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I saw that figure on Wikipedia. I think it's highly suspect for three reasons. First, I have a hard time believing there are more self-proclaimed Catholics in DC than Baptists. With a city that's 55% Black, at least half of those people are going to be Baptist. Some will be A.M.E. The others will be something else...maybe atheist? All I know is that DC seems to be infected with Baptist churches.
Second, if the city is roughly 10% Hispanic, that gives you pretty much 33% of the Catholic population there. DC also has more black Catholics than a lot of cities.
Third, the white population in DC is so transient that it doesn't really matter anyway. It's rare that you find a white person in Washington, DC that was born and raised in the city. There aren't any Southies (Boston), Bensonhursts (Brooklyn) or Gray's Ferries (Phila) in DC. These are the Catholics who voted against Barack Obama in the primaries, by the way. In fact, I think Obama may have lost NYC, Boston, and Philly. If he did win Philly, it was only because Philly has a higher percentage of blacks than NYC and Boston. I can almost guarantee you that Obama lost all of the Italian and Irish strongholds in Philadelphia.
I said Historically Black Denominations were not included in the data, that includes all the denominations of Black Baptists. Southern Baptists (mostly white) were included, but they form a small percentage of the population. To me, you know your white population is Southern if most of them are Baptist, but in DC that's not the case.
You're right cosmopolitan is subjective. I was actually talking about most of the other things on his list. I also pointed out a few things earlier that aren't subjective:
- a relatively high population density (higher than any major city in the South, besides Miami) despite the self-imposed ban on skyscrapers
I think you mean partially due to the self-imposed ban on skyscrapers.
I saw that figure on Wikipedia. I think it's highly suspect for three reasons. First, I have a hard time believing there are more self-proclaimed Catholics in DC than Baptists. With a city that's 55% Black, at least half of those people are going to be Baptist. Some will be A.M.E. The others will be something else...maybe atheist?
I didn't bring up Atlanta's gay population to argue that this was a characteristic of a northern city (although it is a reflection of the city's liberalism, which is a characteristic on your list). I raised that fact to show how substantially different it is from other cities in the South such as Birmingham or Nashville. My point was simply that Atlanta had a certain identity during the earlier half of the 20th century and then radically changed that identity during the latter half. Similarly, Washington, which was considered a sleepy, backwater town for much of the twentieth century, was able to change its identity in a matter of decades.
But in the same way a gay population is not a "characterisitic" of a northern city, neither is "high income" or education, wouldn't you agree? Philadelphia certainly does not have many high wage earners and the city is not a particularly educated one. Nobody would ever argue, however, that Philadelphia is not solidly northern. San Francisco arguably has more in common with NYC, DC and Boston than Philly (aside from the weather, large educated class, high cost of living, high incomes, cosmopolitan, diverse, EXTREMELY liberal, public transportation, density, and yes, many Catholics in San Fran). Those things, while highly correlated with cities on the eastern seaboard, do not make a city southern or northern.
The difference between the north and south is not just population density, theatre districts, snow and Thai restaurants; it's a cultural difference. This cultural difference is a product of the different economic systems that existed in the north and south prior to the Civil War and leading up to the early 20th century. Prior to the Civil War, Boston, NYC, and Philly were all commercial centers. Maryland's economy, with the exception of Baltimore (which I've already said I consider to be more northern than DC), was more agrarian-based, a fact made evident by the large number of slaves there. For Christ's sake, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass grew up on SLAVE PLANTATIONS in Maryland.
On the contrary, the industrial north needed large labor pools for its factories, which it found in the masses of immigrants from places like Ireland, Italy, etc. These immigrants then found themselves competing against newly arrived blacks from the American South, something that never occurred in Washington, DC. For the most part, blacks in DC were a service class for the city's white elites. That's still the case for many black Washingtonians today.
Although Washingtonians many not identify themselves as southerners, Northerners definitely do not accept them as being part of the North. So I guess you can say that the city has its own special region. Growing up, though, we considered DC the South.
Did New Jersey ever have many slaves? And did New Jersey ever consider secession from the Union?
A lot of the reason DC never industrialized was because it was the seat of the federal government. Remember I'm not saying DC is a 100% Northern city, I'm just saying that it has significantly more in common with the North than the South, overall it's in a category by itself.
Measurable statistics (density, politics, income) all affect culture. Consider this: no major city south of DC (including Atlanta, excluding Miami) has a population density 10K/sq. mi. or greater, that must (and does) have an impact on culture (transportatioon, living arrangements, recreation, type of economy).
Again, for every point you can make for DC (or Maryland) being Southern, you can name ten for it being Northern. There are Southern influences, but outweighed by the Northern ones. Edgar Allen Poe, a Baltimore native, was an almost exclusively Northeastern icon. If it wasn't for the Baltimore based B&O RR (the largest company in MD at the time) the Union may not have won the Civil War.
Somebody also mentioned kids playing stickball in the street earlier, which reminds me of something strongly a part of DC and MD culture: lacrosse.
Lacrosse is almost purely a Northeastern sport, and is by far most popular in MD and DC. Nearly every college in MD with a D1 athletic program, as well as the vast majority of high schools, field lacrosse teams. Teams from MD usually fill about 5 of the 16 spots (1/3-1/4) of the NCAA tournament field. There are only 4 D1 college lacrosse teams in the South, but about 40 from DC to Maine. As of the last Nike/Inside Lacrosse poll (based in B'more), 7 of the top 20 teams in the nation are in MD-DC-DE (G'town, UMBC, Loyola, UDE, UMD, JH, Navy). It makes up for the relatively mild popularity of college football in the area (no really great teams, average attendance), something that is HUGE in the South (and Midwest).
So while you find little factoids here and there pointing to "Southerness" in DC and MD, it's the big, obvious things that make it Northern. As I said before, above all it doesn't exactly fit in either region since it's so unique. Most people just call it "Mid-Atlantic," along with NoVa-MD-DE-WV-PA.
A lot of the reason DC never industrialized was because it was the seat of the federal government. Remember I'm not saying DC is a 100% Northern city, I'm just saying that it has significantly more in common with the North than the South, overall it's in a category by itself.
Measurable statistics (density, politics, income) all affect culture. Consider this: no major city south of DC (including Atlanta, excluding Miami) has a population density 10K/sq. mi. or greater, that must (and does) have an impact on culture (transportatioon, living arrangements, recreation, type of economy).
Again, for every point you can make for DC (or Maryland) being Southern, you can name ten for it being Northern. There are Southern influences, but outweighed by the Northern ones. Edgar Allen Poe, a Baltimore native, was an almost exclusively Northeastern icon. If it wasn't for the Baltimore based B&O RR (the largest company in MD at the time) the Union may not have won the Civil War.
Somebody also mentioned kids playing stickball in the street earlier, which reminds me of something strongly a part of DC and MD culture: lacrosse.
Lacrosse is almost purely a Northeastern sport, and is by far most popular in MD and DC. Nearly every college in MD with a D1 athletic program, as well as the vast majority of high schools, field lacrosse teams. Teams from MD usually fill about 5 of the 16 spots (1/3-1/4) of the NCAA tournament field. There are only 4 D1 college lacrosse teams in the South, but about 40 from DC to Maine. As of the last Nike/Inside Lacrosse poll (based in B'more), 7 of the top 20 teams in the nation are in MD-DC-DE (G'town, UMBC, Loyola, UDE, UMD, JH, Navy). It makes up for the relatively mild popularity of college football in the area (no really great teams, average attendance), something that is HUGE in the South (and Midwest).
So while you find little factoids here and there pointing to "Southerness" in DC and MD, it's the big, obvious things that make it Northern. As I said before, above all it doesn't exactly fit in either region since it's so unique. Most people just call it "Mid-Atlantic," along with NoVa-MD-DE-WV-PA.
I don't doubt that those things affect culture. But my question is how have those same things changed DC in a way that Atlanta has not been changed? Atlanta is not dense, but it has loads of educated people, and high incomes relative to the rest of the country. And someone else mentioned something about the white people in DC not being southern. That's definitely the case in the District where you have a lot of carpetbaggers. But the same could be said for Atlanta...and it's perhaps even worse there.
During my four years in Atlanta, I probably met no more than a dozen people who were from there. I had an Italian hygienist from Pelham Bay, a mechanic from Passaic, NJ, a barber from my very own neighborhood in Philadelphia, and one of my best professors was a Jew from Flatbush, Brooklyn. Nobody in Atlanta, at least within I-285, is from there. The Atlanta metro area probably doubled in size within twenty years, and many of those people came from the northeast. In fact, there were so many Philadelphians in Atlanta that I ate at two hoagie shops (Gutbusters and Mr. Everything) on a regular basis and had my hair braided by a chick from West Philly who owned a shop there. I felt more at home there than I do in DC.
So you consider DC being part of the Jim Crow south a mere factoid?
Again, I think that Baltimore has far more of a northern feel to it than DC. I think any self-respecting Washingtonian would agree that the two cities are not the same.
I've lived in the Washington, D.C. area for many years and can say that it definitely feels more northern than southern. The D.C. metropolitan population is about 5.4 million. It has an overlapping labor market with Baltimore, which is an even more northern city culturally. The Baltimore-Washington metro area now has a population of 8.3 million and fits in with the northeast corridor of cities.
Again, I think that Baltimore has far more of a northern feel to it than DC. I think any self-respecting Washingtonian would agree that the two cities are not the same.
They don't but DC and Baltimore have much more in common compared to DC and Atlanta. I been to Atlanta a few times and I currently live in DC and the only similarities between the two is that they are heavily forested and they have a large black population. That's pretty much it nowdays. DC from a built environment is nothing like the South. Culturally, DC is very unique. It has characteristics of both the North and the South. That's why they call it the Mid-Atlantic.
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