Somewhere in the wilds of Vaudreuil, on the mainland just west of the Island of Montreal, there’s this immense brown concrete cube of a building in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea what it’s for. I think the government runs it.
As a sort of an echo, just on the island, towering over the little suburban villages of Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Senneville, is the Sainte-Anne Veterans’ Hospital. It looks outsized because the area is too sparsely populated to need that big a hospital, but of course it isn’t for the local population but for veterans (it’s also run by the government – Veterans’ Affairs Canada – and is in fact the only independent veterans’ hospital still extant in Canada.)
Newark, OH, (pop. ~46,000) has a rather typical skyline with (I believe) only one tall hotel or apartment building. However, wandering out East of town, in the shallow valley of the Licking River, one encounters the seven story tall Longaberger Basket Company corporte HQ–in the shape of a basket with “handles” extending up an additional five stories, or so.
That must be it. (thanks, I’ve wondered what and where ti was for years) It’s enormously out of proportion to the size of the town and definitely looks haunted.
The Price Tower (the only skyscraper Frank Lloyd Wright got built) in Bartlesville, OK (pop. 34,000ish) stood out like a sore thumb for years. Nowadays there’s a few semi-tall buildings there and it’s not as noticeable.
Even though the stadium holds that many for football, the only road from Harrisburg to State College for those games is largely a two lane highway. :mad:
And its counterpart in Hamamatsu (pop. 600,000), ACT City Plaza, at 45 floors and 212 meters tall. Easily five times the size of anything in the surrounding area.
It’s only a few miles stretch through that narrow valley that just two lanes anymore, but good lord, does that stretch suck, or what!
Also, big college facilities cause a surge in population that justifies them. Sure the pop. for State College is listed as 38,000, but that doesn’t count the 84,000 ( :eek: ) students at PSU.
84,000? That can’t be right! The PSU website lists 42,000 students at University Park, including grad and professional students, many of which have residency and therefore overlap with the 38,000 residents.
Jackpot, Nevada is a little gambling town (obviously) just over the Idaho-Nevada line on US 93. The main casino there is Cactus Pete’s, which has a 10-story hotel tower. While www.city-data.com doesn’t even list it, the Wikipedia page shows it as having around 1,500 people. You can see the tower from several miles back, out in the middle of nowhere.
When you drive into East Brunswick off of the New Jersey Turnpike from Exit 9 you are greeted by two 23-story office buildings known as the Tower Center. Nothing else in town exceeds 5-8 stories and there are only a handful of buildings in that range.
There’s a brand new building in Gifu City (pop. 400,000), the Gifu City Tower 43 that stands at 43 floors and towers over everything around it, much like ACT City does in Hamamatsu.
:smack: I got it from Wikipedia…but I failed to consider that that number may include other campuses, like Penn State-Altoona, Penn State-Harrisburg, etc.
Still the number of students/faculty there pretty much outnumbers plain ol’ residents there, and the college is huge and internationally known, therefore, IMHO, it justifies the big buildings, etc. This isn’t a small-town/big building-that seems-to-not-fit situation, it’s a small town with a huge university that is a perfect justification for big buildings/stadiums, etc. Not any sort of anomaly at all, IMHO.
The town of Verona, NY had a population of 6,425 in 2000. It is home to the Turning Stone Casino, which includes the 19-story Tower Hotel - the tallest building between Albany and Syracuse.
On the same vein, Yellowknife in Northwest Territories, Canada has an impressive skyline for a 18,700 population in a very remote area. The building boom was due to diamond mines found in the late 1990s.
