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Historically significant isn't quite the same thing as structural density loss. I can dig these up at some later point, but you can see the kind of destruction that neighorhoods saw in Pittsburgh by zooming in on the satellite views for neighborhoods like the larger Hill District, Garfield, Larimer, Spring Hill, and several others where for some spots they still have the house numbers overlaid on blank lots if they were not redeveloped (though the redevelopment is itself often lower intensity usage like parks or parcels with quite a bit of surface parking lots) like so: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pi...16zL20vMDY4cDI. It's a *lot* of destruction. Detroit and Cleveland's residential vernacular generally weren't quite as dense, but they had fairly dense local main streets that were mostly attached buildings and expansive greater downtown areas that were very densely built and often with quite large, multi-storey buildings.
Yea, I think there's definitely a good case for Newark placing fairly high. There's also bits of Hudson County that are very dense and are more separated from Jersey City than they are from Newark.
This is true Pittsburgh was the last “walking city” and Cleveland was the first “streetcar city. And the gap in built density is noticeable
Yea, I think there's definitely a good case for Newark placing fairly high. There's also bits of Hudson County that are very dense and are more separated from Jersey City than they are from Newark.
Yea you can definitely count Kearny, Harrison & East Newark as Newark’s “suburbs” in Hudson County, I just grouped Hudson County together as one and focused on the built-up west side of the Passaic River.
This area as a whole in my opinion is even more impressive in its urbanity than the Hudson-Bergen waterfront, as a 15 mile stretch of land that is consistently 10-15 miles out from the core city still has an average density of over 13,000/sq mi, a number that isn’t much of a dropoff at all from the Hudson-Bergen waterfront, which is directly across the river from the core city. Obviously it’s not that surprising because it is part of the largest metro in the US, but the area gets highly underrated when discussing the most urban parts of the country. Overall, urbanized North Jersey fits more people than Philadelphia in a smaller area. When you wanna talk about most urban areas of the US outside of NYC proper, North Jersey definitely belongs at or near the top of the list, and it has 2 separate incredibly urban contiguous 50+sq mile areas, separated from each other by the Meadowlands/Newark Bay which each could be in the top 10 of this list if NYC wasn’t counted.
Yea you can definitely count Kearny, Harrison & East Newark as Newark’s “suburbs” in Hudson County, I just grouped Hudson County together as one and focused on the built-up west side of the Passaic River.
This area as a whole in my opinion is even more impressive in its urbanity than the Hudson-Bergen waterfront, as a 15 mile stretch of land that is consistently 10-15 miles out from the core city still has an average density of over 13,000/sq mi, a number that isn’t much of a dropoff at all from the Hudson-Bergen waterfront, which is directly across the river from the core city. Obviously it’s not that surprising because it is part of the largest metro in the US, but the area gets highly underrated when discussing the most urban parts of the country. Overall, urbanized North Jersey fits more people than Philadelphia in a smaller area. When you wanna talk about most urban areas of the US outside of NYC proper, North Jersey definitely belongs at or near the top of the list, and it has 2 separate incredibly urban contiguous 50+sq mile areas, separated from each other by the Meadowlands/Newark Bay which each could be in the top 10 of this list if NYC wasn’t counted.
I think part of my beef with considering NNJ as an urban oasis, is when I worked in Newport, JC and my brother lived in West New York, everyone still drove to the full-scale grocery stores. Like to me, a real hallmark of actual urbanity are the stores built all the way to the curb very much in line with the rest of the neighborhood's street grid. People will hype up a place like Guttenberg and be like "it's the most dense municipality in the United States!". Well yeah, a lot of the population is wrapped up in the Galaxy towers where tons of people drive to do their basic errands. I'm not saying north jersey isn't urban, but I just don't really buy into the idea you can just go off of pure population density.
I think part of my beef with considering NNJ this urban oasis, is when I worked in Newport, JC and my brother lived in West New York, everyone still drove to the full-scale grocery stores. Like to me, a real hallmark of actual urbanity are the stores built all the way to the curb. People will hype up a place like Guttenberg and be like "it's the most dense municipality in the United States!". Well yeah, a lot of the population is wrapped up in the Galaxy towers where tons of people drive to do their basic errands. I'm not saying north jersey isn't urban, but I just don't really buy into the idea you can just go off of pure population density.
While, yes, you need a car in certain parts of NNJ, (in part because it is so fractured into different towns and some of its towns even on the waterfront such as Edgewater or Weehawken aren’t as focused on being walkable), a large amount of its areas are highly walkable/have easy access to public transit/have great urban fabric. And there are plenty of parts of North Jersey where owning a car isn’t a necessity, particularly Hoboken, Jersey City, Union City, Newark, Hackensack, Passaic & Paterson (all of these cities have a large % of residents that don’t use a car). You’re right that certain towns even on the waterfront will require use of a car. But there arent too many cities outside of NYC where one can go fully car-free and be able to get wherever they need to go. And few other cities have as many mass transit options (PATH, Newark Light Rail, Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, NJT commuter rail, NJT buses, jitneys, NY Waterway ferry).
List the top 10 most urban 50 square miles in order.
IMO:
1. NYC
2. Chicago
3. Philadelphia
4. SF
5. LA
6. DC
7. Boston
8. Baltimore
9. Miami
10. Denver
Agreed. This is an example of a thread where the first post gets mostly right, with the few exceptions being I would sub Denver for Seattle (which arguably takes the 8th spot) and probably move down LA's position one slot or two.
Agreed. This is an example of a thread where the first post gets mostly right, with the few exceptions being I would sub Denver for Seattle (which arguably takes the 8th spot) and probably move down LA's position one slot or two.
At a contiguous 50 square miles, I think it's tough to put Boston below DC, Philadelphia above SF, and Denver anywhere on the chart where I agree Seattle should take its place, but at this point above Baltimore.
I think part of my beef with considering NNJ as an urban oasis, is when I worked in Newport, JC and my brother lived in West New York, everyone still drove to the full-scale grocery stores. Like to me, a real hallmark of actual urbanity are the stores built all the way to the curb very much in line with the rest of the neighborhood's street grid. People will hype up a place like Guttenberg and be like "it's the most dense municipality in the United States!". Well yeah, a lot of the population is wrapped up in the Galaxy towers where tons of people drive to do their basic errands. I'm not saying north jersey isn't urban, but I just don't really buy into the idea you can just go off of pure population density.
I agree about not going off pure population density, rather that it's a good starting point as it's also among the easiest ones to get somewhat up to stats for and to be able to monitor change over time. I think using that as a starting point to help first identify where more urban clumps or areas are most likely to be, where they're developing, and unfortunately for some places, where there may be a "loss" of urbanity over time.
I think NNJ as an urban oasis in the context of the US is pretty good as there simply aren't that many currently existing places that have contiguous urbanity for an area as large as 50 contiguous square miles. I certainly wouldn't at this point argue it over Philadelphia's best 50 square miles, but definitely within the top twenty and likely lower half of the top 10 in the US.
I also think on the ground level that there's been visible change from the increase in population density in NNJ over the last decade. I do think a lot of the waterfront construction though is a little perplexing given the increased chances of flooding. I also think that the Galaxy towers are actually easier to live without a car than the vast majority of neighborhoods in US major cities even if River Road has a lot of room for improvement. The towers have their own mini mall collection of services and the area to the west of it are more classically urban.
Agreed. This is an example of a thread where the first post gets mostly right, with the few exceptions being I would sub Denver for Seattle (which arguably takes the 8th spot) and probably move down LA's position one slot or two.
You mean move up a slot or two for LA? Because LA's urban 50 sq mi has been proven one of the densest time and time again.
You mean move up a slot or two for LA? Because LA's urban 50 sq mi has been proven one of the densest time and time again.
I think the tricky part with LA is that while it's very population dense, it's hard to judge how strongly that ties to it being more urban due to its generally fairly wide streets, rather long distance in some places between legal pedestrian crossings, greater but improving prevalence of surface parking lots for strip malls and big box centers in the Central LA area, splotchiness of random detached SFH home tracts on lots that are sometimes seemingly quite large for an urban core, and some neighborhoods where the density is to some degree also a function of very high housing costs pushing working class people to clump together in far less livable space as opposed to structural density. These are sort of hard to measure against the population density, though the population density does seem to also promote quite a bit of job and retail/commercial density as well. Depending on how you're weighting things, it seems like LA's most urban contiguous 50 square miles can go anywhere on a US-only, single entry per metro list from the 2nd highest slot to the 7th highest slot which is a really wide range. I do think the argument for placing it higher though has been getting better every year as more surface parking lots and strip malls have been eliminated in the urban core often with fairly dense mixed-use five to eight story buildings with the majority of new dense construction in the city occurring within the urban core, some "road diets" and somewhat less car-oriented streets rolling out and as rail transit has expanded, though that's also come with some pretty severe neglect of bus routes.
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