Yeah with everyone driving no point in investing in public transportation or keeping streetcars like Toronto and select other cities did.

I also always wondered why Detroit built that toy elevated train instead of a proper light rail. I mean Buffalo's hasn't been expanded but it's definitely usable to UB South campus, medical campus/Allentown, downtown (arena, ballpark, Canalside). The new Woodward streetcar has less ridership than Kansas city's

My great Uncle (that I never got to meet) worked at Hudson's. When he came to visit family in Canada he brought clothes for everyone. When my Mom and Aunt were kids he brought them the nicest clothes/dresses (particularly compared to what one could get in Canada at the time 50s/60s)

Hope the next census shows a decent rebound for city proper. I've always liked Detroit.

I'd like to visit it someday. It seems a great place with lots of history. It's nice to see they managed a comeback.

--------------------------------

This thread is about metro areas, not city propers, but look Glasgow's Detroit style collapse.

1931 -- 1,088,083
1971 ---- 887,505
1981 ---- 685,143
2001 ---- 577,869
2021 ---- 635,130

They peaked in 1931(!), had a horrible 1970's as most big cities on the developed world (-23% fall) and bottomed in 2001 (-47% from the peak) and gladly since then they are having a robust growth, faster than their metro area (2001-2021).

This was almost certainly one of the top 4 downtowns in 1950s America:

https://digital.library.wayne.edu/lo.../0/default.jpg

source: https://digital.library.wayne.edu/

About 70% of the buildings in this photo were lost to freeways, stadiums, surface parking lots, urban renewal, or just neglect. The locations of Little Caesars Arena and Comerica Park are close to the center of this photo. Without adding a single building, it would arguably still be a top 5 - 7 downtown today.

Cleveland

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...173429a2_c.jpg
Oberlin College

Area: 5,177 km²

Population
1900: - 552,359
1910: - 774,657 --- 40.3%
1920: 1,103,877 --- 42.5%
1930: 1,397,426 --- 26.6%
1940: 1,432,124 ---- 2.5%
1950: 1,680,736 --- 17.4%
1960: 2,126,983 --- 26.6%
1970: 2,321,037 ---- 9.1%
1980: 2,173,734 --- -6.3%
1990: 2,102,248 --- -3.3%
2000: 2,148,143 ---- 2.2%
2010: 2,077,240 --- -3.3%
2020: 2,088,251 ---- 0.5%

Population peak: 1970

Decline from the peak: -10.0%

Biggest decline: -10.5% (1970-2010)

Cleveland pattern is very similar to Detroit's. Shrinking and growth on the exact same decades. Cleveland boom timeline is also more similar to Detroit than to Pittsburgh or Cincinatti. The lake city vs river city thing.

If we would have included Akron on Cleveland count, then decline would have been a bit smoother.

I'll say this, since Pittsburgh and Cleveland have similar Metro populations the better downtown of the two is easily Pittsburgh. It just feels like a bigger city and with the hilly geography and point of three rivers the downtown is clustered into a dense triangle or wedge shape.

On the Downtown thread Cleveland and Pittsburgh were featured on pages 5 and 9, and here their numbers:

------------------------- 2020 ------ 2010 ------ 2000 ------ 1990 ---------------- Growth ---------------- Area --------- Density
Cleveland -------------- 13,338 ------ 9,471 ------ 6,312 ------ 4,561 ---- 40.8% ---- 50.0% --- 38.4% ----- 7.8 km² --- 1,705.6 inh./km²
Pittsburgh ------------- 15,497 ----- 13,101 ----- 12,195 ------ 9,739 ---- 18.3% ----- 7.4% --- 25.2% ----- 4.8 km² --- 3,225.2 inh./km²

I used 3 census tract for Cleveland and 5 for Pittsburgh. Downtown Cleveland is performing much better, although Pittsburgh's is denser.

Thanks :tup:
I have a photographer acquaintance from Toronto. He likes exploring new cities and asked which city to visit first. I said definitely Pittsburgh! He told me "Wow, Cleveland was okay but quieter with noticeably wider streets which made it feel even less busy. But I'm in really in love with Pittsburgh's vibe"
He's been back to shoot footage 3 times in da Burgh already.

I know it's anecdotal. But to be accustomed to a city of almost 3M (~2.8M)/Metro of approaching closer to 7M and think a city of 300k with 2M Metro is still a very nice city speaks volumes about Pittsburgh's dense and older 19th and pre war 20th century building stock

Population loss does not equal decline.

Pittsburgh is the best it’s ever been. Pretty damn sure the same holds true for Cleveland and Buffalo.

These cities in their supposed “heydays” were putrid hell holes.

Pittsburgh's recovery from 20th century pollution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsEHdjnRwyw

I don't see how that aerial matches SF, Boston and Philly from that era.

If you want to put Detroit right after those cities, I'm with you, but SF, Philly and Boston had really extensive, contiguous downtowns back then.

This debate over which downtowns that are not NYC and Chicago would have felt the biggest in 1950 is an interesting one.

I would actually like to know what yardsticks people at the time would have used to gauge the urbanness of a city. Did they even care about urbanity? This would have been at a time in American history where most downtowns were at their peak vibrancy and people might have taken bustling sidewalks and intact streetwalls of soon-to-be-demolished Victorian and Beaux Arts commercial blocks for granted, while yearning to leave for greener pastures.

And while I'm stereotyping based on my limited knowledge of the time period, it seems like American downtowns - vibrant and central as they were - were kind of a lather, rinse, repeat of diners and department stores, with the bigger cities having bigger and more lavish examples, but no city's downtown being kind of a radical departure from this template.

So, for this reason - and maybe it's my 21st century bias speaking - I would have been most impressed by downtown San Francisco among the non-NYC, Chicago cities. It would have had a thriving Chinatown and a Beat counterculture scene in neighbouring North Beach. That would mix things up a little bit and, after 24 hours on a Scenicruiser bus, coming down the ramps from the Bay Bridge and into Transbay terminal, I would feel like I had arrived in a mini-Manhattan on the west coast.

While there's probably some truth to that, what's interesting to note is that one of our most frequently cited urbanism measures here at SSP, residential population density, wouldn't have been a good yardstick to use back then for "downtowns". They were certainly very busy places, but not as residential as they are today.

In chicago's case, the 3 core community areas of greater downtown are roughly 2x more populated today than they were in 1940. I excluded the near west side in this calculation because it's just too damn big as a single CA, going all the way west out to western. It really needs to be broken up into two halves along Ashland to use it as a proxy for greater downtown, but I don't have the time to go find the 1940 tract data.

Loop/near north/near south 1940: 90,481

Loop/near north/near south 2020: 176,574

Pittsburgh swapped steel and heavy industry for eds and meds. Cleveland and Buffalo weren't as successful in reimagining their economies. I'd argue they are no where near their primes though the worst is behind them and trending the right direction.

As for the biggest/best US downtowns in the pre-war era, considering the fact that none of us strolled down the streets of any of them back in the day, I think that making any hard and fast claims regarding a specific ordering (beyond NYC once again being an entire tier above everyone else) is somewhat foolish. We know who the usual suspects are, but without a time machine, we'll never have access to the myriad intangibles to definitively rank them.

That said, I will throw this out there as one piece of the puzzle. In the pre-war era, there were only 4 US cities that had both intra-city rapid transit rail systems and comprehensive commuter rail lines feeding their downtowns and pumping them up with hundreds of thousands of commuters every morning: NYC, Chicago, Boston, and Philly.

While perhaps not as hazardous to the air as the black smog of Pittsburgh's mills or the oily flames of the Cuyahoga River, pre-war Chicago had the largest concentration of farm animals on the planet a few miles southwest of downtown. Let us be thankful the Union Stock Yards are a thing of the past.

No wonder lake breezes would be so cherished.

The pollution alone in all 3 was unbelievable! :runaway:

Buffalo adding 17k residents to the city (and 35k to Erie County) is really evident with all the loft conversions, new builds, and the fact the city is doing things like not only striping bike lanes on streets but actually building protected bike lanes.
I saw on Instagram a video of an acquaintance riding her bike and had to ask what street it was. The transformation of Niagara Street in Buffalo alone from decaying industrial to filling buildings with residents along with new streetscaping plus a protected bike lane is nothing short of amazing.

check out the google street view Before/After from SSC
from post #1860 onward
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threa...733630/page-93

Pittsburgh never really had “collar communities” like other cities did though.

Southwestern PA was characterized by mill and factory towns in its river valleys and mining towns on its plateaus and hills. They were not suburbs of Pittsburgh. They developed in their own right (many from the late 1700s on), along with Pittsburgh, not as a direct result of Pittsburgh’s growth.

But that was the case for pretty much every single corner of the world, not only on "declining metro areas". The thing is they were relatively (and in many cases absolute) bigger and had much more influence nation and worldwide.

Another reason to look at them, we're about to leave a 200-year period where population growth was insane to enter a age where population decline will be the rule everywhere. Looking to those metro areas, their challenges, their dynamics will help us to speculate about what happen with other metro areas start to decline as well.

No doubt. Detroit looks so vibrant, so inviting in this shot.