I remember watching Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence a while back and was surprised at how undeveloped so much of Manhattan was at the time. It was clearly America’s largest city in the late 19th Century by all accounts, but weren’t Philadelphia and Boston bigger in colonial times and for a while thereafter? Wasn’t Charleston richer before the Civil War? Didn’t LA overtake it for a while in the 1980s? How has the Big Apple’s stock risen and fallen in its 400-something years as a major American city?
According to wikipedia, New York has been the country’s largest city since 1790.
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New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.[42] It has been the country’s largest city since 1790.
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I couldn’t find anything that said Los Angeles was bigger for a while.
In 1776, Philadelphia was the largest US city, followed by New York, Boston, Charleston, and Newport.
By 1790 when the first census was done, New York had become the largest.
Wikipedia’s list of largest cities in the US by decade:
Note that in the 1900 census New York went from being the largest city to being the largest city by a long shot. In 1898 the five boroughs were consolidated into one city. This city included the largest city (the previous New York) and the fourth largest city (Brooklyn), as well as Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Since then it has always had twice the population of the next largest city.
1790 is just the date of the first census under the current Constitution. There were census’ taken before that but not necessarily with the same rules. For example it was apparently common to count the suburbs of Philly in pre-Constitution counts of that city, perhaps similar to what’s reflected in the US census starting in 1860 (when the whole of Philadelphia county was included and the city jumped from 4th at less than 1/4’s NY size in 1850 to second and more than 2/3’s as large in 1860). Per the common pre-revolutionary way of counting per link, Boston was biggest til 1750, Philadelphia was biggest in the colonial period after that (counting suburbs). But also pre 1790 estimates including only central Philly would put NY biggest from somewhere around 1750, with the exception of the immediate postwar years (from 1783) when the British and loyalists moved out and pro-independence people who moved out during the war hadn’t moved back. Of course ‘NY’ at that time didn’t include the separate town of Brooklyn either.
Yes, what people call “Los Angeles” is really a vast and bizarre hodgepodge of cities and localities, of which the city of Los Angeles is only one part. Some US cities have officially expanded to annex their suburbs, other cities have large independent suburbs. So “largest city” will vary considerably when you count by official city borders, or by metro area.
That’s the deceiving part of “largest city”… “Metropolitan area”!
I count a city’s size as when you drive there and transition from open space to buildings everywhere. In L.A. for example, that is about a 100 mile semi-circle.
And the city of L.A. is within that and about 4 million population.
Metropolitan area and you are looking at about 19 million people!
Agreed, NY is way bigger than any other US city under official counts of either city itself or metro area, and has been on the first way of counting the whole time of the US census.(see above how Philly v NY used to depend on the definition of Philly: the way Philly was counted locally it was bigger than NY perhaps into the early 19th century, the way the census counted it was smaller, and by the time the census went over to the bigger count of Philly in 1860, it was still smaller).
The only way to argue LA is biggest would maybe to be to say all the separate municipalities in the ‘urban’ area of LA County (Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Long Beach etc) are really part of LA and even the sprawling parts of the county are part of the ‘city’ because that’s the style of that city. Whereas you’d argue eg. Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn and Queens are really suburbs of NY in the style of that city (even though more densely populated than even places close to downtown LA). Or IOW you’d have to twist yourself into a pretzel, because NY is a lot bigger than LA.
Seriously though, the outer boroughs do create some special effects for NY. Like for example one reason, though not the only or full explanation, why NY’s crime rate is so much lower than other US cities especially other relatively old ones, is neighborhoods in the outer boroughs which would be adjacent suburbs to other cities.
“City”, for comparative purposes, ought to be defined as any dense urban area surrounding an inner core. Which means any “city” is populated by as many people as there are living in places of an urban nature that are tributary to an original city proper.
It has become the fashion to redesignate a metro area not by its original focus, but by the most populous census-designated entity that happens to be within it. So the largest metropolis in Virginia is no longer Norfolk, it is Virginia Beach, simply because the sprawling old Princess Anne County can spread much further than boundary-locked Norfolk.
I’m not familiar enough with NYC or LA to comment, but they apparently include Naperville with Chicago and Baltimore with DC, which is ridiculous.
If the NYC metro area has to stretch the definition like that to include far off areas and LA has less of a stretch, there may be more tight definitions that push LA in front.
Why is either one ridiculous? Both are places where large numbers of people commute* to the center city to work, and for both examples there’s a continuous belt of suburban development, with no rural area, in between.
*In the modern sense, but also in the original sense of using a commuted monthly train ticket.
Which is why there are separate rankings for “city” (includes only residents within defined city limits) and “metropolitan area.” For example: Columbus, OH is the largest city in Ohio by far, more than twice as large as the second largest city, but only because the city limits include nearly all of Franklin County as well as parts of neighboring counties. Whereas the Columbus Metropolitan Area is only #3 in Ohio, behind Cincinnati and Cleveland.
To further muddy the waters, there’s the Combined Statistical Area, which glomps together various metropolitan areas with each other. Under this definition, the #4 largest CSA is Baltimore/Washington D.C. (behind New York/Newark, Los Angeles/Long Beach and Chicago/Naperville) even though neither Baltimore nor D.C. are in the top 20 of largest U.S. cities.
Los Angeles has never been close to America’s largest city. By 1900, the population was barely over 100,000. L.A. grew to become California’s largest city by 1920, but didn’t become the #2 U.S. city until 1984, when it surpassed Chicago.
The actual city limits of Los Angeles are much larger than most people think. For example, nearly all of the San Fernando Valley is part of L.A. (thanks mostly to L.A. bribing the CA Supreme Court into declaring that they owned all the water rights to the SFV, including groundwater, so the various ranches and sleepy villages had no choice but to allow L.A. to annex them…but that’s a story for another time) and many communities that are often regarded as separate, such as Hollywood, Watts, and San Pedro, are part of L.A. Of course, New York has also made a habit of aggressively annexing its neighbors (Brooklyn, Staten Island, etc.) so there you go.
Fun fact: In the 1990’s, the San Fernando Valley voted to separate from Los Angeles and form its own independent city. The measure failed, but had it succeeded, L.A. would have dropped back down to America’s 3rd largest city, while San Fernando Valley (or whatever they chose to call it) would have been #6.
To provide more detail, the West Bronx became part of New York City in 1874, and most of the East Bronx in 1895. The present city was consolidated in 1898.
Both are places where large numbers of people commute* to the center city to work, and for both examples there’s a continuous belt of suburban development, with no rural area, in between.