Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
I think Montreal nibbles at the top 5 for some people, even in the US. Especially if you exclude Mexico City as "North America".
I also think San Francisco would appear on a lot of people's "top 5" lists, perhaps moreso than Philadelphia or even Boston.
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As a city to be experienced through the senses, through a love of cities, through an aesthetic sensibility... sure. I'll bite.
On the terms of the game that was once played from St. James Street? Not even close. New York and Los Angeles are a given. DC is the capital of a superpower. The Bay Area is the capital of tech, Chicago is a metro of 10 million and sets commodity prices for the continent.
Toronto can peek into this door given its mining power and status as the Canadian metropolis. But Boston has Harvard & MIT and a ton of assets under management as well.
Montreal is a great city, one of North America's finest in terms of history, architecture, culture and liveliness. But it is not a seat of very much power or wealth by continental standards.
Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Miami all have higher metro GDPs than Quebec as a whole.
Mirabel was a vision from a time where you might have had a 50 million annual passenger airport in Montreal. It was planned at a time when Montreal was home to Canada's largest (and fourth-largest) bank, now since departed. We can say with full confidence and some accuracy that Montreal has flourished since abandoning (being abandoned by) the metropolitan power game, that the oligarchs were extractive and unjust, even that it was a historical necessity for reasons related to the French fact in North America, and that the best is yet to come.
But we can't honestly pretend Montreal is a top-tier North American city in any sort of empirical economic realm. Something changed. And Mirabel, to me, was the last stray fragment of the previous circumstance.
(In the resistance to this point, I must say, I detect a kind of willed unreality surrounding what Montreal has and doesn't have...)