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As someone who has lived in the UK, France and Spain - the whole concept of it being normal that "downtown" is grim is really strange. Over here the city centre
by mcjiggerlog 12y ago
As someone who has lived in the UK, France and Spain - the whole concept of it being normal that "downtown" is grim is really strange. Over here the city centre is typically the nicest (and most expensive) part of the city to live in.
I guess it stems from the relative ages of cities in North America vs Europe. A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Whereas in NA, cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.
- raverbashing 12y agoWell, Boston, NYC, amongst others in the USA have nice downtowns. Not to mention Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa and other cities in Canada.
- santaclaus 12y agoNative New Yorkers absolutely looooooove Time Square...
- Ollinson 12y agoTimes Square is not downtown new york.
- ardit33 12y agoUnion Square is the heart of NYC. Almost all lines intersect there, (the L from Brooklyn as well), and it is next to (within 10mins walk) of East Village, West Village, Lower East Side, Chelsea, FlatIron, Kips Bay, etc, which are the most interesting parts of NYC and have both commercial and residential buildings It used to be a dangerous dump 20 years ago, and now it is awesome.
- santaclaus 12y agoEhhhh, that area is a bit B&T at night...
- eclipxe 12y agoReally? I lived close by and never got a B&T vibe from Union Square.
- avn2109 12y ago>> "...the Union Square area." The Union Squarea?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Hobotron1 12y agoFor anyone else that didn't know: a bridge-and-tunnel (B&T) person is one who lives in the suburbs and is perceived as unsophisticated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel I'm perpetually amazed at what people can be condescending about.
- bobbles 12y agoIt's interesting that this idea seems to be somewhat pervasive though. The north shore / North Sydney for example is often seen as pompous and never wanting to 'head across the bridge' to attend events etc. Again with the same separation that you need to be on trains/tunnels/bridges to cross the harbour.
- makeitsuckless 12y agoSame in many places. "South of the river" in Londen, "Noord" in Amsterdam.
- Ollinson 12y agoMaybe B&T was an insult 30 years ago but since some of the most trendy neighborhoods in NYC today are in Brooklyn....yeah not so much.
- mladenkovacevic 12y agoToronto downtown is nice but it is the only exciting, interesting party of the city. I wish some of the surrounding areas had their own centres that didn't revolve around a mall or a Wal-Mart (Scarborough, Etobicoke, Mississauga, Vaughan)
- tjradcliffe 12y agoVancouver. Even some of our smaller cities have pretty OK downtowns (Kingston, Nanaimo...) Liveable downtowns are definitely a matter of policy, not history.
- bluedino 12y agoEurope never had the white flight that a lot of American cities had.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoWho would the white Europeans be running away from?
- guard-of-terra 12y agoNowdays they might flee from muslim immigrants, just suppose.
- kyllo 12y agoYes, but they mostly live in the suburbs of cities like Paris, while the inner city remains affluent and white. Do Europeans just do a more effective job of keeping poor people and ethnic minorities from moving into the inner cities in the first place?
- bluedino 12y agoThe suburbs didn't exist when people started immigrating to cities like Detroit.
- toyg 12y agoA lot of continental inner-cities (Paris, most Italian towns) were already too expensive way before "immigration waves" were even possible. In that sense, newcomers never got a chance. Any town that has existed since Roman times has had two thousand years in which to solidify the link between location and social status, to a point that will likely survive anything bar catastrophic events.
- chrisan 12y agoNo one, which I believe is his point?
- 12y ago
- randallsquared 12y ago> A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Well, the same is true in NA in lots of places, but I think the difference is something else: historic buildings imply that you can't just tear them down and build something nicer, and the oldest buildings in cities I've lived in, here in the US, are not the nicest ones; rather the reverse. As someone who spent most of my formative years in the southern US, my expectation is that the nicest part of town is the one that was just built, and older streets and buildings are literally the ones where people have to be if they don't have the money to scrub that away and build shiny new things, or just move to newer places. This is quite a difference even from the northeastern US, so I can only imagine how stark the difference must be from the US to Europe. Oddly, while I spent a few days in Dublin a few years back for an interview, I don't remember noticing everything looking old and run down there.
- mcjiggerlog 12y agoInteresting, here in London for example, the older the house the more money it's worth generally. Actually, it's kind of a reverse bell curve, with the lowest point falling for buildings built during the 50s/60s. The most desirable houses are typically Georgian / Victorian town houses.
- thisrod 12y agocities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case. Melbourne, in Australia, is a counter example. It started in 1835, it was the centre of the fastest land grab in history, then the population doubled in ten years during the 1850s gold rush. And today the city centre is world famous. The local wisdom tends to support the conclusion of the article. The Premier in the early 1990s (who would be called the Governor in the US) committed to making the city a place for people to live, and started changing the laws about planning, business hours and so on that were preventing that. He quickly lost office, because the rural parts of the state viewed him as "the Premier of Melbourne", but the city kept improving.
- nickonline 12y agoThis is most definitely not a counter example. Melbourne is almost 200 years old, it is very young compared to the European cities being cited. You also point out how the city was rough until someone decided to do something about it 20 years ago. The OP I assume would refer to NYC as a 'fast growing city' (around 400 years old) compared to somewhere like London or Madrid which have both been there for over 2,000 years.
- acchow 12y agoNA cities actually did grow much faster. Melbourne's "doubling in ten years" during the 1850's doesn't even come close. Chicago, for example, grew 6x in the 1840s, almost 4x in the 1850s, and 2.5x in the 1860s.
- makeitsuckless 12y agoExcept that that is not entirely true. Although not as abandoned as many American city centers, the downtown areas of many a European city was pretty awful during the 80s. I personally live in a nice picturesque gentrified part of the center of Amsterdam. The building I live in still has the front they added to the original porch to keep out the junkies and homeless in the 80s... Taking back the city center is a process of the last few decades. The main difference is that there was something worth taking back.