#58, Aurora, Colorado. Ain’t never heard of the place.
I was surprised to see that Salt Lake City isn’t much bigger, population-wise, than piddly little Jackson, MS. I also find it amazing that my state (MS) is about 48,430 sq mi with a population of a hair under 3 million people, while England comes in at about 50,346 sq mi with a population of about 51 million. :eek: Damn, do y’all have any elbow room in England?
Me too.
Woo hoo! We made 185. Where we score is with the metro area(should include counties of Hidalgo, Starr, Cameron, Willacy), although the metro region south of the border is decreasing in population as we speak (and I’m not talking about immigration-wise). Never heard of Visalia, though.
Today, the biggest I’ve never heard of are Gilbert, AZ (#94) and Fremont, CA (#104).
I can go that deep only because shortly after the 2000 census results came out I went through a list of the 100 biggest cities. At that time there were several in the top 100 I didn’t know. Memory is fragile, but I think that in 2000 I had never heard of Santa Ana, Henderson, Glendale, Chandler, Garland, or North Las Vegas.
Well, they do have their own MLB team, the Texas Rangers.
Anyway I got down to #74, Glendale, Arizona.
#122: Fontana, California. I never heard of it, but it’s more populous than Salt Lake City.
Another vote for Chandler, Arizona.
I was “saved” from crapping out at 71 by knowing Henderson, NV from the show CSI 
#89 Chula Vista California.
Another vote for Moreno Valley, CA. There are a handful of California cities after it that I hadn’t heard of before (Garden Grove, Corona, Lancaster, and Elk Grove). The first non-Californian city I hadn’t heard of is Sterling Heights, MI.
The Arizona Cardinals, an NFL team, play there.
What do you think that Hollywood sign is stuck to?
#10: San Jose, California
Maybe It’s because I lived on the east coast all my life, but I don’t think I have ever heard of San Jose before.
Huh, I live in Sterling Heights, MI (metropolitan Detroit), but I wouldn’t expect anyone to have heard of it unless they were from lower-east Michigan.
We visit family out in Mesa, AZ.
And I’ve never heard of Moreno Valley, CA either.
Ah, yes, but if you think that you’re misunderstanding what that list really means. As the wiki article says in its intro, they’re just counting the population of the legal entity called the City of Wherever. That is a totally different thing than the population of the urban+suburban area most of us are thinking of when we hear the name of some city halfway across the country from us.
See Metropolitan statistical area - Wikipedia for the difference.
Taking your first example …
Omaha is an area where the city, the legal entity, encompasses almost all the urban & suburban population. In other words, the City of Omaha extends from downtown out to the edge of the cornfields. It has 840,000 people.
In the St. Louis area, by contrast, the legal entity called the City of St. Louis is a tiny core and the total urban / suburban area out to the edge of the cornfields consists of over 200 cities & towns all tucked side by side. Collectively, they hold 2.8 million people.
In other words, the Greater St. Louis area has about 3.5 times the population of the Greater Omaha area. Meanwhile, the City of Omaha has about 1.3 times the population of the City of St. Louis.
Same here.
I’m another one for Chandler, AZ. I’ve always made an attempt to avoid Phoenix and its environs when traveling through the southwest ( I usually enter the region from CA well north of there, taking the route through Flagstaff), so not so surprising I guess.
Mesa for me too, but I’ve only heard of Jacksonville since I moved in with a guy from there. There are also a whole bunch that I’ve heard the name of, but wouldn’t have thought were particularly large, nor could tell you anything about.
Depends on definiton of “have heard of.” All I know of “Mesa, AZ” is that I recall seeing the name in print. (I may have seen “Virginia Beach, VA” just as often but the redundancy made it less likely to stick in memory. I couldn’t go with Santa Ana, CA … I attended Kindergarten there.)
It’s good to see New Orleans is the largest city in Louisiana again.
Another thread might be “Which city position surprised you?” That San Jose, CA kicked Detroit, MI off the Top Ten list seems “significant.”
This (#10) probably wins the contest. Perhaps the common substitution of the name “Silicon Valley” is the culprit.
Interestingly, I live right next to Fremont, CA, so for me that one was obviously well-known.
#13. Jacksonville, Florida.
Curse you, Midwestern upbringing with no sunlight and lots of corn!