This might be a pretty dry question but I am curious about it.
Occasionally, I read about certain neighborhoods or areas of a city that feel so ignored or disrespected by their municipal government that they threaten to secede and form their own cities (e.g., the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles). However, beyond some grousing, nothing usually comes of it. Still, I wonder if this has ever happened. I also wonder if there any state laws where this possible.
Does anybody know?
And some, if not teeming millions, think of the movie Passport to Pimlico (wiki link). It’s not a documentary? Oh well, back to staring off into cyberspace.
A city block near downtown Buffalo recently seceded from the city. It’s now Seneca Indian land, and considered outside of the jurisdiction of the City of Buffalo. The block was supposed to be the site of a casino, but it’s been sitting half-finished for the past two years or so.
Many cities in Colonial America broke off from their original centers. Danvers MA used to be part of Salem, for instance.
One more recent example (although the region and the name existed far earlier, is Metuchen, N.J., which didn’t break away officially from Woodbridge NJ until 1870. It’s completely surrounded by its “parent town”. But i don’t think it was because of ill feeling toward Woodbridge
I don’t think secession would be an accurate term to describe this situation. I don’t know what the right term would be, but I don’t think labeling the land as being annexed by the Indian tribe would be accurate either.
Of course it’s a documentary 
– but it’s about part of the United Kingdom discovering that it really was part of the Duchy of Burgundy. So it involved part of the City of Westminster losing its territory to Burgundy, but the movie explored issues of international relations rather than local government – such as passport checks on London Underground trains.
Pinecrest, FL?
It was just part of unincorporated Dade county until 1996. But that’s not so much secession as it is incorporation. I can think of several historical examples in NJ, but not any modern ones… there are probably dozens; I just don’t know them.
Here in Rhode Island, the City of Central Falls was once urban center of the Town of Lincoln. It seceded long ago to seperate a thriving city from a rural, largely undeveloped town. Lincoln is now a pricey, thriving, suburban town, while Central Falls has become the most economically depressed area of Rhode Island.
There was a period back in, IIRC the 1970s, when Staten Island seriously considered seeking separate city status owing to a perceived neglect by NYC government. There was quite a large groundswell of popular support for it. It never came to fruition, though – but as something more than a few malcontents making noise, it qualifies for the thread as an example of an almost".
The city of Broomfield, CO used to be in Boulder County, and growth caused it to leak into three other counties as well. After Boulder was (typically) unable to agree on a redesign of an aging mall in the city, Broomfield stepped in and got the mall located in their city. Having to deal with four different county governments was the stated reason for the move, but snagging the mall was the reason they were able to afford to make the change. This happened in 1998.
This is also true in Connecticut. The New Haven Colony was far larger than the eventual City of New Haven, and many of the surrounding towns split from either New Haven Colony or the City of New Haven. See the table here.
Broomfield really didn’t break away from another community, though. It was the City of Broomfield in Boulder, Adams, Weld and Jefferson counties, but became a self-contained city/county like Denver. Lots of annexation in the Denver area, some incorporation (Centenial, possibly Highlands Ranch in the near future), the possibility of some consolidation (Mountain View into Lakewood), but no splits from an incorporated city.
Another sort-of-split: the recent redivision of Montreal, with the recreation of the old, indpendent Anglophone western suburbs.
In the Northeast and a few midwestern states, the incorporation of a village or city in a town isn’t technically a split. The town or township is the basic municipal unit. If the village or city dissolves, the area reverts back to the former underlying township. A while ago, there was a serious proposal to dissolve the City of Buffalo, but few realized it would just revert to the long-gone Town of Buffalo, not just be a part of the county with no local governance.
The slow trend in municipal government in the United States is towards consolidation, not splitting.
Just to be clear, though: Metuchen is completely surrounded by Edison now, not Woodbridge.
That seems to be the case. Also, many states don’t seem to have a legal mechanism where a part of an existing incorporated city can secede to form its own city. In the Revised Code of Washington, for example, there are statutes governing incorporation, annexation, consolidation, and disincorporation but nothing on secession. The laws that come closest in this state are the ones governing the reduction of city limits which allow a section of a city to exclude itself from the city’s boundaries if 60% or more the voters in that particular area of the city (and the Boundary Review Board beforehand) approve. Once that’s done, I don’t think there would be anything preventing this former section from incorporating itself into its own city if it chose to do so (and the Boundary Review Board allowed it). However, I don’t think this has ever been done in Washington.
Marietta, Ohio, where I live is split on two sides of the Muskingum River. The locals tell me that way back when the West Side, known as Harmar, seceded from Marietta and was an independent city for twenty years or so before voting to rejoin Marietta.
So, if true, we have a case here of an area seceding from a city and then reversing that decision.
And my town Belmont used to be part of Watertown, MA.
And I think (not sure) Waverly also used to be part of Watertown, but now its part of Belmont.
Barton Hills, MI seceded from Ann Arbor, MI in 1971. See the text under the first two links, but unfortunately, the actual page linked to isn’t viewable (for me, at least).
Glendale, Missouriwas an honest-to-gosh legally incorporated city with fixed boundaries and everything when, in 1920, the residents voted to split off the southern portion of the municipality (legend has it the people in the north wanted sidewalks and the people in the south didn’t.) A few months later the northsiders wanted to reconsolidate, but the southsiders refused, and instead incorporated themselves as Oakland.
Spokane Valley, Wa recently broke from Spokane, Wa but then ended up having to contract many of their services from Spokane
Not in the United States, but Headingley, Manitoba seceded from the City of Winnipeg in 1993. However, they didn’t secede to become a town of their own; rather, they became a “rural municipality” (the closest U.S. equivalent is probably a township.)