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And we have no reason to obsess over a city that already obsesses over being the smaller version of another city.
I don't know your age and race, but trust me when I say: you'll find more Baltimore influences in Philly than you'll find Philly influences on Baltimore.
Most people know you're a know you're a troll at this point, but I've got some time.
One might assert that Baltimore has been "obsessed" with Philly since Baltimore's inception; considering Baltimore's housing stock is essentially a love letter to Philadelphia. At least DC rowhomes tried to have some sort of originality (though some of them remind me of a Philly row and a NY brownstone mixed together).
And when thinking of the word obsessed, you sure do find your way to post/comment in a lot of Philadelphia related threads, and a lot of times randomly inserting Baltimore. Anyone familiar with your posts (especially the Philly posters) know this. You also speak a lot about how often you travel to Philadelphia, and from my experience that tends to be the case with a lot of Baltimoreans; a lot of them actually love/fancy Philly, just like you.
Just confess your love for Philly and move on, you're not fooling anyone. It's not that deep KB.
Most people know you're a know you're a troll at this point, but I've got some time.
One might assert that Baltimore has been "obsessed" with Philly since Baltimore's inception; considering Baltimore's housing stock is essentially a love letter to Philadelphia. At least DC rowhomes tried to have some sort of originality (though some of them remind me of a Philly row and a NY brownstone mixed together).
And when thinking of the word obsessed, you sure do find your way to post/comment in a lot of Philadelphia related threads, and a lot of times randomly inserting Baltimore. Anyone familiar with your posts (especially the Philly posters) know this. You also speak a lot about how often you travel to Philadelphia, and from my experience that tends to be the case with a lot of Baltimoreans; a lot of them actually love/fancy Philly, just like you.
Just confess your love for Philly and move on, you're not fooling anyone. It's not that deep KB.
You don't have an argument. That's why you prefaced your post with "most people know you're a troll at this point."
You came in here like or post matters or something.
I don't think the African American population of Baltimore ..... gravitates toward Nashville and Country, Bluegrass or Rockabilly Southern music? Really, Country music is nearly as prevalent in PA as the South today. Outside of areas of higher African and Latino populations. Especially as much of PA shares Appalachia to. But doesn't make it more Southern.
I have no doubt more suburban and rural Maryland can? But Urban Baltimore .... I saw as less. Same with DC today. If it wasn't for wider streets of Baltimore. It could be Philly. Lines cross and boundaries ... from transplants over the decades that also altered much I'd say.
Why people see Miami as not really Southern today. By Charlotte, Nashville and Atlanta .... Southern isn't really questioned.
The Mason-Dixon line is not in stone since the Civil war at least for sure.
It's because people view the south as one way, but when a city doesn't fit their view of south, then they don't consider it southern. Other regions aren't held to a one size fits all standard.
Native Midwesterner (born and raised: Kansas City, the Heart of America) and adopted Philadelphian (35 years' residence there) chiming in with a few points that may have already been made.
The first one: There seems to be a natural rivalry in states that have two dominant cities. Missouri and Pennsylvania both fall into this category. And the rivalry has something of a two-way element to it: those in the more dominant of the two occasionally look back anxiously over their shoulders at the less dominant one to see whether it might be gaining on them. (Right now, I would say that is the case with Kansas City vis-a-vis St. Louis; the city of Pittsburgh and its county are enjoying quite a resurgence, and beating the pants off Philly in one key area, but Greater Pittsburgh as a whole remains in something of a funk while Greater Philadelphia is doing all right.)
Otherwise, the rivalry seems to take the form of the second city casting aspersions at the first, as someone said San Francisco does toward LA above. I've seen that in Kansas City, towards St. Louis, and there was a long-running discussion on the Pennsylvania forum here that consisted to a large extent of a particularly insecure Pittsburgher complaining about Philly boosterism while writing posts herself that suggested that Philly was actually in the tank while everything good happening in Pennsylvania was happening in Pittsburgh. Or at least that was the impression one got from her posts.
I know this isn't universal: I don't get the impression that the Tampa Bay area is busy throwing seashells at Miami, for instance, or that Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth engage in constant sniping, or that Hampton Roads tries to kick sand in Richmond's face. If examples of this exist in any of these cases, I'd be interested in hearing about them.
Another: there is a sense in which every other large city in this country has it in for New York, except Philadelphia, which currently relishes the phenomenon of New Yorkers moving here to find the city life they enjoy at a price they can still afford. (But the exception's not total: let someone refer to Philadelphia as "the sixth borough" and watch what happens.) But New York is a statistical outlier among American cities in almost every respect: it's the largest city in the country by a wide margin over the No. 2 entry and the largest metro by a smaller but still sizable one. Its rhythms of life, ways of living, and attitude (it remains a city on the make in a way most other American cities, even others that are on the make, aren't) are different enough from those found in even the country's other largest metros (Chicago and Philadelphia partial exceptions) that comparing it to just about anywhere else is futile. (Let me revise the general point I made at the beginning to add that it strikes me that Angelenos don't care particularly much what they think in New York.)
Now to weigh in on this whole Philly-vs.-Baltimore thing.
First I've heard of it, at least in the fashion derived here.
I know the two cities are compared often, and sometimes even by residents of each, because they're the "ugly ducklings" of the major Northeast metropolises - that is to say, they enjoy neither the exalted reputations nor the outrageously high house prices of the other three. And both of them wear a sort of blue-collar patina that continues to shape perceptions to this day, even if the reality on the ground is about 180 degrees away.
There are some other things the two cities share besides cheaper housing, large swaths of rowhouse neighborhoods (Baltimore's poorer ones look to me more denuded than Philly's poorer ones, but maybe I just haven't been in the right ones in Baltimore), an industrial heritage and developers named Rouse who put game-changing developments in their downtowns (and yes, James [Baltimore] and Willard [Philadelphia] were related, with the Baltimore Rouse enjoying the higher national profile). But Philly copying from Baltimore? Where, aside from some futile attempts to put a festival-marketplace-style development on the Delaware riverfront in the early 1990s?
Let me weigh in on one other thing here: Maryland lies below the Mason-Dixon Line - the line drawn to settle a boundary dispute between the Penns and the Calverts, which serves as shorthand for the line separating North from South - and I've heard some Marylanders speak with accents that sound way more Southern than Northern. But, its slave past aside, it seems to me that there's not much left about Baltimore in particular that I'd call Southern. As others have also noted, the cultural North has actually made its way into Virginia now.
Native Midwesterner (born and raised: Kansas City, the Heart of America) and adopted Philadelphian (35 years' residence there) chiming in with a few points that may have already been made.
The first one: There seems to be a natural rivalry in states that have two dominant cities. Missouri and Pennsylvania both fall into this category. And the rivalry has something of a two-way element to it: those in the more dominant of the two occasionally look back anxiously over their shoulders at the less dominant one to see whether it might be gaining on them. (Right now, I would say that is the case with Kansas City vis-a-vis St. Louis; the city of Pittsburgh and its county are enjoying quite a resurgence, and beating the pants off Philly in one key area, but Greater Pittsburgh as a whole remains in something of a funk while Greater Philadelphia is doing all right.)
Otherwise, the rivalry seems to take the form of the second city casting aspersions at the first, as someone said San Francisco does toward LA above. I've seen that in Kansas City, towards St. Louis, and there was a long-running discussion on the Pennsylvania forum here that consisted to a large extent of a particularly insecure Pittsburgher complaining about Philly boosterism while writing posts herself that suggested that Philly was actually in the tank while everything good happening in Pennsylvania was happening in Pittsburgh. Or at least that was the impression one got from her posts.
I know this isn't universal: I don't get the impression that the Tampa Bay area is busy throwing seashells at Miami, for instance, or that Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth engage in constant sniping, or that Hampton Roads tries to kick sand in Richmond's face. If examples of this exist in any of these cases, I'd be interested in hearing about them.
Another: there is a sense in which every other large city in this country has it in for New York, except Philadelphia, which currently relishes the phenomenon of New Yorkers moving here to find the city life they enjoy at a price they can still afford. (But the exception's not total: let someone refer to Philadelphia as "the sixth borough" and watch what happens.) But New York is a statistical outlier among American cities in almost every respect: it's the largest city in the country by a wide margin over the No. 2 entry and the largest metro by a smaller but still sizable one. Its rhythms of life, ways of living, and attitude (it remains a city on the make in a way most other American cities, even others that are on the make, aren't) are different enough from those found in even the country's other largest metros (Chicago and Philadelphia partial exceptions) that comparing it to just about anywhere else is futile. (Let me revise the general point I made at the beginning to add that it strikes me that Angelenos don't care particularly much what they think in New York.)
Now to weigh in on this whole Philly-vs.-Baltimore thing.
First I've heard of it, at least in the fashion derived here.
I know the two cities are compared often, and sometimes even by residents of each, because they're the "ugly ducklings" of the major Northeast metropolises - that is to say, they enjoy neither the exalted reputations nor the outrageously high house prices of the other three. And both of them wear a sort of blue-collar patina that continues to shape perceptions to this day, even if the reality on the ground is about 180 degrees away.
There are some other things the two cities share besides cheaper housing, large swaths of rowhouse neighborhoods (Baltimore's poorer ones look to me more denuded than Philly's poorer ones, but maybe I just haven't been in the right ones in Baltimore), an industrial heritage and developers named Rouse who put game-changing developments in their downtowns (and yes, James [Baltimore] and Willard [Philadelphia] were related, with the Baltimore Rouse enjoying the higher national profile). But Philly copying from Baltimore? Where, aside from some futile attempts to put a festival-marketplace-style development on the Delaware riverfront in the early 1990s?
Let me weigh in on one other thing here: Maryland lies below the Mason-Dixon Line - the line drawn to settle a boundary dispute between the Penns and the Calverts, which serves as shorthand for the line separating North from South - and I've heard some Marylanders speak with accents that sound way more Southern than Northern. But, its slave past aside, it seems to me that there's not much left about Baltimore in particular that I'd call Southern. As others have also noted, the cultural North has actually made its way into Virginia now.
Re: the bolds (color coded for convenience) A resurgence in what? Could you explain that a little? FWIW, I am a native of the Pittsburgh area, have family all over the place there. I'm not particularly seeing it, and I was last there in September.
Could you post a link to the thread? I visit the Pittsburgh forum some, but seldom the PA general forum. I'd love to read that. TIA.
Thank you for saying that. I've gotten into a lot of "discussions" with people on that issue.
Thanks for saying *that* too. There's a current thread about the dividing line between south and midwest that somehow Pennsylvania got brought into. Several people there disagreed that the Mason-Dixon line divided the north from the south. I have also heard southern accents in Maryland, including the DC suburbs from people who are native to that area. I lived in Wilmington DE in the early 70s, and it was not "southern" either. However, Virginia gets pretty southern outside the DC suburbs, IME.
As a native Eastern Pennsylvanian who has lived in Pittsburgh for almost eight years I don’t believe Pittsburghers are obsessed with Philadelphia at all.
We acknowledge we’re in no way, shape, or form in the same league. Philadelphia is a city about four times the size of Pittsburgh, but because Philadelphia is overshadowed by NYC it is only viewed nationally as being twice as important than Pittsburgh. If you want to be technical I think Philadelphia is underrated/underrecognized while Pittsburgh is overrated/overrecognized. Pittsburgh can compete well with cities twice its size whereas cities half the size of Philadelphia try (in vain) to compete with Philadelphia.
I will say Cleveland is obsessed with Cincinnati, Columbus, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Instead of appreciating what an amazing city they have Clevelanders never miss an opportunity to bash these four cities. I think it’s because Cleveland is transitioning from being the solid #3 city in the Midwest (behind Chicago and Detroit) to being a more “middle of the pack” Midwestern city, and its inhabitants are in denial. Cincinnati and Columbus will both dwarf Cleveland in terms of GDP and population in the coming years if current trends continue, and Pittsburgh’s CMU-fueled tech renaissance has been pumping a tremendous amount of money into the city. I love Cleveland, but it definitely can’t admit it’s going from “No Contest #3 Midwestern City” to “Peer of Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis.” I’d dare argue that Cleveland is currently the #4 Midwestern City behind Minneapolis. There’s nothing wrong with that. Cleveland still rocks. Clevelanders just need to realize they aren’t as important as they used to be and stop bashing the nearby cities that are threatening to dethrone it. Jealousy isn’t a good look for Cleveland.
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