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Deac, I checked on Mapquest and it is roughly 35 miles from Washington to Baltimore. Its over 100 miles from Washington to Richmond.
Now when you can drive 60+ miles an hour you can make it to Richmond in a hour and a half like you said. But that is without traffic and I don't know if you know I-95 but there is often going to be alot of traffic. Certainly something people would not want to do a rush hour commute through every day.
So yes I would say that Baltimore is alot closer to DC than Richmond. I mean look at a map.
I drove from Falls Church to Richmond on a Saturday morning in two hours and I would consider Falls Church to Richmond easier than DC to Richmond.
Alexandria would be a small town. Richmond is likely to stay the same. But the Norfolk area might be a big city rivaling Baltimore.
If Philadelphia was the home of both finance and government, there would be lots of "interplay" between these industries.
Wasn't Alexandria already a bustling town when DC was being made? I think it would have developed into a city like Pittsburgh. Baltimore would probably be a little bigger and nicer. DC takes away some of Baltimore's thunder.
Philadelphia in 1800 was the financial,cultural, and political capital of the USA.
I read a couple articles that Pennsylvania thought they had a lock on the permanent US Capitol being built in Philadephia.6 of the the top 10 most populous towns in 1800 were towns that now make up the city of Philadelphia. They made indepth plans for The Capitol to be built in the Germantown/Chestnut Hill neighborhoods.
NY/Va had the key people though and basically Thomas Jefferson/ James Madison from Va. and Alexander Hamilton from NY(the 3 most powerful people in the US at that time got together and hatched a plan to fleece Philadelphia. The political power ended up in VA/MD and the financial power ended up in NYC. Some powerful and rich Philadlephians including Robert Morris and Ben Franklin had just passed away prior to the decision to move the capitol. If the timing was just a bit different the Capitol may very well have ended up in NW Philadelphia.
Awwww man!!! Haters!!!!
For starters, I probably would not have lived in Germantown as the proximity of the capital building would have (1) resulted in a different land use for the area or (2) priced my family out of the neighborhood. So that would not have been good. But I think Philadelphia would have been a much larger and more vibrant capital than DC simply because it was already a large city during the colonial era. Although government would have been a major industry, I don't think it would have dominated Philadelphia the way it dominates Washington. Given its close proximity to New York, it may have curtailed NYC's growth altogether. Philadelphia at that time was a center of finance too, and the financial industry probably would have grown even more considering that its partner in crime was already there. I'm glad it didn't turn out that way, though. I mean, could you imagine if New York were the financial capital of the United States and the seat of the federal government? Eek would have at least 25 times as many posts as he does today.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 10-06-2010 at 01:06 PM..
The more I think it about, the less I like the idea of Philly being the capital. If Philly had been the capital, it likely would have eclipsed New York as a financial center and thus we would not have a big, cool neighbor to the north. And if the government was in Philly, there'd be no DC, and we'd have one less little, cool neighbor to the south. The thing is, New York is so close to Philly that it would not make sense to have our current arrangement, that is, the financial power in NY and the political power in DC. It likely would have all been packed into one city, which is what you have in London, Paris, and other world capitals.
I'm not sure how much fun the East Coast would be with a diminished NYC and a non-existent DC. It's probably a good thing that we don't have one city serving as both our political and financial centers of gravity.
I think the Philly and NYC metro would merge really quickly with a lot of dense development and infrastructure between the two.
Well one of the potential locations for the Capital was just North of trenton, imagine DC in between these two cities today
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