:15 AM
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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.
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  #67  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:53 AM
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The Washington DC/Toronto comparison is apt in terms of the growth trajectory. Both about 900,000 in 1940, second tier of the large North American cities then.

Even the affluent NW DC neighborhoods have a bit of a similar feel to Rosedale.
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  #68  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 12:12 PM
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Originally Posted by edale View Post

There are parts of St. Louis that look VERY similar to inner Cleveland burbs of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights.

St. Louis

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6364...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6496...7i13312!8i6656


Cleveland Heights

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5079...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5102...7i16384!8i8192
St. Louis a weird city to compare anywhere because its got such an unusual package of cross-currents.

However, one thing that always strikes me is how I don’t think there is a more similar swath of inner suburbs between any two cities. I sort of point at the universities in both cases as the synthesizing element that took industrial weath (Case Western Reserve/Washington University) and spun the refined early century yarn of similar suburban built environments “behind” them.

I live on the outer edge of this area, in the heart of the orthodox community which I understand to be larger in metro Cleveland. striking nonetheless to drive into a midwestern city on a friday night with throngs of people in orthodox garments walking down the sidewalk as if you were in metro NYC.
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  #69  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 12:29 PM
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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
Yeah, not having spent a good deal of time in either city, Cleveland and St. Louis do remind me of each other. Though I'd guess St. Louis is more similar to Cincinnati due to the "high school" question .
theres definitely some similarities there in the social environments between st louis and cincinnati. however, st louis got the great lakes style industrial supercharger (think pruitt-igoe) to sort of bloat things though and thus has massive expanses of industrial areas as well as huge contiguous suburbs of the same era that cincy (or even cleveland i don’t think) doesn’t have on the same scale.

in that way the mid-outer suburban areas are more like a smaller metro detroit than anything with colossal areas of middle class Home Improvement era suburbs extending away from downtown towards the west. parts of the suburbs have their own radio stations that are so far out that i lose the signal downtown. i don’t get that sense of scale in metro cincinnati, which feels more ensconced in its region and isn’t stretching itself towards the sunset up out of the river valley.
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Last edited by Centropolis; Mar 27, 2021 at 12:42 PM.
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  #70  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 12:49 PM
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Originally Posted by Buckeye Native 001 View Post
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis.

Gee, wonder what's the common thread there?
st. louis is the endcap to the ohio valley with a great lakes cough. i can take a photo in st louis and fool someone into thinking its louisville (think 1880s solid brick townhouse with a stoop with a tiny bermuda-grass yard and a southern magnolia in it) or a block of great lakesy frame two-flats and a aerial over a plain with an extant steel mill belching smoke in 2021.

of a different river i can also take a photo in the st. louis county bungalow belt that looks like inner-city memphis. theres some blocks built like bywater but the brick always gives it up.

i view st. louis as a proto-western city (and missouri a proto-western state with its weird contradictions of north/south/outlaw mythos) with everything thrown into the cake without a mixer. it was the prism the laser focused through on its way to vaporize a million buffalo.
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Last edited by Centropolis; Mar 27, 2021 at 1:06 PM.
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  #71  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 1:06 PM
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Originally Posted by Doady View Post
I keep forgetting about Washington. It's impressive what it is has achieved growing mostly in the post-war and automobile era. But no one ever talks about that.
Because what is there to talk about?

DC is an imperial capital. It grew/became rich because of U.S. postwar hegemony. It houses the largest federal apparatus in global history.
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  #72  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 1:34 PM
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Because what is there to talk about?

DC is an imperial capital. It grew/became rich because of U.S. postwar hegemony. It houses the largest federal apparatus in global history.
dc is sort of the “thats no moon” moon in the american sky. everyone (or most) going there are doing so because of reasons, not because they think georgetown is cute (i mean there still are those people i guess).

no, their relatives are getting calls from northern virginia area codes.
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  #73  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 3:33 PM
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Originally Posted by Doady View Post

The pre war, inner city of Boston:


Philadelphia:


Chicago:


Toronto:


That's a really generous "pre war, inner city" of Chicago...
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  #74  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:03 PM
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That's a really generous "pre war, inner city" of Chicago...
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.
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  #75  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:19 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.
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  #76  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:42 PM
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The thing with Toronto is that its rapid postwar growth had an effect on the "outer-inner" city that obscures a bit of its newness, particularly given the postwar decline and more clearly delineated suburban growth focus of certain older US cities in that period.

Let's imagine two streets in 1935: one of them, on the edge of old Toronto, has a few old houses and small businesses intermingled with vacant lots and perhaps some lingering agricultural or rural industry uses. The other, slightly in from the edge of old Baltimore, is more developed, with rows of houses and mixed-use buildings following a traditional streetcar-suburban pattern. Maybe there is even a streetcar.

Now let's say that, between 1935 and 2020, the Toronto street holds on to its small assortment of older structures, while newer ones fill in the spaces held by rural light industry and vacant lots in '35. The new structures are of course unlovely, but they are lively enough, animated as they are by the underlying growth of the city.

The result is a street that lacks the charm of its 1935 Baltimore equivalent, but that is nonetheless full of life and commerce, with a few remaining prewar details at certain intersections. Given Toronto, it likely now features a bus line with relatively high stop frequencies as well.

In Baltimore, meanwhile, let's say that about 50-65% of the old structures are lost to urban decay, and the streetcar line is removed. The vacant lots created by the disappeared structures are only partially filled by newer, lower-level structures.

The result would be that the Toronto street remains somewhat contiguous with the overall use-patterns of the old city, even if it is fairly ugly and utilitarian compared to the Baltimore 1935 street. In Baltimore, however, the area is no longer a part of the "streetcars and storefronts" world that it once was, and while testaments to its former life remain, it is not the same entity it was once, in terms of function.

I am not referring to a specific place and have never been to Baltimore -- it's only an example. But I am describing a process that did occur, however, and that worked to make some of these demarcation lines less obvious.
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  #77  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:47 PM
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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.
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  #78  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:55 PM
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Originally Posted by Doady View Post
Non-Canadians may not know, but for most of Canadian history, the #1 city in Canada was actually Montreal. Toronto being #1 is just a recent thing. Montreal is older, and certainly it feels older.
Montreal was definitely #1 when I lived up there. The amalgamation of "Metro" (everything south of Steeles Ave), not to be confused with the "Toronto metropolitan area" or Greater Toronto Area, vaulted Toronto ahead of Montreal.
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  #79  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:59 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
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.

As well as its inner-city subway system. We had to drive on the mess of dirt and wooden planks on Yonge Street in 1971 when the Yonge Street subway was being extended into North York.
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  #80  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2021, 4:59 PM
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Originally Posted by bilbao58 View Post
Montreal was definitely #1 when I lived up there. The amalgamation of "Metro" (everything south of Steeles Ave), not to be confused with the "Toronto metropolitan area" or Greater Toronto Area, vaulted Toronto ahead of Montreal.
I think the greater urban areas switched places in the early '80s, independent of legal boundaries.
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