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OK, it's about time someone came up with a good list here for once, you know one FREE of biases!
1) New York City
2) Chicago
3) San Francisco
4) LA
5) Houston
6) Dallas
7) Washington DC
8) Boston
9) Philly
10) Seattle
10A would be Atlanta, just missing the cut
There, it only took 6 pages of posts here to get a good list
Keep the opinion to yourself. Here is the view of 60k+ Americans on how "worldly" the people are in 25 major US cities
People
Worldly
Rank Score City
1 4.55 Washington, D.C.
2 4.54 San Francisco
3 4.51 New York
4 4.34 Boston
5 4.34 Seattle
6 4.19 Chicago
7 4.16 Portland, Oregon
8 4.13 Miami
9 4.08 Austin
10 4.05 Santa Fe
11 3.99 San Diego
12 3.98 Minneapolis/St. Paul
13 3.93 New Orleans
14 3.92 Honolulu
15 3.91 Charleston
16 3.85 Denver
17 3.79 Las Vegas
18 3.77 Orlando
19 3.75 Los Angeles
20 3.71 Philadelphia
21 3.65 San Antonio
22 3.63 Atlanta
23 3.57 Nashville
24 3.50 Phoenix/Scottsdale
25 3.32 Dallas/Fort Worth
I've seen that Travel + Leisure list every year, and each year I have to wonder more and more where they find these people with these ridiculous opinions. Austin #9 most wordly?? I about fell off my chair (and yes I've lived there). Sorry.
I guess I'd agree with you about Austin. Still, I was more or less okay with this list until I got to Santa Fe. Santa Fe? I mean, maybe it's a hip little city, but worldly? The problem with lists like this is that too many members of the general public are likely to rate cities based on hearsay and long-held reputations, not on any facts about the actual present-day character of different places.
Cosmopolitan to me means martini-sipping yuppies driving BMW's and living in downtown flats. In addition to having a large worldly, foreign-born population, prominent airport, in additoon to a business/economic mecca. THIS IS COSMOPOLITAN.
This is NOT: Seattle, Baltimore, Miami or San Diego.
Ummm yeah. I can't speak for Houston, but Dallas' metropolitan area is home to over 10,000 corporate headquarters making the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex the largest corporate headquarter concentration in the United States.
In addition, the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is the world's third busiest airport. Couple this with Dallas being the aforementioned third fashion capital of the US (behind NYC and LA), and more upscale shopping and restaurants per capita than any other US city, I'm still scratching my head why some of you keep delegating DFW culturally "backwards".
DFW really is the major city of for it's region (south/southwest), which can't be said for Miami or Seattle.
I find it insulting that you can suggest Seattle or Miami is anywhere near par with Dallas.
First off, the person arguing that Washington is the economic capital of the West Coast over California is a little off. I don't know the exact number, but California's economy is bigger than a significant number of countries.
Anyway - this issue of Dallas not being considered cosmopolitan is obviously very touchy for you, F355. I know how proud Dallas folk are of their city. No one's saying it's a back water. It's a major global economic force. That doesn't necessarily mean it's cosmopolitan.
Dallas thrives as a massive suburb, so the people drawn to that suburban living are going to perceive cosmopolitan differently than those drawn to more urban centers, so don't get offended. It's just really hard to have an auto-dependent sprawling city on the scale that Dallas is generate the kind of layered cultural sophistication necessary for cosmopolitan culture. People retire to their large homes and drive into their shiny office complexes. They don't call a certain style of McMansion home a North Dallas for nothing.
Also, corporate headquarters don't make a city cosmo. It just makes a lot of office parks surrounded by parking lots or big shiny buildings downtown that remain more or less isolated from the surrounded community. They also tend to attract a rather homogenous type of individual. (Generalizing here)
Upscale shopping and dining don't inherently make a city cosmopolitan. That just might mean there are a lot of malls. As a matter of fact, upscale anything just means there's money. It doesn't mean those people are worldly or developing / supporting different layers of arts and culture from a global perspective. Perhaps there is quite a bit of this in Dallas. I know in Houston the culture is more or less shipped in or paid for by the big corporations. It has great theatre, great music, great everything a vibrant city could hope to have, but it doesn't percolate up from a vibrant and layered culture. Maybe Dallas is different.
Having the busiest airport might have a lot more to do with Dallas being in the middle of the country and having a lot of flight layovers coming and going. That's one thing that makes Chicago O'Hare and Atlanta so busy - not necessarily just people coming to the city.
Lastly, being the economic center of a region is just an economic force, not a cultural force. That's different. One could argue Miami is a cultural force. One could just as easily argue it is not. Who knows?
You'll disagree with everything I've written, I'm sure. I'm not trying to insult your city. I've been there. It's fine if you like cars.
It's amazing to me how everyone seems to have forgot Orlando, it offers tremendous international services and presence as it is a top draw. Competes with NY as a main destination in the US.
Also Las Vegas is up there in those terms along with San Fran, DC, Boston, Dallas, Houston.
Cosmopolitan isn't about how many mouse-ear and argile sock clad tourists land in a city. They come and go and leave nothing.
DC, for example, has 20 million tourists a year. While boosting its economy quite a bit, they contribute little to nothing to its cosmopolitanism. As a matter of fact, they are mostly either mocked or ignored by the citizens of the District.
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