Chicago vs San Francisco: Which feels more urban or cosmopolitan? (comparison, place)
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If we are talking CSAs, I would say that the Bay Area edges Chicagoland. In terms of urbanity and cosmopolitanism, Berkeley beats Evanston and there is no equivalent to Oakland in the vicinity of Chicago, but if it is city versus city: Chicago by a large margin. Much better nightlife, equivalent food, much better public transportation, and economies of scale. The Loop smashes downtown San Francisco. SF has the better Chinatown. Lakeview east is much more lively than the Castro. Ditto for Lincoln Park over Nob Hill. I am a middle aged gay guy. I really want to like San Francisco, but compared to Chicago, it always feels sleepy and provincial...
No doubt Chicago has better nightlife, but SF is no slouch - North Beach, Mission, Polk Street, SOMA, Marina, and so on. There are plenty of good nightlife neighborhoods and a dizzying concentration of neighborhood bars (ranging from world class cocktail dens to crusty dive bars) spread throughout the city.
It also looks like 3am last call is on the horizon, which will improve the nightlife quite a bit.
San Francisco felt like the whole damn city was a tourist attraction. Barely anyone that lived there was from there.
Chicago has many tourists and tourist things in its core, but the residential neighborhoods feel residential. You can tell people have lived there for generations. You have blue collar neighborhoods, yuppie hoods, hipster hoods, ghettos...
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San Francisco was much denser throughout the whole city. But it cuts off immediately on all sides due to the water and then the mountains to the south. All the buildings are mostly 2-3 story apartments/houses.
Chicago ...You have small low level bungalow neighborhoods, to neighborhoods that are full of 4 story courtyard apartment buildings housing dozens of people. The density can be pretty high, but then it does radiate out to less dense.
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Both feel like a city to me. But Chicago just feels much more diverse when it comes to density, architecture, money.
SF feels the same everywhere. Be it density, architecture, or income diversity.
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Chicago is about 30 miles long from the far South side to the far north side borders. San Fran is like what? 6x6 miles?
And even then Chicago flows into the suburbs seamlessly. While SF is connected via bridges and highways that go around mountains. It's just not the same.
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I think SF overall is more urban, but I will say Chicago’s most urban areas are more so than SF’s (not talking about density). SF is just more uniformly urban than Chicago.
Cosmopolitan is a word I don’t like because it has a few very different definitions and OP didn’t define which one she wants to use. But SF certainly feels more international.
On balance, I prefer Chicago. It’s just cleaner, slicker, and more polished than SF. It nails urban aesthetic in a way no other city I’ve visited has managed to.
Chicago's downtown is cleaner but I would argue SF's residential neighborhoods are cleaner. There is no equivalent of the West and South sides in SF. Tourists in Chicago don't see that side of the city, which has been woefully neglected for decades. We should also factor in the lack of rain in SF and how the city needs to triple the size of it's street cleaning budget and increase civic pride (which it is doing).
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Originally Posted by SnobbishDude
I would go further to say in terms of “niceness” of the residential neighborhoods, places in SF like the North Beach, Presidio, Nob Hill even Marin County are probably among the best residential neighborhoods in the whole country, rivals Santa Monica/Beverly Hills/Malibu here in LA and Upper West Side/Upper East Side of Manhattan, NYC.
Totally agree, the locals in Chicago readily exclaimed that the municipality maintains the loop like a shrine, spit-shined and easily revealed for the tourists. Obviously there are yet many great local/ethnic neighborhoods that define Chicago as much as the loop but they are not maintained to anywhere near its level. An unfortunately large swath of Chicagoland has lost its middle class and is suffering because of it.
Those San Francisco city neighborhoods and surrounding areas of course remain and are still as magical as they always have been. The City’s mostly Paris scale infrastructure marching up and down the hills with defined, very special neighborhoods dressed in unique architecture, a major reshaping with its own tall buildings redefining the downtown and those many near perfect areas (if you can afford it) across the bay or down the peninsula; Sausalito/Mill Valley, Oakland Hills, Hillsborough, Atherton, Los Altos, all of it is uncontested. The Bay Area is no doubt one of the best urban places in the country, I was fortunate to have lived and experienced a good portion of my life there. The City is still present and pretty but needs some attention and direction to become again the rowdy, stunning yet still approachable city it once was.
Totally agree, the locals in Chicago readily exclaimed that the municipality maintains the loop like a shrine, spit-shined and easily revealed for the tourists. Obviously there are yet many great local/ethnic neighborhoods that define Chicago as much as the loop but they are not maintained to anywhere near its level. An unfortunately large swath of Chicagoland has lost its middle class and is suffering because of it.
Those San Francisco city neighborhoods and surrounding areas of course remain and are still as magical as they always have been. The City’s mostly Paris scale infrastructure marching up and down the hills with defined, very special neighborhoods dressed in unique architecture, a major reshaping with its own tall buildings redefining the downtown and those many near perfect areas (if you can afford it) across the bay or down the peninsula; Sausalito/Mill Valley, Oakland Hills, Hillsborough, Atherton, Los Altos, all of it is uncontested. The Bay Area is no doubt one of the best urban places in the country, I was fortunate to have lived and experienced a good portion of my life there. The City is still present and pretty but needs some attention and direction to become again the rowdy, stunning yet still approachable city it once was.
Not a sliver of San Francisco is anywhere comparable to cleanliness as Chicago is. I mean, come on, California is suffering from our homeless epidemic and it's not anywhere near as bad in cities like New York or Chicago.
And Paris scale infrastructure? Not in a million years is anything in that city comparable to Paris! Never heard that before...... at all.
The hustle and bustle, the city feel, the bigger buildings. It feels much more like a city to me.
Nonsense.
Bigger buildings have nothing to do with being more urban and as far as 'hustle and bustle', SF does that at least as hard as Chicago does, if not more so.
Anyone have experience living in both cities? I understand there are obvious differences (weather, scenery, COL) but am wondering about the lived urban experience. Public transportation, walkability, access to bars, restaurants, museums, etc.
Feel free to be as objective or subjective as you like. Looking for your own personal opinions.
Public transportation goes to Chicago easily.
Walkability is about a tie.
Access to bars is very much in Chicago’s favor as I found it to be a heavy drinking city with last call at 4 am rather than 2 am in SF, though that may change, and just a lot more places serving drinks in general and I especially appreciate the random places that are in smack dab in a side street somewhere in a residential area.
Restaurants are a tough one as I found that I really do think really fresh vegetables were more common in San Francisco which is great, but being able to eat out in a nicer place where the quality was high was far more affordable in Chicago. The Bay Area does generally have more of the handful of restaurants that get ranked as among the best in the world, but I go to such maybe a few times a year so I can’t really see that being a major factor (and so far, the very top for Chicago was more memorable for me than any of the top Bay Area places).
Museums go strongly in favor of Chicago. I go to museums several times of month often for events, and so when visiting either city, I generally do a lot of museum visits and try to attend events if available. Some of the settings and buildings for SF museums are quite pretty, but the offerings are relatively paltry compared to those of Chicago and the programming from what modest experience I have doesn’t seem particularly interesting to make up for such. This also holds for cultural institutions and the performing arts where Chicago also outpaces SF.
I do like SF’s narrow streets in the downtown parts of the city and I sort of wish Chicago was able to stay clean as it is, but also manage to use its alleys the way that Melbourne uses its laneways. I also wish Chicago would make Lake Shore Drive work more like the Embarcadero which is with transit, pedestrian crossings and lights, and narrower. I really like the many trees on the streets in Chicago. In terms of general urbanity, I think both have somewhat different takes on it, but are quite urban for US cities. It did feel like the urban core of Chicago stretched out further than that of San Francisco with neighborhoods like Uptown still feeling very urban despite being a distance away from the Loop and with continuous urbanity between them. As for being cosmopolitan, I believe the Bay Area has more immigrants and more languages spoken, but I’m not entirely sure about the latter. I believe all Bay Area airports have more international flights than Chicagoland airports do, but someone should check that and Chicago has more diplomatic missions from other countries than SF does.
Overall, both are pretty good cities though my preferences lean towards Chicago. I’m also put off by SF and the Bay Area’s ability to deal with its growing homelessness issue. It’s crazy to see the strip malls and parking lots so close to BART and Caltrain stations that should so obviously be built up.
Totally agree, the locals in Chicago readily exclaimed that the municipality maintains the loop like a shrine, spit-shined and easily revealed for the tourists. Obviously there are yet many great local/ethnic neighborhoods that define Chicago as much as the loop but they are not maintained to anywhere near its level. An unfortunately large swath of Chicagoland has lost its middle class and is suffering because of it.
Those San Francisco city neighborhoods and surrounding areas of course remain and are still as magical as they always have been. The City’s mostly Paris scale infrastructure marching up and down the hills with defined, very special neighborhoods dressed in unique architecture, a major reshaping with its own tall buildings redefining the downtown and those many near perfect areas (if you can afford it) across the bay or down the peninsula; Sausalito/Mill Valley, Oakland Hills, Hillsborough, Atherton, Los Altos, all of it is uncontested. The Bay Area is no doubt one of the best urban places in the country, I was fortunate to have lived and experienced a good portion of my life there. The City is still present and pretty but needs some attention and direction to become again the rowdy, stunning yet still approachable city it once was.
oddly the very (correct) observations you made about the charms of both San Francisco and the Bay Area are exactly what is causing the negatives that affect the place today.
SF is too damned advantageous, the city and the whole Bay Area make up what is arguably the most beautiful of any metro area. The climate is as good as it gets. SF and the Bay Area were simply too nice for their own good, a desirability from them was bound to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
The city has no way of giving " some attention and direction to become again the rowdy, stunning yet still approachable city it once was." because it is nobody's city. It is made up of transients who move in and move out. What it is not made up of is something it once had in huge number, was actually famous for having. That now extinct organism was called a "San Franciscan". Some people, like Herb Caen, were famously San Franciscan. But most where just everyday folks.
Look, change is constant. And all cities change. SF was once a blue collar town, a port city with longshoremen, a city of industry (albeit usually the lighter variety), a place where tourism may have been important but was nowhere near the main industry. Sure it always had the bohemian element, the counterculture from beats to hippies to gays, but in pre-1950 SF, the city was mostly about everyday folks living everyday lives. They are their kids....yes, they had kids back then. If San Franciscans are a extinct, then children are barely hanging on the thread of endangered species.
Everyone will see (or not see) the progression of events in their own paradigm. To me, SF from the time of the Gold Rush was a special place, a place with so many advantages, a package it put together that came of age spectacularly in the 15-20 years or so after WWII. In this era, SF became lifestyle, the good life, the joys of urbanity and being urbane. SF became a "major league city" by decree.....the Giants moved there in 1958 and made it official. Transcontiental jets transformed California into being part of the mainstream. SF was never again going to be its own city....the flood gates were too open.
So what happened (IMHO): SF/Bay Area were never going to be able to handle the crowds in this fragile environment. They certainly were not capable of making themselves immune from the 1%/Silicon Valley/big money that in its own way helped to kill off "San Franciscans".
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And even more strangely, Chicago benefitted in ways that hurt other cities (like SF or NY) to which it is similar. Chicago was blessed by disadvantages that were fare more advantageous than SF's advantages were. Chicago (unlike the other great US cities...Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) alone was inland....it was never going to be affected by the forces of development that happened on the coasts. Chicago despite having so many transplants is still a city of Chicagoans. They exist; they are no San Franciscans. In a sense, Chicago cheated. It created an outstanding urban environment that people love, created a place where we're not into comparing ourselves with other cities because we are happy with who we are....we're a city keep its cake (for all its wonderful offerings..they still remain) and eat it too (it's been delicious). Chicago does not fly under the radar. But it does fly through the perfect zone of the radar.....not total center stage, your typical American city....but between those two belts.
Bigger buildings have nothing to do with being more urban and as far as 'hustle and bustle', SF does that at least as hard as Chicago does, if not more so.
Sorry but 👎
This is a damn city.
Bigger buildings mean more people...I would think that would mean more "hustle and bustle."
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