Why are river towns so dreary and economically depressed now adays? My experience is mostly midwest US. But I’ve lived in them, visited them and driven through many. They are all old, dirty, unkept, depressing places…without exeption I can think of.
Even though other means of transportation have supplanted a lot of river barge travel, I’m sure river transport remains a vital and inexpensive means of moving goods. Why then are these towns all stuck and dying. WHen I was living in one, it was clear anyone with the skills, intellegence, or money left as soon as they could.
If I had to guess, I would say that efficiencies in transportation have meant that you don’t need as many rivertowns. Whereas before you neede 10 towns, each with their own grain silos, docks and infrastructure, now you just need 1. Thats my WAG.
The towns were built around heavy industries that left or downsized years ago.
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati andSt. Louis are all deary and dying? Seems to be a bit of exaggeration and generalization. While clearly not as robust and vibrant as they were back in the heavy industrial smokestack age they still have maintained a decent level of livability. Actually having a river nearby without loads of factories on them is actually a plus for many of these places. Like most all cities there are bad parts of town, but overall quite a few river towns are nice places to live and visit; like that place down south on the Mississippi where people flock to for partying, oh what’s it’s name . . . oh New Orleans.
Portland (Willamette River) invalidates the OP, as does Minneapolis (Mississippi).
As does Chicago.
I happen to love the river area of New Jersey between Bucks County Pa and Hunterdon/Warren County NJ. A very quaint peaceful place to be. Very artsy and slower paced lifestyle.
Can you give examples of specific river towns or regions? I’m thinking of places like Upstate New York and Eastern PA.
I believe Lord Feldon and madmonk28 have it correct. Rail, air and superhighway have long supplanted waterways as the main form of transportation. At least any waterway too small to accommodate a 75,000 ton container ship.
Manufacturing and other heavy industry has largely been automated, consolidated and outsourced. So smaller factories and manufacturing centers end up not able to compete with larger, automated factories with their economies of scale.
There is also a growing urbanization trend. People are being drawn towards major metropolitan areas like New York, Boston, North Carolina’s “Research Triangle”, Dallas and San Francisco, among others. Centers of finance, technology, research, culture and education as well as major transportation hubs.
So because of all these things, it’s less important to base your corporate headquarters near a river or other natural resource. It’s more important to be near those cultural and educational centers so you can attract the best and brightest.
It’s one of the main reason that Pittsburg’s biggest export is Stealers fans.
Well for these three cities, their populations peaked in the 60’s/70’s and since then their populations have declined by about 50%…I would say that supports the OP’s theory.
St. Joseph, MO
Davenport Iowa
Cairo, Ill
East St. Louis
you would think that Cairo would be a huge metropolis, because its at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio. if you haven’t heard…its not.
I think the counter examples are valid, but come to mind because they are so big and able not be identified by their rivers. THe dying river towns don’t enter your consiousness because…well…they’re dying, nobody thinks of them.
Perhaps a better question is why are river towns so dreary when compared to other towns of similar size.
Cities in general are getting a lot better. They kind of died there in the mid-20th century. The bigger ones got fixed up first (like NYC), and the smaller ones are lagging behind.
St. Louis certainly seems to be getting a lot better. Memphis can’t be far behind. New Orleans might be a lost cause though. 
I live in a river town (St. Louis) so I’ll give it a shot.
Most of those towns existed for one reason, to give the boats a place to stop. Just like railroad towns, Just like little towns in the Midwest that were built around grain elevators.
Once transportation improves so that the boats don’t have to stop, the towns have to find a different reason to exist, or they die.
If you think river towns are dreary, never, ever drive an old U.S. highway that’s been made obsolete by an Interstate!
St. Joseph was always dependant upon the cattle yards and meat packing industry. With more foreign sourced beef and the ability to preserve and transport meat over longer distances its fortunes fell. There were also a few manufacturers there which have largely either gone out of business or moved elsewhere.
Davenport and the Quad Cities area is strongly dependant upon agricultural equipment manufacturing (John Deere headquarters) and government (Rock Island Arsenal). Both have decreased in labor needs.
Cairo and East St. Louis both suffered from racial tensions and “white flight” which led to subsequent reductions in property values. This, combined with the reduction in river shipping and almost complete disappearance of passenger travel on rivers, along with the construction of bridges which essentially eliminated the need for ferry stations, caused these municipalities to wither away. The amount of damage these places experience from periodic flushing renders them difficult to protect and maintain.
This is not unique to “river towns”; the same declines can be seen in former high value ports on the Great Lakes such as Municing, MI or Green Bay, WI, and the former logging ports on the California, Oregon, and Washington Pacific Coast. A combination of the decline of various manufacturing, logging, or mining industries combined with more reliable modes of transporting goods (e.g. road and rail), and the use of air or road travel for personal transport has led to the lack of necessity for these ports. Nobody takes a steamboat cruise down the Old Miss except for a pleasure cruise of a few hours.
Stranger
Also because I’m not from that part of the country. But I think I’ve seen a similar affect in the Northeast. Maybe not “dying” but places like Albany, Buffalo, Newark, Bridgeport and other old manufacturing cities haven’t been doing well these past decades.
Yes and no. I’m somewhat familiar with Pittsburgh and Cincinnati as I have family in both cities. Pittsburgh’s population has largely stabilized and the economy has diversified since the decline of the steel industry. And Cincinnati is largely a company town for Proctor & Gamble and a few other large corporations. Both are actually considered very livable cities.
Probably the main difference between those cities and places like Detroit is that Detroit never seemed to diversify it’s economy. It just continues to cling to the auto industry, even as the industry has moved out of the area.
That’s only if you go by population alone. Pittsburgh was a cesspool of pollution back in the 60’s and 70’s. Much like Beijing is today. They went thru the rough times in the 80’s and 90’s and have since come back fairly strong. Lived there and Cincinnati as well in the late 90’s and they were going strong. Much better than say the city of Detroit has fared, which happens to be technically on a river as well.
One of the eighties editions of. Places Rated Almanac rated Pittsburgh the best city to live in within the US.
Cairo was never a large place, never really large enough to call a city.
Not quite sure what the OP means by river cities, as that includes cities such as NYC (Hudson and Harlem rivers), Boston (the Charles), DC (the Potomac) and other cities that are doing reasonably well. I realize they don’t fit the narrative but there’s a little no true Scotsman going on here. Why are so many river cities doing badly if we leave out the ones that are doing well?
Same with any town that once housed a largeish population for labor, and now no longer needs that labor and there is not enough need within commuting distance.
Portsmouth Ohio? Marietta, Ohio? Steubenville, Ohio? Pittsburgh, PA?
Before transportation and shipping costs fell dramatically after WWII, large cities tended to form at either break-in-bulk points (where goods are transferred from one form of transportation to another) or fall lines (waterfalls, providing mills with power). Cairo is neither. It’s just a confluence. You don’t have to offload goods to move them from a barge on the Mississippi River to a barge on the Ohio.
“What about Pittsburgh?”, you might say. That’s a bit different. Pittsburgh was always a port town, but its location between the UP (iron ore), Appalachia (coal), and the Northeasten Corridor (markets) made it an ideal and cost-effective location for steel production. It was a place of convergence. Cairo wasn’t.
Consider that cities like Austin, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Charlotte, and Orlando were lumped in with Utica, Wheeling, and Erie for size and prestige until the 1960s. What changed? Air conditioning and cheap transportation.
Another thing: Cairo is also prone to frequent floods, and it sits close to the New Madrid fault. When the rivers flood around Cairo, the city is completely shut off from the rest of the country.
River towns, as opposed to river cities, tend to be hard places, with hard people living there. They tended to be crime-ridden and politically corrupt; far more so than the norm at the time. A lack of good governance will hurt your city’s odds at survival in the post-industrial era.
Cairo also dealt with racial unrest that was, in proportion to a city its size, epic. Hate played as much of a role in killing Cairo as an increasingly irrelevant location based on 19th century transportation technology.