Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
New York existed but... it was pretty much a village until the mid 19th century.
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NYC had a population of 60,514 in the 1800 census and was the largest US city at the time, (as it has ranked in every US census ever undertaken, though early Philly was technically split among a handful of different municipalities that might've been larger in aggregate at some points in time).
What's more, the city was large and established enough in the 18th century to have served as the nation's capital city from 1785 - 1790.
In 1820, NYC had a population of 123,706 when Chicago was literally a remote fly-speck frontier swamp village trading post barely hanging onto existence with ~100 permanent settlers (a best guess, as the place wasn't significant enough to even register an official census count at the time).
Calling NYC a "village" until the middle of the 19th century, in any way that remotely resembled what Chicago actually was at the time, is being quite disingenuous with the facts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
I think the distinction is that Chicago was not an organized municipality in the colonial era. I don't think that qualifies it as "fastest growing city in the world", though.
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We'll have to agree to disagree.
Chicago flashed into existence like a lightning bolt out of a veritable interior wilderness in a fundamentally different way than NYC and the other east coast colonial cities developed.
Chicago went from a 100 person outpost frontier village on the very edge of civilization to a 1M person metropolis serving as the beating heart of the interior of the nation in just 60 years.
That same 100 to 1M people process took NYC over 2 centuries.