I know I'm going to be accused of homerism for my No. 1 choice, but I think it highly defensible:
1.
Kansas City (Mo.) Don't take it from me - take it from French novelist and biographer Andre Maurois, who wrote the following in his journal in 1947:
Quote:
''Who in Europe, or in America for that matter, knows that Kansas City is one of the loveliest cities on earth? And yet it is true.
''The downtown section is like any other in the United States, with its violent contrasts of skyscraper and wasteland. But the residential section is a masterpiece of city planning. The streets follow the curves of the hills or the winding of streams.''
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(You'll find this quote reproduced in full in
this rather wide-eyed appreciation of the city that ran in
The New York Times in 1985.)
The streets he refers to in that passage are the city's famed boulevards, a green lattice that follows the terrain rather than the surveyor's grid and knits the city together so well that its freeways seem superfluous. (Congestion indices have shown that the city has the least traffic congestion of any large city in not only the U.S. but the Western Hemisphere.) The city's boulevards and the spectacular parks they lead to were one of the crowning achievements of crusading
Kansas City Star founder William Rockhill Nelson, who also (along with schoolteacher Mary Atkins) endowed what is quite possibly the finest art museum located in a city of less than 1,000,000, and maybe even better than a few of those in those larger cities. Besides being much greener than just about all of its Midwestern peers and many on the coasts as well, the city also punches above its weight on a number of fronts, including nightlife, arts and culture generally, and food (not just barbecue).
2.
San Francisco. There is no more spectacularly situated city in the United States. Its many hills offer some fabulous vistas, the one from the Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill perhaps the best known, and there's nothing like walking in one direction on the Golden Gate Bridge, then turning around while the fog lifts as you travel in the other direction. In terms of appearance, it strikes me as the most Mediterranean of American cities (once you subtract all the skyscrapers in the downtown). Its weather, however, borders on the strange (Mark Twain once said "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," and I don't think he was too far off the mark). And the effect of all this wonderfulness is to produce a citizenry that is astonishingly smug and self-satisfied, which is why, if I had to live on the West Coast, I'd rather live in...
3.
Seattle. I hadn't seen a city as green as my forever hometown until I laid eyes on this one. If Chicago is the "urbs in horto" (the "city in a garden"), then Seattle is the "urbs in sylvania" (the "city in the woods"). Mount Rainier makes a spectacular backdrop for the city skyline, though you have to be in just the right locations for it to work, and it has some pretty good hills of its own. And its residents strike me as much more down-to-earth than San Franciscans are, which for me makes all the difference.
4.
Boston. The Charles River Basin and adjacent Back Bay neighborhood together comprise one of the most attractive core cityscapes in the country, and when viewed from the Cambridge bank of the Charles, they make a great foreground for the two tallest skyscrapers (in the Back Bay) and the cluster of towers downtown. Boston is also blessed with a chain of green - the "Emerald Necklace" of parkways that form a ring around much of the core city - and it also has islands in Boston Harbor that offer both a respite from and a great view of the bustling city center.
5.
Washington, D.C. There's nothing in the country that rivals its monumental core along the National Mall, one of the best civic improvement projects of the City Beautiful era, and its residential districts - even the ones close to the city center - are unusually bosky. Once again, this city also has some notable linear parks, most notably Rock Creek, though they aren't as thoroughly knit into the city fabric as they are in KC or Boston. No matter: those diagonal avenues Pierre L'Enfant put into the city plan to frustrate advancing armies (fat lot of good they did in the War of 1812) and the resulting traffic circles where they meet mean that this city is chock full of impressive vistas, including many that do not terminate as Pennsylvania Avenue's does. 'Tis a pity the city is populated mainly by insufferable Official Washingtonians.
6.
Pittsburgh. Yes, Pittsburgh, the only rival I've yet run across to San Francisco for the title of most spectacularly situated city in the United States. No approach to a major American downtown rivals the one to Pittsburgh from the south on I-279: You disappear into the side of a hill and emerge on the other with the Golden Triangle laid out right in front of you, point end first, on the other end of a bridge. Like San Francisco and Seattle, hills define this city too, and the disappearance of the steel mills means you can actually see things from them now. Unfortunately, the disappearance of the steel mills means that some of what you see in Pittsburgh is vast swaths of empty territory along the two rivers that meet there to form the Ohio. I know the city now falls below the population threshold the OP set forth, but that's also due to the departure of the steel mills, so I'm including it anyway; besides, even though its surrounding region remains seriously depressed, the city itself is on the mend.
7.
Chicago. Unrivaled for urban beaches, which stretch for several miles to the north and south of the Loop. The view along Lake Michigan, especially from the Loop north, is perhaps the most "American" of any large city, dominated as it is by skyscrapers and apartment towers. (Yes, New York's collection of these is even bigger, but there's not as much for them to play against.) It has several attractive tree-lined parkways, one of which lies to the south of the Loop. There is a marked contrast between the North Side and South Side when it comes to streetscapes - the University of Chicago campus, former 1893 World's Fair midway to its south, and residential district to its immediate north are islands in an otherwise bleak cityscape save for that parkway I mentioned. I hope the powers that be work on this.
8.
Toronto. The city's come a long way since its City Hall was built in 1965; its two curved towers were deliberately made different heights because there were no taller buildings in the city at the time. They're now dwarfed by newer skyscrapers, with the CN Tower serving as an exclamation point. Its lakefront seems to me less well sculpted than Chicago's, though, and it only has one green ribbon that I saw in the form of the Don Valley Parkway.
9.
Philadelphia. Again, a city that has made some significant strides on the skyline front. But those skyscrapers rest atop a foundation of some of the most elegant and gracious residential streets in any American city's downtown (and there are lots of these: only New York and Chicago have more people living in its downtown than Philadelphia has). Society Hill, the urban renewal project that
didn't just flatten an entire neighborhood, oozes 18th- and 19th-century charm, and Old City to its north has that SoHo-ish industrial-chic ambience down cold. However: Even though it's home to one of the nation's largest urban parks and the best urban wilderness in the United States, its tree cover is sorely lacking, and as a result, many of the city streets outside the core have a severe, barren appearance.
10.
New Orleans. No Spanish moss, but it doesn't need any; it has loads of that languid Southern charm without it. Its French accent makes it stand out from every other large city in the country, not only in the French Quarter but in the Garden District as well. Its wide avenues (St. Charles, Carrollton, Elysian Fields, Canal Street...) may not be linear parks, but they're landscaped as if they were. I understand, though, that Hurricane Katrina laid some of its hardscrabble inner-city neighborhoods low. I wonder how their rebuilding has changed them - for the better, I hope.
I'd include
Savannah, Ga., and
Charleston, S.C., among the top 10 if they were large enough, but they're not. I'd like to visit Cincinnati someday; until then, I'll wait to pass judgment on it, but I suspect it merits honorable mention, as would Louisville, Ky.
Astute observers might notice one element that I pay particular attention to in assessing the relative beauty of cities. What is it?
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