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It's widely assumed that the cities that peaked around 1950 and then began declining were at the summit of their powers at their peak. Most of these cities are classified as "rust belt."
Did any of them actually not realize their potential before their decline as assumed? It has to be self-inflicted damage, not "well St. Louis was doing X and then Chicago did Y so...."
This poll was inspired by a YT video I watched where the creator explained how Cincinnati could be so much more but the way the city is planned hinders urban growth.
St. Louis has always been the one that stood out to me. Hard to believe it was once the 4th largest city in the country. I feel like it should have become pretty close to what Chicago is now. It just never happened.
I would say St. Louis and Detroit. Both cities failed to build legacy rail transit, made huge urban renewal blunders, abandoned the core for extreme suburban sprawl. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh have seemed to whether the storm a little better in my opinion. The avoided a lot of the extreme poverty and urban crime that you see in Detroit and St. Louis. Today, I would say Cincinnati and Pittsburgh function well at their current sizes. St. Louis and Detroit would need to literally double their current populations to have a density that matches their infrastructure.
St. Louis has always been the one that stood out to me. Hard to believe it was once the 4th largest city in the country. I feel like it should have become pretty close to what Chicago is now. It just never happened.
Agreed, St. Louis should be like the Boston of the Midwest. Detroit should be something more similar to Philadelphia. De-industrialization and urban renewal really tapered their trajectories.
Detroit should be something more similar to Philadelphia.
^^^I agree with this. And it was at its peak.
As far as the question for this topic itself, it's really subjective. It's hard to imagine what may have been, because of so many different variables that were at play.
I would say St. Louis and Detroit. Both cities failed to build legacy rail transit, made huge urban renewal blunders, abandoned the core for extreme suburban sprawl. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh have seemed to whether the storm a little better in my opinion. The avoided a lot of the extreme poverty and urban crime that you see in Detroit and St. Louis. Today, I would say Cincinnati and Pittsburgh function well at their current sizes. St. Louis and Detroit would need to literally double their current populations to have a density that matches their infrastructure.
St. Louis has a very impressive interurban rail system for the midwest. Are you talking about pre war streetcars?
St. Louis has always been the one that stood out to me. Hard to believe it was once the 4th largest city in the country. I feel like it should have become pretty close to what Chicago is now. It just never happened.
Yeah, I get that feeling too. Did Chicago gain the advantage through annexation? Don't know. Both cities declined but it seems St. Louis has the much more significant geographic location, but times change and rivers became less important.
St. Louis has a very impressive interurban rail system for the midwest. Are you talking about pre war streetcars?
ISTR that, like Pittsburgh did, St. Louis also drew up a plan for rapid transit to serve the city just before World War I.
Pittsburgh took as long as St. Louis did to actually build its light metro system, but unlike Pittsburgh, it had made no attempt to upgrade its streetcar system between that first proposal and the time the new line opened. Pittsburgh still had three (four?) functioning LRT lines that could feed the central subway tunnel by the time the city started work on it in the mid-1970s. St. Louis' last streetcar made its last trip to the carbarn in 1963, and thus the city had to start from scratch when it decided it needed a light metro after all.
The funny thing about Kansas City is, its population is once again approaching its 1970 peak of just over 507,000.
But the city does seem to have lost the momentum it had in the 1960s and early 1970s. The city fathers annexed lots of land from the end of WWII up to the 1970s in anticipation that it would expand out into the cornfields, but they didn't reckon with the same depopulation in the core that St. Louis experienced.
And where voters enthusiastically approved several major public facilities in the 1960s, attempts to build similar facilities now have proven difficult to effect at best. Of course, this could be because the most successful of the facilities the voters did agree to build, the Power & Light District, will be a drain on the city treasury for decades to come, contrary to what its promoters had promised.
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