Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It may not be the top city, but I need to showcase Philadelphia’s engineering feats at the very least:
-Fairmount Water Works, which was the nation’s first water supply to pump water using steam-powered turbines
-Building a dense city over existing streams and waterways
-Converting the massive Mill Creek into a sewer, which enabled development in West Philly
-Constructing City Hall, which is the tallest masonry building in the world
-Constructing the Broad Street Line’s City Hall stop UNDER the support structures of City Hall
-Building the Ben Franklin Bridge, which was the tallest bridge in the world until being replaced by the Ambassador Bridge in 1929
-Building the Schuylkill Expressway, which is sandwiched between hills, the Schuylkill River, Fairmount Park, active railroads, and under 30th Street Station and the IRS Building (formerly the main post office)
-Connecting the ex-Pennsylvania Railroad and ex-Reading Railroad commuter rail systems via the Center City Commuter Tunnel, giving Philly the only true REGIONAL Rail system in the US. It is also the only through-routed and fully-electrified commuter rail system in the US
-Not really city-based, but the University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC computer system was a HUGE feat of computer engineering
The largest engineering project of the Industrial Revolution in USA isn't mentioned in this thread. The land filling that created Boston as it is known today is not largely understood or appreciated today:
A diagram of Boston's massive landfilling is shown here.
The scale is truly "ungodly." It took something like 190 years, 1,700,000 train loads & some number, perhaps "930 quadrillion yards" of rock and gravel.... It tore through men, the sweat & blood of thousands upon thousands of men, most of whom literally dropped dead where they stood moving Heaven and Earth. ~2000 acres, 20~32 feet thick just by 1910.... It required a city in possession of the economic power of the Industrial Revolution itself--to pull off such a colossal feat in our nation's youth, and the upheaval of the Civil War period....
The project/s began during the Colonial era, but gained steam in the late 1830's. The major filling of Boston occurred from 1836 to 1900. Back Bay only accounts for about 1/3 of the total... It continued with the planning and construction of Logan Airport later in the 20th Century,
Quote:
"New technologies were required for the filling of the Back Bay. It was a larger area to be filled -- more than 700 acres -- and the easy sources of fill were already cut down. The invention of the railroad and steam shovel made it possible to bring in gravel from as far away as Needham to the West. It was a tremendous undertaking, and carefully organized. At the peak of activity, 3,500 carloads per day were sent from the Needham gravel pits to be dumped in the Back Bay. The main entrepreneur in this venture was John Souther.
A map of Boston in 1862 shows the progress of the landfill; the criss-cross created by the railroad lines has been nearly half filled in, only 5 years after the project began. By the early 1880s, the main outlines of the Back Bay were nearly completed."
Then came the Big Dig, to reshape it for modern automobile, rail travel and trucking... and the creation of new islands in the 21st Century.
The complete story including your near disbelief is told here....
New Orleans actually requires a similar effort. But in today's economic model, it's a tall order. They never filled it, but instead opted out, built a wall, albeit, poorly....
The largest engineering project of the Industrial Revolution in USA isn't mentioned in this thread. The land filling that created Boston as it is known today is not largely understood or appreciated today:
A diagram of Boston's massive landfilling is shown here.
The scale is truly "ungodly." It took something like 190 years, 1,700,000 train loads & some number, perhaps "930 quadrillion yards" of rock and gravel.... It tore through men, the sweat & blood of thousands upon thousands of men, most of whom literally dropped dead where they stood moving Heaven and Earth. ~2000 acres, 20~32 feet thick just by 1910.... It required a city in possession of the economic power of the Industrial Revolution itself--to pull off such a colossal feat in our nation's youth, and the upheaval of the Civil War period....
The project/s began during the Colonial era, but gained steam in the late 1830's. The major filling of Boston occurred from 1836 to 1900. Back Bay only accounts for about 1/3 of the total... It continued with the planning and construction of Logan Airport later in the 20th Century,
Then came the Big Dig, to reshape it for modern automobile, rail travel and trucking... and the creation of new islands in the 21st Century.
The complete story including your near disbelief is told here....
New Orleans actually requires a similar effort. But in today's economic model, it's a tall order. They never filled it, but instead opted out, built a wall, albeit, poorly....
I think the fact that NOLA is actively working on it vs just dumping dry from Beacon/Mission Hill or Newton into the Charles and being done with it puts it I’ve the top. Also it’s like 70sq miles vs like 15 for Boston.
There really isn’t a right/wrong answer. That’s subjective.
On a separate note I think Vegas should’ve been on this poll now that I think about it. It probably would’ve gotten my vote. Every single time I go there I’m amazed that a place like that is able to exist in the middle of the desert!
And of course there’s the whole thing with the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, the man made lake that keeps Vegas running 24/7
Not to mention still growing at record pace the same thing with SoCal, and Phoenix not a drop of water, but still functioning quite well.
The greatest miracle of modern engineering up to that time -- was undoubtedly, the creation of Boston's Back Bay which effectively took 80 years. But, the most intense period of construction activity took place over 43 years from 1857-1900.
from the wiki;
In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was chartered to construct a milldam, which would also serve as a toll road connecting Boston to Watertown, bypassing Boston Neck. The dam prevented the natural tides from flushing sewage out to sea, creating severe sanitiary and odor problems. With costs higher and power lower than expected, in the end, the project was an economic failure, and in 1857 a massive project was begun to "make land" by filling the area enclosed by the dam.
The firm of Goss and Munson built additional railroad trackage extending to quarries in Needham, Massachusetts, 9 miles (14 km) away. Twenty-five 35-car trains arrived every 24 hours carrying gravel and other fill, at a rate in the daytime of one every 45 minutes. (William Dean Howells recalled "the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of the westward hills.")
Present-day Back Bay itself was filled by 1882; the project reached existing land at what is now Kenmore Square in 1890, and finished in the Fens in 1900. Much of the old mill dam remains buried under present-day Beacon Street. The project was the largest of a number of land reclamation projects which, beginning in 1820, more than doubled the size of the original Shawmut Peninsula.
Completion of the Charles River Dam in 1910 converted the former Charles estuary into a freshwater basin; the Charles River Esplanade was constructed to allow residents to enjoy the view of the new lagoon, which had vanquished the smell of raw sewage at low tide. The Esplanade has since undergone several changes, including the construction of Storrow Drive.
Thank goodness someone else mentioned this. I was about to lose my mind. Perhaps the one of the greatest works of engineering in US history.
Not to mention still growing at record pace the same thing with SoCal, and Phoenix not a drop of water, but still functioning quite well.
I would say that Vegas is not so much a marvel of engineering as it is a marvel of the city's mayor at the time. Now, don't quote me on this, but if I'm not mistaken, Vegas took off as a gambling city because it offered a nice resort for workers working on the Hoover Dam. From there, it really lured in everyone, rapidly becoming the Casino Capital of the world (sorry, Macau). But of course, for a city the size of Vegas to exist in the arid desert with basically no resources is also a marvel of engineering nonetheless.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
