Philadelphia surpasses Chicago as the 2nd largest downtown in the US! (map, place)
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Isn't the effectiveness of using the city hall method for measuring population dependent on where city hall is located in a city? What if city hall isn't in the middle of downtown? What if it's barely downtown at all? Isn't it better to measure from the middle of downtown?
Isn't the effectiveness of using the city hall method for measuring population dependent on where city hall is located in a city? What if city hall isn't in the middle of downtown? Isn't it better to measure from the middle of downtown?
Where city hall is located is irrelevant to this thread topic.
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What if it's barely downtown at all?
huh?
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Isn't it better to measure from the middle of downtown?
It would be interesting to see the central contiguous 6-8 sq-miles of peer cities: Bos, SF, Chi, and maybe LA. This 2nd largest downtown designation seems to suffer from somewhat arbitrary construction.
The majority of this "downtown Philly" definition is composed of quiet, tightly packed 2/3 story rowhouses. Vine to South Street seems like a more reasonable definition for "downtown Philly" based on a typical downtown environment.
Philly 8 sq miles is probably a little bigger than Boston, given that Philly holds it's density better. Maybe even higher than Chicago (for now) given the big underdeveloped areas that suround greater downtown Chicago. But, I find it highly unlikely that Philly's 8 sq miles is denser than SF's, given SFs cohesive density and vast tracts of 5-7 story walk up apartments.
This is hard to imagine with all of Chicago's restored lofts and 50-60-70-80-90+ story residential towers. 2 miles from city hall is also pretty generous. In Chicago's case, in 0.5 miles going East you hit a lake, so there's one limit. Also, the scope of Chicago's downtown is soooo much larger than Philly's. In the one case, with what is left over as land within that 2 mile radius of Chicago City Hall, that is mostly legitimately "downtown" if you will for all intents and purposes. Also want to point out that there is 3x as much office space and I don't know how much more retail in that radius in Chicago, not to mention institutional uses. Being the bigger city.
In Philadelphia's case, a 2 mile radius includes East Passyunk, Bella Vista, and other South Philly neighborhoods (not to speak of their lesser equivalents north of CC). Would anyone legitimately claim they live "downtown" if they live in Bella Vista or Kensington or Passyunk, etc etc? I'd say, in residential terms, a neighborhood like Rittenhouse is certainly downtown, but Philly has a much smaller downtown than Chicago so what's actually "downtown" is likely just an adjacent neighborhood that you can walk to downtown from within 15-30 minutes. It'd be like calling South Boston "downtown" or Pacific Heights in San Francisco "downtown" (heck you'd be hard pressed to get any folks in Nob Hill, Russian Hill, or North Beach to say they live "downtown" even though many probably walk 10-25 minutes to work downtown).
Finally, by nearly any metric, according to this report, Center City Philly is not as large as NYC - Midtown, NYC - Downtown, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, or Boston. According to this report, there are 11,210 hotel rooms in Center City. Compare that to the 40,000 in DT Chicago or the 25,000+ in downtown San Francisco (33,000 in SF overall), 29,000 in DC, and 22,000 in Boston + Cambridge. According to this report, there is 43 million sf office space between CC and University City. Using same source (Cushman & Wakefield), compare that to 65.3 million sf in Boston before Cambridge, 75.4 million sf in San Francisco, 107.5 million sf in DC, and 126.2 million sf in Chicago.
Where city hall is located is irrelevant to this thread topic.
huh?
Not really
It does matter. There are plenty of cities with city halls not located in, or even near the center of the central business district. I do think the report does try to remedy that.
It's quite funny to see people make excuses. Look, we all know Chicago is a great city but you gotta give credit to Philly on this one. Center City has improved so dramatically over the last 20 years. It was inevitable that it was going to surpass downtown Chicago in population. It was only a matter of time.
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