What midwestern city seems most “urban” to you (except Chicago)?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Frankly I'm surprised that this isn't better-known on urbanist boards.

the high quality 19th century urbanism of cincy's basin is very well known in urbanist circles.

i was merely pushing back on your claim that it had the densest neighborhoods in the nation outside of NYC at the time.

my spidey senses went something like, "oh, that's a fairly bold claim, surely there were neighborhoods in boston, philly, or baltimore that were just as dense, or even denser back then, no?", so i asked for some back-up for the claim and all i got was essentially "it's in some old books about cincinnati".

i know that cincy's basin nabes were very densely built and populated, and if the original claim was merely "some of the most densely populated neighborhoods outside of NYC", i probably wouldn't have batted an eyelash.

and to crawford's point, tract-level density data was most likely pretty spotty back then (did they even use tracts/block groups back then?), so the issue of which city had the densest hoods outside of NYC in the mid-19th century will likely remain unprovable.

i am more than happy to agree that cincy had some of the densest neighborhoods back in the day for the sake of moving on.

[mhays]

Yeah, it could be true, but cities bat around false stuff all the time. The original might be true, like "one of," or have some other qualifier. But that would get lost. Even major organizations like tourism boards and chambers would screw it up.

In my area one claim was "most diverse zip code." That was debunked.

Another in many places is "biggest park" and "second biggest." Even some relatively small parks got that treatment.

Theater and theater districts are a big one. Several cities seem to be second to New York in some way.

Of course we all hear "4th biggest city" and variations on that theme.

[Steely Dan]

^ yeah, the theater district one is always very eye-roll inducing.

I've also seen "we once had the largest streetcar network in the country" applied to like a dozen different cities over the years on SSP.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

and to crawford's point, tract-level density data was most likely pretty spotty back then (did they even use tracts/block groups back then?), so the issue of which city had the densest hoods outside of NYC in the mid-19th century will likely remain unprovable.

I don't think census tracts were introduced until the 1920s or 1930s, and in the beginning it was only used in a handful of cities. A claim about neighborhood level density in the 1800s would have to be proven through something other than census tracts.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

the high quality 19th century urbanism of cincy's basin is very well known in urbanist circles.

i was merely pushing back on your claim that it had the densest neighborhoods in the nation outside of NYC at the time.

my spidey senses went something like, "oh, that's a fairly bold claim, surely there were neighborhoods in boston, philly, or baltimore that were just as dense, or even denser back then, no?", so i asked for some back-up for the claim and all i got was essentially "it's in some old books about cincinnati".

i know that cincy's basin nabes were very densely built and populated, and if the original claim was merely "some of the most densely populated neighborhoods outside of NYC", i probably wouldn't have batted an eyelash.

and to crawford's point, tract-level density data was most likely pretty spotty back then (did they even use tracts/block groups back then?), so the issue of which city had the densest hoods outside of NYC in the mid-19th century will likely remain unprovable.

i am more than happy to agree that cincy had some of the densest neighborhoods back in the day for the sake of moving on.

I am fairly certain that nowhere in Philadelphia was of a similar residential density to the core of Cincinnati. Remember, Philly's 19th century fabric is basically all rowhouses. There are some four-story ones in Center City, but I believe these were generally meant for a single wealthy family, with servants quarters on the top floor. Philly just didn't do tenement housing. This is different from Cincinnati, where rowhouse-like buildings exist, but a lot of the housing stock was always intended as walkup multi-units.

Boston though, may have been a different story. There's absolutely tenement-style housing in the brick core of the city. I have a hard time believing the North End didn't have Cinci-level densities at the time, for example.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by eschaton

I am fairly certain that nowhere in Philadelphia was of a similar residential density to the core of Cincinnati. Remember, Philly's 19th century fabric is basically all rowhouses.

but when you pack rowhouses as tightly as philly does, you can get pretty high densities.

even today, there are plenty of 100% rowhouse tracts in south philly in the 30 - 50K ppsm realm, the same range that was being claimed for cincy's basin back in the day.

i don't think it's much of stretch to think that they were just as dense, or possibly denser (bigger families), back in the 19th century.

[jmecklenborg]

Another film set in NYC was shot this week in Cincinnati:
https://www.wvxu.org/media/2021-12-0...innati-tvkiese

They built a fake NYC subway station entrance on Vine St. in Over-the-Rhine. I happened to walk past this thing last night:




Earlier this week I saw them shooting on this block in the West End:
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1182...7i16384!8i8192

[Crawford]

I hope that's a historic film, bc NYC subway entrances don't look anything like that anymore.

Actually, the new entrances are radically different from even a few years back, though a lot of stations haven't been updated yet.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I hope that's a historic film, bc NYC subway entrances don't look anything like that anymore.

I'm guessing that it's set in the 1950s.

That green utility pole you see in the first photo is an old streetcar wire pole. The city re-used a ton of them after the streetcar system was removed.

[mrnyc]

there are also ghosts of lost urbanity -- for example, no one would know east cleveland was one -- being its so emptied out and forgotten today.

hopefully the state will help cleveland annex it out of its misery.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

There are about 10 good books on Cincinnati history, written by academics rather than foo-foo people. https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Plan.../dp/0814207626

Cincinnati was big-time by the 1850s when St. Louis and Chicago were small towns. In the 1850s it had the longest suspension bridge in the world u/c and a 2-mile double-track railroad tunnel u/c, which was the longest urban railroad tunnel in the world at that point, but the project was abandoned.

what about during the revolutionary war, how many battles did Cincinnati have again? oh wait, it didnt exist yet.


distilledhistory.com

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

there are also ghosts of lost urbanity -- for example, no one would know east cleveland was one -- being its so emptied out and forgotten today.

hopefully the state will help cleveland annex it out of its misery.

Your image is not showing up, by the way.
I assume you were trying to show this area: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5357...7i16384!8i8192

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

what about during the revolutionary war, how many battles did Cincinnati have again? oh wait, it didnt exist yet.

probably a good time for this graph again.

cincy was the first interior city to get sorta big early on, but once things got rolling, st. louis was really only a decade behind it in terms of growth, and then chicago trailed st. louis by about a decade until the civil war, and then chicago shot off to the stars.

[mrnyc]

^ err, wasn’t cahokia the biggest city in america before those? i mean it was no tenochtitlan, but they say it was a significant city in those days.

[Steely Dan]

^ Cahokia was the biggest deal around WAY back in the day, but it was abandoned around 1350, roughly 4 centuries before the first European explorers first came across the area. At its peak, population estimates range anywhere from 6,000 - 40,000 people. We don't really have anything in the way of a written record for Cahokia, so there's a pretty large blackhole of knowledge about it, hence the really wide range of population estimates.

[mrnyc]

^i wonder if there were any other pre-euro actual cities around of any major size? cahokia couldn’t have been the only one. maybe around the mound builders sites?

[left of center]

Wow, that graph really shows the potentially suspect 1870 St. Louis census numbers. Again, as Steely said, no way to actually confirm anything, but if it wasn't some kind of petty numbers manipulation, then it was one hell of a coincidence that St. Louis's growth accelerated to beat out Chicago by a few thousand

[Steely Dan]

^ the crux of the argument behind the suspicion that st. Louis fudged its 1870 census numbers is the fact that the local leaders in charge of the census there intentionally waited until Chicago released its population figure, and then subsequently released a figure for st . Louis that was just a little bit higher.

Here's a good article about it that also digs a bit into the ill-fated movement spearheaded by st. Louis boosters at the time to try and move the national capital from DC to the banks of the Mississippi river.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/archiv...592e4ba71.html

[mrnyc]

^ thats interesting and makes sense -- there was even an article about it this past april in the wash post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/histo...020-civil-war/