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A twist on this question: I wrote a post a while ago about the "vanquished twins" of many US cities , formerly independent cities that were absorbed into faster-growing neighbors -- often an equivalent settlement across the river.
Baltimore, Denver, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee came to mind; their "twin" downtowns of Jonestown, Auraria, Allegheny, St. Anthony, and Kilbourn all declined after their mergers, later offering a uniquely cheap combination of deteriorated, frontier-era buildings within a short walk of the principal downtown. Shunned and looked down upon by the ascendant city’s downtown elite and starved for resources (namely the intra-city transportation links that funneled commuters to the principal downtown), the "vanquished twins" became prime targets for urban renewal, and today their names only resonate for local history buffs.
The only US city that maintains, to this day, multiple administrative downtowns seems to be New York City: no other city in America spans multiple county seats, much less multiple federal court districts. (Odd that most-populous Queens has a singularly un-memorable and low-rise Borough Hall; single-family Kew Gardens will never be mistaken for a "downtown.")
I'm not counting outlying business districts that emerged beginning with the suburban era -- railroad, streetcar, or auto era business hubs for the richer side of town, specializing in entirely different industries than the traditional downtown -- or suburban Edge Cities.
Some of those adjoining centers get merged in and remain centers in their own right. Oakland, Alexandria, and Newark are some examples on a large scale.
In my area, Ballard used to be a separate town but got merged into Seattle in 1907 and its downtown remains one of the better third-tier centers in the region. Actually it's surging with 4,000 new apartments since the late 90s and a stable employment base including a hospital, a big maritime sector, and a decent amount of tourism due to the Ballard Locks and the National Nordic Museum. I'm not counting Fisherman's terminal across the canal, though that's often said to be in Ballard in an honorary sense.
Some of those adjoining centers get merged in and remain centers in their own right. Oakland, Alexandria, and Newark are some examples on a large scale.
In my area, Ballard used to be a separate town but got merged into Seattle in 1907 and its downtown remains one of the better third-tier centers in the region. Actually it's surging with 4,000 new apartments since the late 90s and a stable employment base including a hospital, a big maritime sector, and a decent amount of tourism due to the Ballard Locks and the National Nordic Museum. I'm not counting Fisherman's terminal across the canal, though that's often said to be in Ballard in an honorary sense.
Philly technically has 2 if you're counting "center city" and university city as separate CBD's. 3 including Conshohocken
Conshy is a small-town downtown that got an edge city grafted onto it.
And as far as CBD-ness goes, it doesn't hold a candle to the region's biggest edge city, King of Prussia, just a few miles up the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76).
But it is true that Conshohocken looks more like a downtown than KofP ever will. The latter is an archipelago of office buildings and light industrial facilities with a huge super-regional shopping mall as its biggest island. (I think that American Dream in the Meadowlands may have surpassed it now, but if you removed the indoor amusement park from the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, the King of Prussia mall had the most selling space of any mall in the country.) And it's the region's leading high-end fashion destination; Walnut Street in the actual downtown Philadelphia struggles to keep up with it. (That's because the serious money in this region lives closer to it than to Rittenhouse Square — Villanova and Radnor are both just down the road from KofP but a 30-minute train ride into Center City.)
Last edited by MarketStEl; 05-29-2024 at 10:51 PM..
More accurately, University City and Center City have grown towards each other.
University City's chief employment center remains the two next-door-neighbor universities that give the district its name. The land to their east, towards (William H. Gray) 30th Street Station, was largely either abandoned industrial/warehouse space or fallow land isolated by the railroad tracks that bracket the eastern part of UC. Then someone figured out that 30th Street Station is both an intra- and inter-regional transportation hub, and next thing you know, developers were putting skyscrapers up around it. Schuylkill Yards, a joint project of one of those universities and the region's (and Austin's) biggest commercial landlord, represents the merging of these two halves of UC.
The land on.Center City's western edge was likewise underutilized; a large railroad viaduct didn't get removed until the early 1950s, and the initial developments on its site were modest in scale, expecially compared to the West Market Street office canyon that emerged in the 1980s and the adjacent Comcast towers. The PECO Energy (originally Philadelphia Electric Company) headquarters at 23d and Market was an isolated tower in a sea of parking lots, but those parking lots are being reclaimed, and the low industrial buildings in the area have been repurposed — one, I think, is getting an overbuild as I type this.
This. They remind me of a scaled up version of whats happening between Downtown Baltimore, Harbor Point/East & Hopkins Medical Campus.
I'm sure most Meds and Eds cities have some sort of similar dynamic. Philadelphia paid Brookings a decade ago to research how it could compete better in 21st century and it came to the conclusion that connecting the area between 17th street and 43rd street into a singular 'innovation' district could spur more growth. The area in-between has got pretty built up and can look like a singular district from some vantage points: https://i.imgur.com/yKokDI8.jpeg
It's currently got one of the most absurd proposals to fully turn I-76 into a tunnel and build an artificial beach, concert space, and pool out over the river: https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia...treet-station/
I'm sure most Meds and Eds cities have some sort of similar dynamic. Philadelphia paid Brookings a decade ago to research how it could compete better in 21st century and it came to the conclusion that connecting the area between 17th street and 43rd street into a singular 'innovation' district could spur more growth. The area in-between has got pretty built up and can look like a singular district from some vantage points: https://i.imgur.com/yKokDI8.jpeg
It's currently got one of the most absurd proposals to fully turn I-76 into a tunnel and build an artificial beach, concert space, and pool out over the river: https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia...treet-station/
I think that Brookings study you refer to also coined a term to refer to this city that I consider quite perceptive:
"Bostroit."
I think most of you can figure out what Brookings Met was referring to when it coined that term.
(And the term was coined well before that article was written in 2017. I think it appeared in another Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program report on Philadelphia's future prospects that came out in the 1990s.)
As for the beach proposal: My guess is that someone here visited Paris, whose Left Bank Expressway becomes a beach on the weekends, and thought it might be a good idea to try that at home.
Basically every city in the US has an "innovation district" of some kind (tech, biotech, medical research, satellite college campuses, all of the above). It's common for these to be on the downtown fringes.
New York City has Downtown brooklyn and downtown Manhattan. With New York City having the biggest
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