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Midtown is its own beast. It's a total separate neighborhood entity. Would be example of Atlanta's downtown 2.0: Gulch and point south
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Originally Posted by the topper
In Dallas case: Uptown is built an offshoot to downtown when they built the American Arena and high rises surrounding it. In Philly: Center City East was a no man zone recently as 2010. They revitalized the whole area with shops, restaurants, museums, theaters, high rises and etc. It qualifies as 2.0. University is separate neighborhood entity.
As usual, you simply don't know what the heck you're talking about.
I'd even say you could argue that Boston's Back Bay is it's original "Downtown 2.0." It's so old and established at this point that it's not comparable to the newness of others here. And the gap between Back Bay and the Financial District continues to fill in.
But I would agree with the Seaport and Kendall (no reason to exclude it). Kendall has been around for quite some time, and it continues to grown and boom. The Seaport is truly a brand new neighborhood and peripheral downtown. In the past 15 years, it's gone from parking lots and rail yards to the hottest neighborhood in the city. Tens of millions of square feet of office, residential, and retail space have been added. It definitely belongs on this list.
Though all these areas border each other, really. I think the average person visiting Boston wouldn't walk from Copley to Faneuil Hall and feel like they ever left downtown and reemerged in another one. For Kendall and Seaport all you have to do is cross a bridge.
In Dallas case: Uptown is built an offshoot to downtown when they built the American Arena and high rises surrounding it.
That would be Victory Park, not technically Uptown. Victory Park was built more recently (circa 2004), whereas the urban development of Uptown can be traced back to at least the mid-80s. It was only recently (circa 2012) that Uptown & Victory Park became more connected with Downtown and arguably an offshoot.
Though all these areas border each other, really. I think the average person visiting Boston wouldn't walk from Copley to Faneuil Hall and feel like they ever left downtown and reemerged in another one. For Kendall and Seaport all you have to do is cross a bridge.
You can definitely make that case for Back Bay and the Financial District. Boston's consistently dense, so you'll never fully escape that when walking between Back Bay/Financial District. If that's your argument, you could make the same one for University City/Center City, The Loop/River North, or San Francisco's Financial District/ Rincon Hill, etc.
I would still consider Back Bay/the Financial District to be distinct, even from the perspective of a pedestrian making that walk. That walk is over a mile and a half and the Common/Public Garden, and the historic, relatively low-rise development around it is a distinct barrier between the two areas.
I would also say you can make the case for Seaport and the Financial District too if you want. But the same thing would have to apply to the Loop/River North in Chicago which is separated by a narrower physical barrier than the Ft. Point Channel which separates the FiDi and Seaport. And it's really hard to make the argument for continuity between Back Bay and the Seaport which would highlight the fact that it's a pretty distinctly separate area.
Kendall is the one where I don't think it can really even be debated. It's very much a distinct and separate central business district. Not only is it separated by a wide body of water (the Longfellow Bridge is nearly 1/2 mile on its own), but there's no way to walk from Kendall directly to downtown Boston without having to pass through some residential areas. If you're walking from the Financial District, you've got to go down Cambridge Street - essentially running the length of Beacon Hill (all residential), and the West End (hospital/residential). It's not a "downtown" area and any visitor walking through that stretch would know they've left downtown Boston. If you walk from Copley, you've got to walk through block after block of residential brownstone, cross a highway, a 1/2 mile bridge, another highway, and a university campus before you get there. No matter how you do it, there's very clear transition and a number of distinct, defining barriers in between.
River North isn't Chicago's second downtown. It's one of several neighborhoods that bordered downtown that eventually got incorporated into an ever growing downtown. Even decades ago it was still home to to Wrigley Building and Merchandise Mart, while Streeterville had Tribune Tower, and Gold Coast had the Hancock, etc.
USRoute10 makes a reference to New Center in Detroit. I had read in an urban planning book that New Center could be viewed as the prototype of the 'edge city.' This is an independent business/office district which includes corporate offices, white collar employment, and a retail sector. Since WWII with the growth of suburbia combined with the decline of many CBDs, edge cities have been located in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas.
Though all these areas border each other, really. I think the average person visiting Boston wouldn't walk from Copley to Faneuil Hall and feel like they ever left downtown and reemerged in another one. For Kendall and Seaport all you have to do is cross a bridge.
Kendall is on the other side of the West End/Beacon Hill and across a rather long bridge. I would say it’s distinct. The other two you can compare to Midtown/Downtown Atlanta technically different but there is no real neighborhood separating them so I’d say they are the same.
I agree. Using Seattle as an example, people here often refer to the "Central Business District" ("CBD") and the "South Lake Union / Denny Triangle" districts as distinct neighborhoods, but really they are all part of the same one-square mile downtown center, making their distinctions arbitrary. They are often referred to as distinct districts because the tech / Amazon growth has focused in the north part of Seattle's downtown whilst the southern part of downtown is mostly Seattle's civic center with governmental and legal firms being located here. But absent the arbitrary naming distinctions, they are all really just part of "downtown Seattle." Plus, it is not as though Seattle is like Manhattan where urban development spans miles upon miles of land where neighborhood distinctions makes sense. Seattle's downtown is roughly 1 mile east-to-west by 2 miles north-to-south. That's not large enough to warrant making every 0.5 miles of land a distinct and separate neighborhood. Our downtown is roughly the size of Manhattan's Midtown neighborhood.
Portland is a similar story. Downtown Portland is roughly one square mile. The "Pearl District" is the northern part of that square mile downtown. This area was once industrial warehouses and was referred to as "Northwest Industrial Triangle." Around the 2000's, probably as a way to drive up business and real estate development, the area was renamed the "Pearl District" which is more marketable of a name than "NW Industrial Triangle." But just because land owners rebranded the general area, this doesn't make this area a separate district. It's all just part of downtown Portland.
I'd call the Denny Triangle a natural expansion of the CBD.
South Lake Union I'd put with other fringe districts, whether they're more office, research, residential, hospital, and/or event focused...Lower Queen Anne, Belltown, the dense parts of Capitol Hill, First Hill, the ID, Pioneer Square. These are part of greater Downtown, but not part of the core CBD.
Kendall is on the other side of the West End/Beacon Hill and across a rather long bridge. I would say it’s distinct. The other two you can compare to Midtown/Downtown Atlanta technically different but there is no real neighborhood separating them so I’d say they are the same.
Yes but it's not like the bridge is a neighborhood. It is mostly distinct looking in that it's much more "modern" looking. As a Bostonian, I'm not saying these are all "downtown"; of course, I would never tell someone to meet me "downtown" to mean Back Bay or the Seaport, etc. But when I think about cities with two downtowns, I don't really think Boston either.
If we treat Boston Common as the center of "downtown Boston", it's 1.6 miles to Kendall, 1.6 miles to the Seaport, 0.8 miles to Copley. Compare that to the 4.9 miles between Public Square and University Circle (my earlier example of Cleveland). If you're in Cleveland, it's 1.5 miles from the main stretch of bars in the Flats to Playhouse Square. Just about the same distance as the Boston examples. But it's all downtown and continuous.
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