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Kansas City's financial district is the same way. Inside those freeways that surround it there are only about 3,700 people (albeit I'm using walk score, they don't include 2-3 blocks within the freeway to the west).
Atlanta, mostly bordered by the freeway and the convention center has about 13,000 people. The Downtown Atlanta CID, a 4 square mile self-taxing district and includes the outlying downtown neighborhoods from the financial district, has 26,000 people.
I don't know much about Atlanta, so I'm not that familiar with CBD boundaries and sizes of ATL, though it is clearly a bigger city with a lot more development happening and I have no doubt it is as or more walkable than KC.
That said:
KC inside the freeway loop has a population of 6100 in slightly under a square mile. Greater Downtown is 3 square miles and has 20,000 residents.
Location: The Greatest city on Earth: City of Atlanta Proper
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dweebo2220
Sorry--admittedly Century City was a bad comparison. I just meant more tower-focused. Very few places in this country are as soul-deadening as Century City. I would also never say that midtown atlanta was not urban.
To clarify what impresses me about Country Club Plaza is the human scale and civic design qualities/attention to detail (it's a very early suburban shopping center from the 20s--so it was designed from the ground-up to be a town center):
from wikipedia:
Oh, well, if that's what you meant then Atlanta has plenty of that all throughout the city in the neighborhoods that ring Downtown and Midtown. All of them were built in the early 20th century just like Country Club Plaza and are integrated in to the surrounding residential areas as the main retail node.
Oh, well, if that's what you meant then Atlanta has plenty of that all throughout the city in the neighborhoods that ring Downtown and Midtown. All of them were built in the early 20th century just like Country Club Plaza and are integrated in to the surrounding residential areas as the main retail node.
Thanks for the links--I'd never heard of Edgewood before. I love the eclectic feel of the storefronts all painted different colors in Atlanta's town centers, and I 100% prefer these types of neighborhoods (as in I would much rather live there) over somewhere like midtown Atlanta.
I do still think, however that KC's Country Club Plaza is pretty unique. As it was a master-planned shopping district, it has a cohesive style, thoughtful placement of buildings, "civic" features like fountains, public art and other landmarks.
It's the grandfather to the outdoor "lifestyle malls" that have cropped up around the country in recent decades, that blur the line between mall and urban neighborhood (many with residential above the stores).
While I have some aversions to private property masquerading as public space, my biggest qualm with the new stuff is the lack of attention attention to detail. If you go to a new lifestyle mall and look up the facades, the quality of materials will fall as your eye travels up. Oftentimes you can round a corner and come to a blank wall or a sterile parking structure. In the 20s, they took these kinds of things (full pedestrian experience) into account when they built their fantasy malls, and I find it really impressive. I can imagine strolling the blocks of Country Club Plaza and just looking at the buildings, the landscaping, etc.
We don't really have anything comparable to this in Los Angeles--about the only thing that comes close would be Westwood Village which has really been screwed up over the years... or maybe downtown Beverly Hills which lacks a lot of the civic character qualities.
Anyway, forgive my long post--I'm not trying to say that KC is more walkable than Atlanta or anything broad like that... I just wanted to bring up what I find really impressive about KC which is not downtown but Country Club Plaza, which as far as I can tell and from reading is truly a unique/standout district. I'm not sure how well the buildings/neighborhoods surrounding it integrate with the shopping parts, which might be a fault to find with it.
The photo of Atlanta is definitely more impressive.
To be honest, I am a little more impressed by Country Club plaza than by midtown Atlanta, just by virtue of the kinds of things I'm interested ins. Granted, I've never been to KC, but from aerials/streetview, etc the area around country club plaza seems more cohesive as an urban environment than midtown atlanta, which feels more like Century City (auto-oriented tower-centric urban design) to me.
The part I'm most impressed by in Atlanta is the old urban grid southeast of olympic park.
Auto oriented? as there are 3 subway lines that run underground in that area, a large park, lots of residential and office towers u can pretty much get off any of those stations and begin to walk. During the day u can see lots of Ga tech students walking threw or catching the trolley. There are lots of restaurants clubs bars and Gay area in midtown which are all accessible by train. The only thing I see Country club district has over midtown is the shopping that's it. Everyone drives to Country Club plaza they don't have the option of catching a train to that area.
Auto oriented? as there are 3 subway lines that run underground in that area, a large park, lots of residential and office towers u can pretty much get off any of those stations and begin to walk. During the day u can see lots of Ga tech students walking threw or catching the trolley. There are lots of restaurants clubs bars and Gay area in midtown which are all accessible by train. The only thing I see Country club district has over midtown is the shopping that's it. Everyone drives to Country Club plaza they don't have the option of catching a train to that area.
I understand him though...
It has that town like feel with all the shop fronts butting up to the street. It isn't important what is at level 2+.
It is why many people like living in the Virginia-Highland and Decatur.
I think Atlanta's closest equivalent to what he is showing is still in the works and was scaled down. It looks like an upscale development, like the Streets of Buckhead would have been. Buckhead Atlanta has kept some of that.
It is still happening, the parcel map is roughly correct, but there are more apartments and less high-end condos going in. The large price tag has been scaled back.
Had ATL, Dallas, and Houston preserved their pre WW2 stock do you not think these cities would be more walkable? All the so called "new urbansim" that happened from the 60's forward was tear up buildings that were at human scale and made office parks out of them, obviously not all of the southern cities got it that bad but just look at Houston for an instance.
How familiar are you with historic preservation in Atlanta and the other cities mentioned? I don't know a lot about historic structures in Houston/Dallas, but I'm very aware of the large volume of historic buildings in and around Atlanta. You might want to educate yourself before acting as if other cities have destroyed their urban fabric...that isn't even nearly true in the case of Atlanta, where you will find many walkable pre-war areas and neighborhoods below the shiny skyline.
Last edited by JoeTarheel; 03-12-2013 at 08:05 PM..
While midtown Atlanta is vibrant, Downtown Atlanta seems to need more residential. Unless there is activity around the convention center or something, it's dead down there after business hours. I understand the same can be said about Financial districts in NYC, Chicago etc, but it seems like prices would be cheaper to build more residential in downtown vs pretty much only in Midtown and other areas. I can't say I follow Atl development closely though, so that could already be changing.
A common misconception about downtown Atlanta...the financial district is just one of the districts included in downtown (Hotel and Government Districts, Fairlie-Poplar, Castleberry Hill, Georgia State University, Five Points, etc) and in 2010 more than 26,000 residents lived in the 4 square miles designated as downtown. Downtown Atlanta - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
How familiar are you with historic preservation in Atlanta and the other cities mentioned? I don't know a lot about historic structures in Houston/Dallas, but I'm very aware of the large volume of historic buildings in and around Atlanta. You might want to educated yourself before acting as if other cities have destroyed their urban fabric...that isn't even nearly true in the case of Atlanta, where you will find many walkable pre-war areas and neighborhoods below the shiny skyline.
It's half true.
We saved alot and got rid of alot. KC is actually in the same boat as us... in fact... so are most major cities in the US to some degree or another. It was very popular to remove blocks of old buildings to build larger skyscrapers and make way for parking as residents suburbanized.
The other day I was looking at a nice picture map of Atlanta from 1919. You can stare it for hours and find tons of stuff Atlanta still has and find tons of stuff Atlanta got rid of.
Atlanta's downtown, while small, use to look more like the dense brick city's of the northeast in large parts. That was back in the day when postcards termed Atlanta/Georgia the empire City/state of the South. The comparison made some sense back then.
We just have isolated buildings and a few pockets from that era. Granted, I'm proud we saved as much as we did compared to other sunbelt cities.
We saved alot and got rid of alot. KC is actually in the same boat as us... in fact... so are most major cities in the US to some degree or another. It was very popular to remove blocks of old buildings to build larger skyscrapers and make way for parking as residents suburbanized.
The other day I was looking at a nice picture map of Atlanta from 1919. You can stare it for hours and find tons of stuff Atlanta still has and find tons of stuff Atlanta got rid of.
Atlanta's downtown, while small, use to look more like the dense brick city's of the northeast in large parts. That was back in the day when postcards termed Atlanta/Georgia the empire City/state of the South. The comparison made some sense back then.
We just have isolated buildings and a few pockets from that era. Granted, I'm proud we saved as much as we did compared to other sunbelt cities.
Zoom in and look all around downtown. It is a fun map to look at.
Luckily, we still have things like the Candler, Healey, and Flatiron buildings.
Well of course it's all relative...one wouldn't expect every turn of the century building in a growing/developing city to remain intact, but Atlanta has a done an excellent job at preserving many of its more important/iconic structures in addition to large areas of nondescript low-rise structures. There have been tragic losses as well (like every American city), but the losses add up to far less than the saves.
It's just so irritating for someone without any real knowledge of Atlanta history to make assumptions about Atlanta's lack of pre-WWII building stock and act as if most of the city is "new urbanism".
Last edited by JoeTarheel; 03-12-2013 at 08:22 PM..
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