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of course "The Fire" is #1 and nothing could compare to it.
But I'll add a second one to the list:
The Erie Canal: When one thinks of transformational events that shape a city's destiny, none come close to NYC and the Erie Canal, the true propelling point of the city's dominance and influence as it along of the coastal cities now had access to the entire markets to the west, past the Appalachians, of a nation moving westward. It's the Erie Canal that sped New York ahead of eastern rivals Philadelphia and Boston....and the city city never looked back.
So New York, the eastern terminus of the Great Lakes-Erie Canal-Mohawk,Hudon-Atlantic link, rose to dominance.
But what about the western terminus? New York itself had chosen and invested in the very city in the west that serve a similar role as New York....and that city was Chicago.
I would argue the Erie Canal had a bigger impact on Buffalo which of any of the places that people call "the sixth borough" Buffalo is the correct answer. It's
If you note, no team in the city by the bay is called the "San Francisco Naught Sixers" (for the 1906 earthquake/fire), nor is there one known as the "San Francisco 67ers' (from the 1967 summer of lake in Haight Ashbury and GGP).
But there is one called the "San Francisco 49ers" and no one will argue the most important event in San Francisco history took place in 1849 with the discovery of gold at Sutter's nMill.
I would argue the Erie Canal had a bigger impact on Buffalo which of any of the places that people call "the sixth borough" Buffalo is the correct answer. It's
btown, my claim was not related to any other city. I wasn't comparing the impact of the Erie Canal on Buffalo or any other city with Chicago.
When I suggested a "second major event", that second is to Chicago events...in other words, I'm suggesting that after the fire, the second most important event in Chicago history was the opening of the Erie Canal.
Of course, Buffalo was hugely impacted by the opening of the canal and perhaps the city was more affected by it than Chicago was. But i don't see the relevance based on what I had proposed.
btown, my claim was not related to any other city. I wasn't comparing the impact of the Erie Canal on Buffalo or any other city with Chicago.
When I suggested a "second major event", that second is to Chicago events...in other words, I'm suggesting that after the fire, the second most important event in Chicago history was the opening of the Erie Canal.
Of course, Buffalo was hugely impacted by the opening of the canal and perhaps the city was more affected by it than Chicago was. But i don't see the relevance based on what I had proposed.
I was taking "none comes close to NYC and the opening of the Erie Canal" as meaning no one event snapped a city as much as that, when I would argue it wasn't even the city most impacted by the opening of the Erie Canal.
Not an obvious one, but for Pittsburgh, it may well be the War of 1812. That war cut off the supply of manufactured goods from Britain, prompting increases in domestic industrial output. Pittsburgh was a major beneficiary of this trend, and it is not a coincidence that Pittsburgh was incorporated as a city in 1816. The War of 1812 was directly responsible for turning Pittsburgh from a small village where frontier-bound settlers stopped to build riverboats to sail down the Ohio into a major manufacturing city.
For Baltimore, it's probably the battle of Fort McHenry in 1814, which led to our Star-Spangled Banner and was the beginnings of its fastest growth phase, replacing Annapolis as Maryland's main city. It created a nice buffer between the industrial North and the aristocratic south which played a key role in its position in the Civil War, and didn't face reconstruction like cities further south, and warmly embraced industrialization, first through railroads and steam and later steel and canning. The 1904 fire was an important event, but not quite impactful on a grand scale like Chicago's, although it did provide a modern at the time revamped downtown with wider streets and revised building codes. But to facilitate its decline, I'd point to the 1968 riots and freeway revolts. Yes, white flight had been ongoing like in other cities for over a decade by that point, but this lead to a bad '70s before a brief stabilization in the '80s-'90s (but still with a slow decline), before accelerating again in the past 15 years.
For Detroit, it was when the Ford Motor Company introduced the assembly line not long after the first Model T in 1907, combined with the first Great Migration. The 1967 riots were important though that created decay similar to Baltimore, but at least that city for the time being is starting to recover.
While it can be argued that Baltimore was relatively stable during the 1980's, the 1990's were a complete disaster by any measure. In the 90's the city lost 85,000 people, and perhaps more importantly, over 17,000 households. That level of decline hung on through the first couple of years of the 2000's. From 2004 to 2015 the city had very modest population losses. It is well documented that the population has started to plument again in 2016 and 2017, but the dynamics of the losses are very different than in the 1990's. In 1998 only 152 housing units were built in the city - just over 1% of the regional total. That is in contrast to the 2,200 or more units per year that are being built in Baltimore these days - well over 20% of the regional total. In the 90's vacancy was increasing rapidly vs. stable today. Also, in the 90's the city was getting poorer vs. leading the State in year on year increases in income tax receipts (which are still pretty meager.) These days, population losses are driven by extraordinarily large decreases in household sizes - not by abandonment. The household count is up.
I moved to Baltimore during the mid-1980's and I can tell you that there is no panic in Charles Village today like I experienced during 1990's. North Baltimore had an unusually good spring homebuying season this year. Despite similar population trends, the feel of the city incredibly better than in the 1990's.
A few for New York:
— Great blizzard of 1888. Direct reason for building subway.
— Consolidation of the five boroughs into NYC in 1898.
— The Catskill and Delaware aqueducts in 1916 and 1945, respectively. Lots of water!
The blizzard of 1888 I get.
Two colossal events in NYC are the civil war draft riots and the Sept 11 attacks. Those two things have to be the most important events ever to occur in that location IMO.
Here in the Knoxville area I would say the most important and influential events here are the civil war battles for this region and the development of the TVA in the 1930s. Just today I spent the day enjoying a TVA lake and everyday I use power from a TVA dam.
Although I previously posted about Charles Lindbergh building his plane here and actually starting his cross Atlantic journey here I think I didn’t respond correctly to the OP.
Definitely the historic event that changed San Diego was the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even though it wasn’t directly connected to SD at the time the bombing there caused the Pacific fleet to move here and the Navy/Military town that it became and thrived because of it was directly related to this event. San Diego became the region with now the highest number of active duty and retired military in the world and its culture has directly influenced the city ever since.
For Birmingham, the Civil Rights troubles of 1963. Birmingham and Atlanta were roughly comparable in size at that time.
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