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In my opinion it's San Francisco because everyone is trapped on an island.
Sure it's a peninsula, but there's mountains to the south with a small strip of habited area that connects the rest.
You have 3 ways in. Golden gate, Bay bridge, or Daly city to the south. Which leaves a trapped sensation and everyone gets stuck in there. Couple it with the urban fabric... it's pretty active. Throughout the whole city you see people walking around on the street. There's very little quiet areas.
NYC is more than just Manhattan. It consists of 2 boroughs on one island (BK/Queens), 2 individual islands, and a peninsula. The size of NYC makes it almost impossible to ever feel "trapped on an island." Also the transit options off the island(s) makes it less of a "trapped" feeling. I felt completely trapped in SF. BART doesn't run at night. MUNI barely leaves the city limits.
And SF city limits are tiny. NYC city limits are 6.5x larger than SF city limits. Plus at night LIRR runs 24/7 into LI, NJT buses run 24/7 into NJ, PATH runs 24/7 into NJ. In SF, you're stuck on that peninsula at night if you don't own a car or take a Lyft. Philly city limits are almost 3x the size of SF city limits with 24/7 transit plus 24/7 PATCO access to South Jersey. Chicago is almost 5x the size of SF city limits, also with 24/7 public transit access.
SF is the only city where you can truly feel "trapped" because it's already absolutely tiny, but then you can't even leave that 7x7 box after a certain time of night unless you have a car or take a Lyft.
The Sunset, Outer Richmond, Oceaview, West Portal, Forest Hill, Cole Valley, Outer Mission, Crocker Amazon, and Excelsior are pretty boring, non-vibrant neighborhoods within the city of SF. They may have a few people walking around, but they're quite residential with long periods of very little activity. They make up 14.302 sq mi of the city, or 30.5% of the entire city.
I'm not saying Philly, Boston, DC, and Chicago don't have large swaths of land that are pretty boring. Philly has several residential-heavy neighborhoods in the Northwest and Northeast. NW DC is pretty quite suburban. Southern parts of Boston are quite residential. NW and far southern neighborhoods in Chicago are very residential. But NYC maintains vibrancy for much further out than any of those. So I wouldn't compare outer neighborhood vibrancy for any of them.
A lot of people like to say that because SF is so small, it stays vibrant throughout basically the entire thing, but that's not true. Even with its tiny footprint, there are still very large portions of the city that are very quiet. Manhattan alone is almost the size of SF and has nothing close to the Sunset or Outer Richmond. The other cities do a better job of maintaining vibrancy away from their urban core IMO considering how much larger their land areas are.
Chicago is known as the second city for it rebuilt itself after the fire, but most know it as the 2nd U.S. city to NYC.
Downtown Chicago and Manhattan are in a class by themselves when it comes to Skyscrapers, downtown skyscraper living, dining, entertainment/shows/musuems.
Obviously Manhattan is bigger, more dense, etc., but if you ask the average tourist the two biggest downtowns that are similar you are gonna get that.
Does not mean better, etc.
Right now most tourists would want to go to NYC, Florida beaches/Disney, Las Vegas, LA for Hollywood, and then maybe San Fan/Chicago.
I agree, Philly is definitely the closest to NY architecturally. Parts of City Center could be neighborhoods in Manhattan or Brooklyn and it would fit right in. Chicago is different architecturally. Only the canyons of the Loop remind me of NYC in a literal way. The similarity to NY is basically the grand big city feel. It's obviously much smaller than NYC, but comes the closer at capturing the huge urban city feel than Philly or any other US city.
Yeah, Chicago has the highrises and Philly the brownstones and general architecture, but neither city really has the neighborhoods full of walk up apartment buildings. Chicago has a lot on the North Side, but they tend to be interspersed with leafier row homes.
Looking back on what I wrote a year ago, my thinking is largely the same. I would refine it a little:
Philly- the most similar to NYC's feel in a literal sense. You could relocate Philly to where Jersey City/Hudson County is and it would fit right in architecturally/culturally as a pretty seamless extension of the NYC.
Chicago- it's pretty different from NYC in many ways. But, it comes the closest to replicating the big city metropolis feel.
SF- Outside of the NE Quadrant SF is nothing like NYC. It's a west coast city. But, the heart of the FiDi/UnionSquare/Tenderloin/Chinatown arguably arguably come the closest to replicating the dense/organic people everywhere feel of places like Chelsea/Gramercy, etc.
Boston- it has the most tenuous claim to feeling like you're in NYC. I can't come up with a measure on it would be the "most like NYC." It feels the smallest. It doesn't match up to NYC in the way Philly does architecturally/built environment standpoint. But, Boston/NYC have some atmospheric similarities as prosperous northeastern coastal cities. If Philly and NYC are twins (albeit a far smaller twin), then NYC and Boston are siblings. They don't look exactly alike. But, you can definitely see the resemblance. FiDi/DTX/Chinatown/Bulfinch all have a vaguely mini-NYC feel. South End can feel a little like Park Slope, Back Bay has something of a mini-UWS/Brooklyn Heights feel.
Looking back on what I wrote a year ago, my thinking is largely the same. I would refine it a little:
Philly- the most similar to NYC's feel in a literal sense. You could relocate Philly to where Jersey City/Hudson County is and it would fit right in architecturally/culturally as a pretty seamless extension of the NYC.
Chicago- it's pretty different from NYC in many ways. But, it comes the closest to replicating the big city metropolis feel.
SF- Outside of the NE Quadrant SF is nothing like NYC. It's a west coast city. But, the heart of the FiDi/UnionSquare/Tenderloin/Chinatown arguably arguably come the closest to replicating the dense/organic people everywhere feel of places like Chelsea/Gramercy, etc.
Boston- it has the most tenuous claim to feeling like you're in NYC. I can't come up with a measure on it would be the "most like NYC." It feels the smallest. It doesn't match up to NYC in the way Philly does architecturally/built environment standpoint. But, Boston/NYC have some atmospheric similarities as prosperous northeastern coastal cities. If Philly and NYC are twins (albeit a far smaller twin), then NYC and Boston are siblings. They don't look exactly alike. But, you can definitely see the resemblance. FiDi/DTX/Chinatown/Bulfinch all have a vaguely mini-NYC feel. South End can feel a little like Park Slope, Back Bay has something of a mini-UWS/Brooklyn Heights feel.
To me they all seem so different. Philly would probably be the closest to Nyc. Boston is designed like a Euro city, roadwise and its so different from the grid in Philly and Ny.
In some ways Baltimore feels like what I imagine an old school NYC.
Arrabers, much stoop activity, grid, grime, crime, little street greenery, large parks, guerilla captialists/ selling laundry detergent, steamed crabs,and clothes on the street in low income areas, busted fire hydrants....
Not the NYC today but I think Baltimroe has some of the feel of the NYC of old just scaled down.
None of them honestly.... they all have bits and pieces, which is what makes NYC so unique excluding it's size.
Chicago's downtown is the only one in the country that even remotely approaches the breadth of Midtown/Lower Manhattan in terms of verticality and sheer scope.
Boston/Philly/SF offer the tight-knit intimacy of small city limits, high structural density, narrow road and people crunching
LA exceeds NYC in terms of visual scope and vastness, due to it's sheer urban expanse but it's built form is incredibly linear relative to NYC's highly core centric built form.
You have to go international to find NYC's closest urban feeling city (arguably London)
None of them honestly.... they all have bits and pieces, which is what makes NYC so unique excluding it's size.
Chicago's downtown is the only one in the country that even remotely approaches the breadth of Midtown/Lower Manhattan in terms of verticality and sheer scope.
Boston/Philly/SF offer the tight-knit intimacy of small city limits, high structural density, narrow road and people crunching
LA exceeds NYC in terms of visual scope and vastness, due to it's sheer urban expanse but it's built form is incredibly linear relative to NYC's highly core centric built form.
You have to go international to find NYC's closest urban feeling city (arguably London)
I feel like its gotta be London.
If we go to the inner city/heart of the city we find Boston is an outlier between NYC CHicago and Philadelphia
Chicago.. When you're walking in certain areas of the Loop, it looks and feels exactly like Manhattan... I would say San Francisco to a lesser degree...
Chicago.. When you're walking in certain areas of the Loop, it looks and feels exactly like Manhattan... I would say San Francisco to a lesser degree...
Yes.
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