My city is known for _______.

In My Humble Opinion
81

Los Angeles, California

The DODGERS!!!

The movie industry and a major chunk of the recording industry

The beaches

The babes (seriously, we have the most beautiful women in the world. Not that they’re born here, they just end up here)

The worst freeway system in the world.

Hating all things San Francisco (Gawd, they suck!) :smiley:

The Whisky a Go-Go

The Sunset Strip

Universal Studios

LAX

the 'Hood (Watts, Compton, East LA, Echo park, etc)

Beverly Hills (technically not part of LA, but completely surrounded by LA)

Hollywood

and te soon-to-be-famous seccession of the San Fernando Valley!

82

More awake now…I’m from the outskirts of Chattanooga, which is known for many things:

lights
the Chattanooga Choo-Choo
the Read House
the Vols
Ruby Falls
Rock City
Riverbend
Bessie Smith
the Tennessee Aquarium…the list goes on and on.

But my actual hometown is mostly only known for two things:

Dolly Parton got married a few miles from here, and Tri-State Crematory is a few miles from here. Yeehaw.

I’ll soon be residing just outside of London, however, which is known for a kajillion things. :grin:
Lived in Athens, GA, for eight years. Known for the University of Ga, REM, B-52’s, a million other bands, the Tree That Owns Itself, and being dubbed a few years ago as the “most enlightened town in America”.

83

San Diego, CA

In no particular order:

Zoo

Balboa Park

Old Globe Theatre

Navy and Marine Corps

Single-runway airport that badly needs to be replaced, but nobody can make up their minds how to do it and just keep doing study after study after study of the problem.

Hating Los Angeles

Tony Gwynn

The Padres

The Chargers

Scripps Institute of Oceanography and its aquarium.

UCSD

San Diego State University

Childrens Pool (actually a small beach) and the permanent population of seals (or are they sea lions? don’t remember) that live at it and on rocks just off the beach.

Biotech industry

84

Somers Point, NJ

“Eddie and the Cruisers” filmed here.

LPGA (Ladies Professional Golf Association) Tournament…up to a few years ago. (MMMM…Juli Inkster and Nancy Lopez)

85

Hong Kong:

The highest population density
Concrete jungle
Urban sprawl
Super efficient construction companies
Best airport in the world
Longest suspension bridge for both trains and cars
Rude people
The city that never sleeps
Awesome night time skyline
Big Buddha
Best food in the world
Amazing biodiversity
Most expensive real estate property
Biggest container port (IIRC)
Temple Street
Women Street
Bird Street
Goldfish Street
The Peak
Penisula Hotel
Fresh seafood
Jockey club
Rickshaw
etc.

86

apparently my town of Coventry, CT is home to the country’s oldest tavern, The Bidwell. I never knew that untill recently. I doubt its validity, but its cool to know.

                                                           -jeff-
87

My hometown is a 'burb, so here’s to our cultural epicenter:

Cleveland, Ohio

The Cleveland Orchestra

The Cleveland Clinic

The Cleveland Indians

The Cleveland Browns

The full-Cleveland look

Lake Erie

The Cuyahoga River

The Terminal Tower

LTV Steel

The Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

The Cleveland Museum of Art (ah, “Waterlilies”)

Empty downtown at night

The Emerald Necklace …the metropolitan park system

Drew Carey

Michael Stanley

Patricia Heaton

Pirogies

The “Free” Stamp

Kate Mulgrew’s voice in all our commercials lately

Orange barrel earrings

Euclid Beach that is no more

The Torso Murders

American Greetings

JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts

Things Remembered

88

Havre, Montana:

The name nobody can pronounce correctly the first time. No, I won’t tell you how. It’s how we seperate natives from Goddamned Californians/Easterners. :smiley:

The Hi-Line. It’s the northernmost east-west Interstate in the Lower 48. Havre is smack in the center, and it’s the biggest town on the Hi-Line as well. This makes Havre a minor confluence of culture and trade, but Great Falls is the Big Town in the region.

The Burlington Northern railroad. This is actually how Havre got its start: James J. Hill (immortalized in statuary near the train tracks, not to mention the name of the county Havre is the seat of, a statue atop fountains local vandals love to clog with soap suds) and various cronies decided that Havre would be a good midpoint for the new train route (the original Hi-Line, before the Interstate came through), thereby ensuring Havre a constant stream of cargo and passenger trains stopping there for refueling and other needs.

The Empire Builder. This is Amtrak’s ultra-luxury passenger train that stops here on its way to and from the coast. Amtrak’s decline makes some people around here really nervous.

The Havre Underground. This is related to the railroad: When the rails were being laid, the Asian-Americans, who couldn’t get rooms aboveground, made hostels and whorehouses and laundries and post offices and other essential things beneath the streets. This is wonderfully preserved and cheap tours are readily available.

Northern. Actually, MSU-Northern, the northernmost campus of Montana State University. This makes Havre the most pitiful freaking university town in the history of man.

Bootlegging. Havre is fifty miles south of Canada and it’s easy to lose yourself in the coulees and the badlands near the border. Havre was a main artery of the illegal booze trade. We still have a strong Border Patrol presence. Havre has always had a rather colorful history, full of various criminals and other less-than-savory characters, and Havre is still a place to buy drugs. Largish drug busts are not big news around here.

Really, that’s about it. Havre is a dull, dull town, unless you like drugs.

89

Heh-heh. Had a conversation with a Daytonian on Friday night about what there was to do there. We pretty much agreed that Dayton was like a smaller version of Cincinnati without all the glitter. Unless you’ve been to Cincinnati you can’t know what sort of an indictment that is.

Cincinnati

WKRP
Graeter’s
Chili made with chocolate, thrown on top of spaghetti, with cheese on top
Marge Schott
Charles Keating
Maplethorpe (the controversy, not the man)
Oscar Robinson
Pete Rose and Johnny Bench
The Reds, the Bungles
Procter & Gamble
Race Riots
No 7-11s
Simon Leis vs Larry Flynt
The airport is in a different state.
Flying Pigs
Goetta
Jerry Springer (yes, that one) used to be the Mayor, then was a local news anchor for a while, before embarking on his current career.

90

Winston-Salem, NC:
Cigarettes (RJR Tobacco)
Wake Forest University and/or the Demon Deacons

the biggest mall between Atlanta and DC

Me

Sara Lee and Hanes Hosiery Corporate HQ and factories.

Minor-league baseball

RJ Reynolds Tobacco

Cigarettes

Former HQ of Nabisco and Planters

91

The site of a major US Civil War battle.

A good university.

Birthplace of Grantland Rice, 19th century sportswriter.

Hometown of Margaret Rhea Seddon (M.D.) . Former NASA astronaut.

The locale of the first mass grave I’ve ever seen.
And, I hope, the last. See the above Civil War battle.

92

**ShibbOleth, ** not only is Cincinnati’s airport in Kentucky, so is its red light district!!

93

Tokyo

  • being one of the largest cities in the world

  • getting stomped periodically by Godzilla, Gamera, Rodan and various other radioactive monsters

  • insanely crowded subways (but they don’t need ex-sumo pushers, Cecil’s column to the contrary notwithstanding)

  • an insanely complex subway system ( but really convenient, once you learn it)

  • having a full-scale model of the Eiffel Tower and a quarter-scale model of Versaille in its center

  • filled with a seemingly infinite web of tiny back streets, each of which is lined with dozens of shops and restaurants

  • being the center of all branches of the national government and the finance and commerce sectors, making the entire country extremely vulnerable to natural (or unnatural) disasters.

  • becoming increasingly non-Japanese. According to Hiroshi Kume on News Station last night, one of every ten marriages in Tokyo last year was an “international marriage”.

94

Milwaukee:

  • Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley

  • Bud Selig and the incompetent Milwaukee Brewers

  • Beer

  • Jeffrey Dahmer (Dude, he’s from Ohio! He doesn’t count!)

  • Zucker, Zucker & Abrams

  • Cheese

  • The new Art Museum extension (the white moving sail thingie)

  • the new stench at the lakefront, supposedly thanks to zebra mussels

  • Summerfest

  • where George Carlin got arrested (as did Wendy O. Williams, Billy Joe from Green Day, Luis Polonia… oh, I could go on and on)

  • the three minute rush hour

  • William Rhenquist

  • the multi-million dollar construction projects that wound up being too small (the deep tunnel that doesn’t stop sewage discharge into the lake, and the convention center that is now too small for GenCon. At least they aren’t worrying about not having enough seats at Miller Field!)

  • Birthplace of the typewriter

  • Socialist mayors, back in the day.

95

Chanute, Kansas

Home of Amanda Marsh, the winning lady on ABC’s “The Bachelor”

Jennifer Knapp’s hometown

Hometown of Osa and Martin Johnson

Thats about it.

96

Things that Toronto, Canada is known for:

[ul][li]The CN Tower, tallest free-standing structure (for now)[/li][li]The Royal Ontario Museum[/li][li]The Hockey Hall of Fame[/li][li]The Art Gallery of Ontario[/li][li]The Bata Shoe Museum[/li][li]The University of Toronto[/li][li]York University[/li][li]Ryerson University[/li][li]“Like New York run by the Swiss”–sadly, not so anymore.[/li][li]Streetcars and subways that run on tracks with the unique and extremely non-obvious broad gauge of 4’ 10-7/8"[/li][li]Old Chinatown[/li][li]Kensington Market[/li][li]St Lawrence Market[/li][li]The Toronto Islands, the ferries that go there, and the people who live there[/li][li]The Parliament Buildings, seat of the Government of the Province of Ontario, which were built on the site of an insane asylum in Queen’s Park[/li][li]Great cultural diversity[/li][li]A dozen daily newspapers, four of which are in English[/li][li]A great concentration of media: broadcasters, newspapers, etc[/li][li]A growing film industry that consistently manages to land work that could have gone to Hollywood, but somehow never manages to get many Canadian films into the theatres[/li][li]Music: Rush, the Bare Naked Ladies, the Spoons, Jane Siberry, SSQ, M+M and Loreena McKennit, to name a few[/li][li]Radio: the legendary CHUM-AM during the founding years of Rock music, and , later, the equally legendary CFNY-FM during the founding years of Alternative.[/li][li]Television: CITY-TV and TVOntario [/li][li]The Avro Arrow[/li][li]A transit system that manages to do more with less that anywhere else in North America (85% of revenue comes from the farebox)[/li][li]The headquarters of the Bank of Montreal[/li][li]Very wide freeways[/li][li]An all-day crush hour on those freeways, leading to some of the worst traffic in North America[/li][/ul]

97

The antelope valley couinting palmdale lancaster quartz hill techapi and other small places:

1 being one of the fastest growing regions in ca and the country

2 our areospace and space shuttle work (although thats fast disapearing)

3 We were also well known for being the number one speed producing place in the nation which was the reason we were number one in child abuse in the nation in the 90s

4 being one of the most conversative places in L.A county we have 3 churches for every one person

5 neo nazi groups and gangs

6 the famous people that lived and still live in the area I went to school with teachers that knew frank zappa when he lived here

7 the recently kidnapped girls went to school about 5 minutes from where i live
its not all bad tho just in growing pains with a older citizenery that still thinks its the farm town it was back in the 50’s

98

Saskatoon, SK, Canada:
[ul]
[li]bridges; specifically, the Victoria bridge, which always looks as though its only minutes away from collapsing into the South Saskatchewan River[/li][li]Saskatoon berries[/li][li]The Bessborough hotel[/li][li]a big bronze bust of Gandhi sitting on a downtown street corner[/li][li]being the hometown of Joni Mitchell and Gordie Howe[/li][li]the University of Saskatchewan[/li][li]Wanuskewin[/li][li]inspiring that Guess Who song[/li][li]somehow having only the third-funniest-sounding city name in the province (after Moose Jaw and Regina)[/li][li]riverboat racing[/li][li]the “Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan” festival[/li][li]in the early '90s, coming this close to being the new home of the St. Louis Blues[/li][/ul]

99

Isn’t Dayton, OH also the site of the world’s largest hamfest (ham radio swap meet)?

And kittenblue, you forgot about Cleveland’s two biggest moments of infamy: Nickel Beer Night and the burning river (you mention the Cuyahoga but not the reason most people remember it). If you’re listing what the world knows about us, you gotta take the bad with the good.

On the other hand, our public library system is one of the best in the world and contains the White collection, the largest collection of chess literature anywhere.

Also:

Paul Newman

Bob Hope

Jayne Kennedy

The Flats

And some famously weird politicians (no, not Traficant, that’s Youngstown), including a mayor’s wife who refused an invitation to the White House because it was her bowling night. Oh, and her husband the mayor set his hair on fire, twice :D, during ribbon cutting ceremonies, with a welding torch.

100

Grew up in Las Vegas, and as Chicago (my current hometown has been covered in depth, i’ll go with LV:

Hoover Damn

Lake Mead

Having to wear oven mits to open your car door in the summer

Red Rocks

Nellis Air Force Base (home of the Thunderbirds)

Area 51 (nearby)

Above ground Nuke tests (not anymore, obviously)

The Rat Pack

Former Mob Lawyer Oscar Goodman is the Mayor

Former used car saleswoman Jan Jones used to be the mayor

The UNLV Runnin’ Rebel Basketball team (man, those were the days)

NO. in fact prostitution is NOT legal in Clark County, thankyouverymuch

Timet- titanium mill/refinery/plant (?)

Ocean Spray Juices

More Mormons by percentage of population than Salt Lake City, believe it or not.

Henderson, a suburb has ben for a while (and may still be, not sure) the fastest growing City in the country… and if you try to drive there, you’ll believe it.

Ridiculously low cost of living

and somebody told me we have some hotels there or somethin’.

and cheap buffets. lots of cheap buffets.

Chris