Let us assume different settlement patterns of the North American continent, colonist ships landing on different places and so on.
Which sites will in almost any cases grow into sizeable cities?
For example, it is hard to imagine any America with a largish port city on the island of Manhattan or westernmost Long Island.
OTOH, I have wondered why Baltimore grow so big and why there is no city at the mouth of the Susquehanna.
Charleston, SC also seems to be at the mouth of the shortest rivers they could find in the area, with the worst access to the inland region. (But I might be dead wrong here, looking only at maps.)
In the Midwest, I guess a big city between Lake Michigan/Great lakes watershed and the Illinois River/Mississippi watershed is also natural, even if its exakt center might be somwhere between Evanston and Gary. Whereas the existence Indianapolis seems to be mostly politically motivated and highly susceptible to historical change.
I guess some places are only signifcant cities because in the 19th century the railway arrived there first.
So, which city sites are destined by geography to become great and which are more a result of human decisions or sheer random?
I can’t speak for the other cities, but Charleston was picked because of the nature of the port (two rivers makes a deep and well-established harbor) and the ocean-going possibilities.
It was founded as a walled city in the 1670s, remember, and we didn’t know squat about the interior of the country, nor did we think it was particularly important to know (other than to protect from the attacks from indian tribes and the Spanish). All of the usefulness was along the coastal plantations, and the closer regions of the rivers, and to different cities that we mostly got to via the coastline rather than by interior travel.
What I wonder is how different the settlement patterns would be for a modern technological society discovering a “new land” with all the benefits of GPS, surveillance, topography maps, awareness of plate tectonics and all that. I figure it has to produce a very strongly different pattern of city placement and connectors - look how different a planned-size city looks from one that grew up in stages and fits and starts!
I have heard it said that if the US had been settled from the west instead of the east, New England would have been left essentially wilderness, as the land is so unsuitable for pretty much anything.
Not just San Francisco- a decent-sized bay makes a good location for a big port city. Houston, Mobile, Tampa, and Seattle (yeah, I know, it’s a sound- same diff) are other examples.
What’s weird to me is that some of our most major river mouths (either at the ocean or at another river confluence) don’t have major cities there. St. Louis is at least close to the confluence of the two longest rivers in the lower 48, but the confluence of the longest and 3rd longest gives us… Cairo, Illinois? The Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean at… nothing?
There is an area in central eastern Nevada that I can see turning into a major city at some point in the distant future. Relatively mild climate, very flat and the land would be very cheap and easy to develop. Water would be an issue. I believe it is part of theGreat Basin.
Cleveland, Ohio was settled precisely for its location where the Cuyahoga meets the lake. You go as far south as you can on the Cuyahoga (a short distance) and then portage a few miles over to the Tuscarawas > Muskingum > Ohio > Mississippi. Cleveland becomes the nexus for connecting all the backcountry waterways of the new nation from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. George Washington even back before the Revolution foresaw that the mouth of the Cuyahoga would be an important strategic location for a city, though it had to wait until the US gained title to the land. At least in this case the land was acquired legally from the Indians instead of stolen.
Well, we should be able to count Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA as near the mouth of the Columbia.
I think initially having a good location for a port was essential. Later, locations along strategic rail lines would become an advantage for places away from the coast. Today, thanks to cheap oil and extensive transportation infrastructure, it is wherever someone can sell cheap land for homes. How else do you explain places that have no other reason to exist, like Phoenix, AZ and Manteca, CA?
The Chesapeake Bay is subject to sudden violent storms, and it is big enough to pretty much fail as a harbor. The estuary of the Patapsco river forms the outer harbor of Baltimore, and it is pretty sheltered compared to the bay, but a basin, probably formed by Jones Falls, forms the Inner Harbor, which is sheltered, accessible to water power for mills because of Jones Falls, deep, and accessible from the bay.
New York City and Boston were inevitable – large protected harbors, protected by islands and with good land and fresh water nearby.
One city that wasn’t inevitable is Atlanta Georgia. It’s not at a river confluence or anything. It’s reason for existence is that it was used as a railroad hub. It could easily have been physically located elsewhere. I understand that there are many towns that looked promising that were doomed when bypassed by the railroads (although I can’t remember names now)
Salt Lake City ended up where it is because it was a protected valley that the fleeing Mormons could live in, with broad flat lands (a former lake bottom) that was farmable if you brought down salt-free “sweet soil” from The Benches, the former beach of the salt lake. But it still couldn’t have been built were it not for the presence of City Creek Canyon providing a plentiful supply of fresh water (and because of the other canyons with their strweams. Salt Lake’s water hasn’tcome from City Creek for ages).
Rochester, NY ended up a major city because of a number of circumstances – farmable land, a waterfall to provide power to run mills, proximity to the east coast and its burgeoning population – but bthe trigger was the opening of the Eries Canal. Without the canal to provide a cheap way to get all that flour to the markets in New York City and the rest of the coast, Rochester would’ve remained a relative backwater, maybe shipping barges of goods to towns along Lake Ontario.
Actually, Houston wasn’t the obvious choice originally. Galveston was- it’s on a barrier island at the entrance to the bay, and has a natural deep water harbor on the back side of the island. From the 1830s through 1900, it was one of the largest and richest cities in the country, called the “Wall Street of the West” for its concentration of financial businesses and wealth. It was sometimes described as being only second to NYC in terms of culture and architecture in its time.
Houston only eclipsed Galveston after 1900, when a large hurricane virtually wiped out Galveston in a orgy of death and destruction that makes Katrina look like a mere thunderstorm.
Once Galveston was physically and economically wrecked, Houston dredged out the deeper ship channel through the bay (which is generally only about 10-15 feet deep), and opened up their own port, and took a lot of Galveston’s port traffic.
Houston and Galveston swapped roles, with Galveston becoming the sleepy smaller city, and Houston becoming a huge cosmopolitan city.
I think the other reason NYC and Boston were inevitable is the geography for land travel. If you’re going by land from the Mid-Atlantic to New England, the natural place to go is in the Manhattan area (no harder, in fact, easier to cross the Hudson there than for hundreds of miles upstream, so take the shortest route). Likewise, to a lesser degree, going from anywhere from Providence to Cape Cod up to anywhere from Gloucester to the end of Maine, you’re going though the Boston area.
Perhaps the most arbitrarily-located largest city in the U.S. is Denver. Sure, there’s probably a need for a regional hub somewhere in the Colorado-ish area on the east side of the Rockies, and I suppose it makes sense to put it up against the mountains, rather than stranded in the middle of the plains, but I’m not sure there’s much reason to put it at Denver rather than many miles north or south.
Are Houston and San Antonio on any real water bodies?
And of course Washington DC was deliberately put somewhere a city hadn’t already grown up, because it wasn’t particularly suitable.
No, I haven’t been assigned homework since the early days of the internet.
And wouldn’t my question be overly broad for homework, regarding all of North America? I mainly wanted to pick the dopers’ brains for anecdata since wikipedia often isn’t very clear wrt to the reasons why a major city became successful.
We’ve discussed Washingomn on this board before. I’ve always wondered why they put the capital in such marshy, swampy ground. It’s oppressively hot and humid in the summer, and I can’t imagine what it was like in pre-air conditioner days. I believe McCulloch’s bio of John Adams talks about them constantly having to dry things over fires.
I believe that it turned out that they’d hoped that the Potomac was going to be some major transporation river, with a lot of stuff coming down the river from farms and plantations, and that the new city would be ideally suited to profit from that. but it didn’t happen.
Washington improved greatly once they paved over the fetid open sewer that ran from Capitol Hill to the Potomac. It is now Constitution Avenue. The original creek was there for a solid physical reason: the local topography determines that water runs off into that channel, which is why the remnant of the creek still flows beneath the street.
