Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
Pittsburgh's not in the midwest, but the best way to describe it is basically as follows:
First, a well-preserved, dense downtown area with extremely minimal usage of sufcace parking lots for a rust belt city.
Second, a "ring of ruin" basically surrounding downtown on all sides where traditional urban form was either destroyed or all-but destroyed. Lower Hill, Uptown, Strip District, North Shore, Station Square, etc. All of these areas are seeing massive new investment today, but it's very much "urban light" in the modern sense and won't hold a candle to what was lost.
Third, a series of very-well preserved, finely-grained, traditionally urban neighborhoods which are found on the North Side, East End (including Oakland) and South Side. Altogether it makes for a very large swathe of urbanity, but the lack of cohesive traditional urbanity between them and downtown is palpable. Still, the overall scope of this grouping is way larger than Cincinnati, and it's way more intact than anything remaining in St. Louis.
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Excellent description of Pittsburgh, and I concur that overall, despite some holes, it has a larger contiguous chunk of traditional urbanity than does Cincinnati or St. Louis. And while it is true Pittsburgh's downtown is separated from the city's other vibrant urban nodes, it is by far the busiest, tallest, densest commercial core of the three, and features a light rail subway to boot, which is a nice urban perk (as is the gold-standard bus rapid transit line to the eastern nodes).
It's possible St. Louis may have, cumulatively, more traditionally urban (as opposed to streetcar urban) areas overall than does Pittsburgh (and it definitely has more than Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland, and Minneapolis), but the dead zones between almost all of them attenuate the overall impacts of the fantastic architecture, human scale, historicity and fine materials in St. Louis' best areas.
Columbus is great in many ways, especially the charming red brick areas others have duly noted. But it's a car city, and that sucks much of the life out of areas that otherwise would be more vibrant at those built densities. If Columbus could build (and getting people to use) a multi-modal and comprehensive transit (and bike-walk) system, the downtown-N. High St.-university corridor would just blow up. Imagine if that same corridor were somehow magically recreated in Portland--it would be packed to the gills, because people get out of their cars more. That could absolutely happen in Columbus with the right decisions, investment and planning.
Detroit has good bones and once could have taken this thread in a walkoff, if it had continued to build tall like it did early in the skyscraper era, and of course, if there hadn't been all the wholesale abandonment outside downtown.
Cleveland has a taller tower (and earns points for heavy rail, plus light rail and a gold-standard bus rapid transit line), but Minneapolis has the the best skyline in question, and best downtown overall, despite the skyways.
I have not been to Milwaukee, but I suspect it is a strong contender in terms of density and cohesiveness. Kansas City is nice enough, but it doesn't stand out among its peers. And Indianapolis is notably unremarkable in every category.
So...I guess I'd go with Minneapolis, even though its primary built form is streetcar urban rather than traditionally urban. So while it lacks the fine-grained traditional urbanity of Cincinnati's anomalous Over-the-Rhine, it also lacks the huge dead zones that pockmark St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati and Cleveland. It lacks heavy rail, but has good transit overall (and excellent bicycling). It doesn't have the tallest tower of the bunch, but it has the best skyline and the most functional downtown. It seems to boast a lot of middle-class people who want to live in the city, and value the nature and functionality of their cityscape. And it continues to make decisions that will lead the entire city to become denser and more transit- and ped/bike-oriented in coming years and decades.