Urban vs. suburban vs. rural and what is considered inner city? (Boston, population)
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Here's a webpage that describes a city neighborhood as suburban:
Bayside - Neighborhood Profile of Bayside, Queens, New York
Bayside, in northeastern Queens, is a suburban neighborhood with city amenities and city taxes (often $6,000 a year less than neighboring Nassau County). Walk down Bell Boulevard, Bayside's crowded main thoroughfare, and it's hard to believe that just one block away are wide, green streets and one-family homes.
Was a contender one year for best communities for Money Magazine, but lost out to Louisville.
I have no clue what this has to do with the thread. Though, I've been in plenty of old homes, lived in many of them. I like a lot of old homes. They all of a functional kitchen with fridge. The median home in Massachusetts was built in the late 1940s. People seem to do fine with the houses here.
You can have bad innovation and good innovation. I dislike the design of most new neighborhoods in the US over older ones, though I know others will disagree.
It's part of this meme of "the old homes are better, blah, blah" which you do see on this forum a lot. I didn't say the kitchens of these old houses don't have refrigerators now; I said the kitchens were built w/o a place for one. In my parents' old house, the fridge was in a hall outside the kitchen. In my in-laws' house, it was down a small flight of stairs. My dad, engineer that he was, figured out a way to get the fridge into the kitchen. It wasn't a matter of the size of the kitchen, it was the configuration, with lots of doorways. My in-laws' fridge remained down the stairs. Now to the young guys on this forum, this doesn't sound like much of a problem, but to people who are actually responsible for feeding a household 21 meals a week, it is. The "work triangle" concept was developed in WW II. Kitchen Work Triangle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Prior to that, as my mom liked to say, "they took whatever space was left over and called it a kitchen". I also thought I'd post a view of what life was like before refrigeration. I thought it was interesting. These old house kitchens also did not have any counter space (usually) and few cabinets. I was at my MIL's senior apartment last night. She has a better kitchen there than in the house where she cooked for 5 people.
Interesting, though every old house/apartment (including where I live in now, the majority of the housing stock in the city excluding outlying parts is pre-1920 or so) I've been in has the fridge in the kitchen. The counter space is a bit small, though. I like old houses better than newer ones in general.
Interesting, though every old house/apartment (including where I live in now, the majority of the housing stock in the city excluding outlying parts is pre-1920 or so) I've been in has the fridge in the kitchen. The counter space is a bit small, though. I like old houses better than newer ones in general.
They may have been remodeled to accomodate the new invention, the refrigerator.
Boston isn't any more compact than Philadelphia; it's a bit less dense.
Philadelphia has a grid, and it was built in the 1600s. Partially true of Baltimore. New York was originally grid less and then adopted one in the early 1800s, though it has occasional deviations from a grid. Boston could have done the same, but choose not to. Few places in New England have gridded streets, though a few 19th century industrial era cities have grids, and parts of larger cities were developed on a grid in that era. Boston's 19th century streets were usually fairly regular, even if they did follow a grid format exactly.
Many midwestern (and western) metros grid their arterials (and some rural roads) as well as their local streets. Eastern cities don't grid their main roads.
For New York City, there's a rather clear difference in structural density where subways stop. This from historical as much as practical reasons (pre-automobile, an area with subway access was inconvenient and couldn't really support high densities. Zoning in later decades has helped keep this difference as well as practicality loss from not living near the subway). I could probably draw a fairly accurate line based on the subway system splitting more urban vs less urban.
I think these photos show the broad categories very well. There would still be some fine-tuning needed to account for urban residential areas and low-density suburbia, and to determine the best category for non-suburban towns as discussed early in the thread, but these three photos get across the basic idea very well.
Looking at that picture 313Weather posted for rural brings to mind several posts in this thread in which any population density under 1,000/sq. mi. was listed as "rural." I'd be interested in knowing whether the people who suggested that number are longtime urbanites. My speculation that the 1,000 number was suggested by people not highly familiar with non-urban landscapes results from the fact that you need a much lower number as the threshold between suburban/exurban and rural, at least if by rural you mean something like the picture 313W posted, or Nei's picture of Hadley, MA. 1,000/sq. mi. is more like large-lot suburban, not farm country.
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