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Myrtle Beach. An area during the fall and winter of less than 300K is the biggest tourism destination in SC, with the second largest airport in the state.
Asheville. A tourism hub for people from much of the South, population of only 430K, but hub for entire Western North Carolina area, with the Biltmore and everything else there.
Myrtle Beach. An area during the fall and winter of less than 300K is the biggest tourism destination in SC, with the second largest airport in the state.
Asheville. A tourism hub for people from much of the South, population of only 430K, but hub for entire Western North Carolina area, with the Biltmore and everything else there.
Isn't Charleston South Carolina's largest tourism destination? I also thought CHS was larger than Myrtle Beach's airport...
I think you could add in a lot of college towns that usually aren't big themselves but are important with the role the universities provide worldwide, such as Ann Arbor, MI, Madison, WI, Boulder, CO.
Also a college town but one I would add to the list for other reasons is Norman, Oklahoma which is home to the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center, the place that issues severe thunderstorm and tornado outlooks and watches across the country.
If you mean "smaller metros", than I agree with some of the above mentioned areas. But the OP says "smaller cities", so I take that to mean cities with a fairly low population but a fair amount lot of clout. That would include places like Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinatti, and Tampa.
Billings
Charleston SC
Asheville
Ithaca
Athens GA
Boulder CO
Wilmington NC
Key West
Brownsville
International Falls
Bentonville - Fayetteville
Chapel Hill
Annapolis
-some are 'important,' and some are just famous for other reasons, but well-known is well-known...and some of those ARE in significantly larger metro areas...
Of cities in the 150,000-to-800,000 range:
Charlotte
Austin
Columbus OH
Minneapolis - St Paul
Indianapolis
Orlando
Richmond
all spring to mind, and - again - their metros are all variably larger
And of even bigger cities, San Diego and San Jose are relative underdogs compared to L.A. and SF, even though their importance in many ways, from tech to the military to tourism, is substantial indeed.
Billings is one to watch. I have no idea what's fueling the growth spurt out there, but once upon a time Butte (pretty much dead, at this point) and Great Falls were the largest cities in Montana, with Helena as the political center of gravity. The emergence of Billings (and Missoula) as nascent major cities has taken place rapidly and suddenly, over the last 20 or 30 years, and - from a distance - seems to have come from nowhere. Billings' surge across the 100,000 mark happened rather rapidly.
On the East Coast, Greenville NC is starting to emerge as a minor research hub, university related, and it's gone from 30,000 to 85,000 in 25 years' time. It's now the 10th largest city in NC, and will almost certainly become the 10th city in the state to hit 100,000, before the next census. Concord NC will likely become the 11th, and again before the next census.
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