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There's nothing you cant get in NYC you can get in DC or Boston. I almost said skiing right outside the city like Blue Hills, but I guess you can do that a at the American Dream?
So..yea, nothing. Greatest city in the Western Hemisphere and probably on earth.
The New York Aquarium in Coney Island is tiny compared to the National Aquarium in Baltimore or Shed in Chicago, let alone the Georgia Aquarium.
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Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade
There's nothing you cant get in NYC you can get in DC or Boston. I almost said skiing right outside the city like Blue Hills, but I guess you can do that a at the American Dream?
So..yea, nothing. Greatest city in the Western Hemisphere and probably on earth.
I think you have your eras wrong which is leading to confusing answers. Gantz and BugsyPal are citing neighborhoods built in similar styles / eras as all of Back Bay and most of Charlestown and Georgetown. These aren't colonial / revolutionary era architectural designs, but do run the same gamut of mostly 19th and early 20th century with some variation since it's a large time period to cover. Georgetown does seem to have a slightly larger amount of things actually from the 18th century though also a lot from later era.
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Originally Posted by BajanYankee
Brooklyn Heights would be closer. But as I said in my previous post, places like Old Town Alexandria and parts of Center City Philly lean into the colonial theme much more. In Old Town, they even have women with these Molly Pitcher costumes who speak like pirates and in Old City many residents will hang the Betsy Ross flag outside of their houses.
The Betsy Ross House notwithstanding, Old City actually is not an example of the type of neighborhood we're talking about here. Its architecture is dominated by mid- to late-19th-century mercantile and light industrial buildings. To me, it's the Philly neighborhood that most closely resembles Manhattan neighborhoods like Tribeca.
Society Hill, a street view from which I posted upthread, is IMO the epitome of the type of neighborhood that poster had in mind. Its Boston analogue is neither the Back Bay nor Charlestown but Beacon Hill.
I just thought of a couple of other things I haven't seen in New York that I have here:
One is an urban wilderness. That term is probably the best short description of Wissahickon Valley Park in Northwest Philadelphia. Rather than manicured or sculpted landscape a la Central Park (or most NYC parks), this park, created to protect the city's water supply in the 1820s, before the area around it was developed, has been left in its natural state, save for the 1850 Valley Green Inn about two-thirds of the way up Forbidden (to vehicular traffic, bikes excepted) Drive from its southern end. (Oh, there are also bridges built by Philadelphia County along the way, which means they predate 1854, and some WPA shelters as well. Plus there's the first reinforced-concrete span in the US (1907-08) carrying Walnut Lane over the valley's lower end and one more recent sculptural span built in the 1990s on a medium-difficulty hiking trail that takes it over a small waterfall.) At 2,800 acres, it's the second-largest park in the city park system and (according to the Wikipedia article) a National Natural Landmark. (So are the Palisades, but they lie outside the New York city limits and are IMO less wilderness-looking than the Wissahickon Valley. Most of the forest parts of the Palisades Interstate Park lie in the suburbs.)
Another is streetcars. I have read about plans to return LRVs to Brooklyn but don't know how far they've progressed. They've returned to Washington and Baltimore (mostly in the form of slightly faster light rail there), and Boston and Philadelphia never got rid of theirs.
There was one other thing I thought of but have forgotten.
If there was through-running regional rail going through Penn Station, then Rahway to Huntington would be one of hundreds of different trip combinations outside of Manhattan. Some of those cities have jobs, family members, friends, tourist attractions, etc. for some set of people. It's also operationally a lot more efficient making better use of staff, rolling stock, and railways.
For PATH and NYC Subway, the one-seat ride can be pretty useful. There was a proposal post 9/11 for PATH-WTC to connect to the IRT 6 train since the terminal stations were about a half mile from each other and there's general compatibility between PATH and IRT. This would have eliminated a lot of transfers for PATH to and from the east side of Manhattan. It would have also made a direct PATH extension to EWR much more heavily utilized and score better on federal funding formulae.
But your proposals are NOT all one seat trips as was mentioned as a NYC shortcoming. My response was to resident09 who postulated that NYC is not a world class city because you cannot travel from the eastern outer limits to the western outer limits as you can in Washington. The example of travelling from the eastern suburbs in Maryland to northern Virginia was given.
Mass transit exists for moving the mass of people. It is not fashioned for those few people who might occasionally want to visit their cousins in New Jersey.
Walmart and IKEA. I know they're in the area but a much smaller fraction of the population go to these than any other city.
TRIVIA: The first IKEA in the U.S. opened in Philadelphia in 1985, and today, Philadelphia is where the U.S. headquarters are located. The second IKEA opened in Washington D.C. in 1986, and the third opened in Baltimore in 1987. The fourth? Pittsburgh in 1989. Take that, New York!
But your proposals are NOT all one seat trips as was mentioned as a NYC shortcoming. My response was to resident09 who postulated that NYC is not a world class city because you cannot travel from the eastern outer limits to the western outer limits as you can in Washington. The example of travelling from the eastern suburbs in Maryland to northern Virginia was given.
Mass transit exists for moving the mass of people. It is not fashioned for those few people who might occasionally want to visit their cousins in New Jersey.
What do you mean? They are one seat rides. Are you saying a one seat ride from *any* station in existence to any other regardless of where they are located? I don't think anyone was arguing for that.
Who said anything about the few people who might occasionally want to visit their cousins in New Jersey as a main driver? I'm sure that exists, but there are also people with jobs that need to be commuted to, site visits for work, festivals, universities for classes or employment, elderly parents to visit, divorced parents with children doing visitations, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends from high school, friends from college, work colleagues to make social visits with, etc. Did you think the right thing to do was to list *every* single context that might happen for this to make sense? You also forget the part where this is *operationally* more efficient and therefore you get more service for every dollar put into it. The balkanized transit system of the NYC metropolitan area is to a large degree where it falls short of other cities in its tier and plays a large part in why so much transit money yields such little improvement. It's just hard to see because US municipal transit is subpar among cities in developed countries, though DC has been getting pretty decent for its size.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-08-2023 at 06:29 PM..
Yes I know exactly darn well what I'm talking about, thank you. I mean what equivalent is there in New York city to Back Bay or Charlestown in Boston, or Georgetown in DC? These areas have a distinct colonial/revolutionary architectural design, no tall buildings, and cover a decent section of their city. Park Slope comes close, but it has more of a gilded age feel to it than a colonial feel.
Back Bay, Boston is went up over landfill in 1859, it really is a bay filled in by land which explains all the rats.
Victorian through Edwardian period saw an explosion of similar development not just in Boston but NYC, and many other urban areas not only in USA but Britain and elsewhere.
Brooklyn Heights was once billed as one of if not the first suburb in USA. Area existed during colonial times and there are still traces of that about.
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