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Who said Boston is number 1? All i said was Boston ranks closer to SF than many people will think.
or
that Boston's numbers will surprise a good number of people.
Bostons' tech is oriented toward's medicine, defense and it's universities... Obviously SF is very strong in defense as well..... One thing i strongly admire San Francisco for is the host of turnkey legal, marketing, and organizational services to help startups move forward with lightning speed.... By comparison, Boston is far behind SF in this area.
and yes, Red John's list was fantastic and thoughtful, even if he craps on Boston like a horse's ass.
here's a short drone vid of Fort Point Channel and Rose Kennedy Greenway.
and yes, Red John's list was fantastic and thoughtful, even if he craps on Boston like a horse's ass.
I think Boston is a fine city. Nothing wrong with it. I was there as recent as yesterday morning. I spent three days in Greater Boston, two in the city itself and one on the coast. I think it is a fantastic city and have always maintained that. It has one of my favorite street-level feels in all of America, along with Chicago and New York. Especially its peak high density areas in the core of Boston. Few streets as beautiful as Newbury.
My only actual criticism for Boston has always been that its smaller than I'd have liked for it to be and that it is cold. Boston nor its people have any control of the latter, so I don't hold that against them. I do get a sense though that Bostonians want their city to remain the size it is now and that they're averse to becoming a significantly larger metropolis. That's a shame, with the way Boston's core is built, I'd have liked for it to be 3X larger, it would've had a spectacular feel to it. I do like visiting Boston, even though I'm not sure I could live there. The San Francisco Bay Area, in contrast, appears to embrace getting larger, more so the rest of the Bay Area than San Francisco the city itself but the region seems to want to be a large scale draw. It is very good at it too right now.
I think Boston is the #6 most important city in all of America. Any other country in the world and it would've been in the Top 5.
Boston is a very influential city in specific fields but it is not as influential or important as San Francisco.
And, OP, you really shouldn't be too concerned by Boston's current lack of prestige. Boston hasn't been among the top of the top cities in the nation since 1730. However, it has managed to stay surprising relevant for a very very long time.
If someone in 1920 had suggested that Boston was more influential than Detroit or Saint Louis, they probably would've been ridiculed just as much as someone in 2016 who suggests that Boston is more relevant than SF or DC.
Now there's no reason to think that SF and DC will end up going the way of STL and Detroit. My point here is that Boston has done very well for itself over the last 4 centuries regardless of it losing a spot in the top 5, and that's something to be more or less proud of I guess.
I do get a sense though that Bostonians want their city to remain the size it is now and that they're averse to becoming a significantly larger metropolis. That's a shame, with the way Boston's core is built, I'd have liked for it to be 3X larger, it would've had a spectacular feel to it.
What would you have us do exactly?
Tear down people's homes in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan in order to build modern apartment buildings and highrises?
The city of Boston already did that once. In the 1950s the city of Boston tore down the entire West End in order to build highrises and trendy brutalist buildings. That decision is currently thought to be one of the biggest mistakes in all of Boston's history, and one that won't be repeated any time soon.
We're currently building up the Seaport, Fenway, Northpoint, Kendall Square areas but in general there just isn't enough build able space for us to increase the size of the city's core by a factor of 3 without tearing a lot of stuff down.
Top 1000 Most Visited Art Museum Exhibitions in the World by Annual Attendance, 2014:
+ San Francisco Bay Area:
- Matisse from SFMoMA (358,369)
- Project Los Altos: SFMoMA in Silicon Valley (314,048)
- David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition (239,462)
- Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George (200,484)
- The Art of Bulgari: La Doke Vita and Beyond (174,397)
- Modernism from the National Gallery of Art (110,108)
- Anders Zoom: Sweden’s Master Painter (97,895)
- Yoga: the Art of Transformation (81,860)
- Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg (68,099)
+ Greater Boston:
- Jamie Wyeth (177,986)
- John Singer Sargent: Water Colours (175,686)
- Quilts and Colour (137,466)
- Boston Loves Impressionism (131,565)
- She Who Tells a Story (115,671)
- Magna Carta (80,973)
- Visiting Masterpieces (51,938)
+ San Francisco Bay Area:
- American Conservatory Theater (33rd Tony Awards, 1979)
- San Francisco Mime Troupe (41st Tony Awards, 1987)
- Berkeley Repertory Theater (51st Tony Awards, 1997)
+ Greater Boston:
- Trinity Repertory Company (35th Tony Awards, 1981)
- American Repertory Theater (40th Tony Awards, 1986)
- Huntington Theater Company (67th Tony Awards, 2013)
Allow the free market to dictate what remains and what gets knocked down. Allow development and developers to build to their capacity without the stringent opposition from NIMBYs and the like. NIMBYism has a positive purpose on some occasions, keeping urban blight and questionable facilities out of desired areas but from my viewpoint with American cities, it serves as an impediment to the evolving urban fabric of the city by keeping it limited in size and scope or delaying rapid infill. Cities with strict zoning and restrictive ordinances already have put forth their requirements to developers on how to design their infill, if they meet those requirements, then it is fair game and it should be allowed to get built without the NIMBY opposition that often comes with it. That's how the free market should work.
Toronto and Sydney are able to do what they do by burying the opposition, I can't speak for Toronto but in Sydney's case it is done at the city government level. This is why both are enlarging their cores, becoming more structurally dense, and increasing their respective core densities at much more rapid pace than any American city currently.
As soon as Sydney came to realize that its lack of supply in housing is putting stress on renters in the city and keeping a larger number people out and unable to enter, it started giving more leeway to residential developers. Some in Sydney still oppose development but have increasingly become much more powerless to do much about it. The city's track record in the last 5-6 years is a complete 180 of what it had been the 30 years prior to that.
These metropolises are more or less "in the same size range" as Boston in the present or maybe just a smidgen to decent bit larger, but if you come back and revisit the topic in just 10 years from now, it'll feel different, they'll feel a pretty good bit larger.
Last edited by Trafalgar Law; 08-21-2016 at 04:52 PM..
Allow the free market to dictate what remains and what gets knocked down. Allow development and developers to build to their capacity without the stringent opposition from NIMBYs and the like. NIMBYism has a positive purpose on some occasions, keeping urban blight and questionable facilities out of desired areas but from my viewpoint with American cities, it serves as an impediment to the evolving urban fabric of the city by keeping it limited in size and scope or delaying rapid infill. Cities with strict zoning and restrictive ordinances already have put forth their requirements to developers on how to design their infill, if they meet those requirements, then it is fair game and it should be allowed to get built without the NIMBY opposition that often comes with it. That's how the free market should work.
Toronto and Sydney are able to do what they do by burying the opposition, I can't speak for Toronto but in Sydney's case it is done at the city government level. This is why both are enlarging their cores, becoming more structurally dense, and increasing their respective core densities at much more rapid pace than any American city currently.
As soon as Sydney came to realize that its lack of supply in housing is putting stress on renters in the city and keeping a larger number people out and unable to enter, it started giving more leeway to residential developers. Some in Sydney still oppose development but have increasingly become much more powerless to do much about it. The city's track record in the last 5-6 years is a complete 180 of what it had been the 30 years prior to that.
These metropolises are more or less "in the same size range" as Boston in the present or maybe just a smidgen to decent bit larger, but if you come back and revisit the topic in just 10 years from now, it'll feel different, they'll feel a pretty good bit larger.
NIMBYism is far worse in the Bay Area than any other major US city. If SF has been growing faster than Boston, it's only because the underlying pressure for change/growth is tremendous. Without NIMBYism here, we'd easily see another 100k housing units (housing 200k residents) built within the next decade
Top 15 US Colleges by Medals Earned,
Rio 2016 Summer Olympics Stanford 25
UC Berkeley 19
USC 18
Florida 13
Texas 11
Georgia 10
UCLA 9
Indiana 7
Penn State 7
UConn 6
Oregon 6
West Virginia 6
Arkansas 5
Tennessee 5
Washington 5
Last edited by stanley-88888888; 08-21-2016 at 10:31 PM..
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