# Natural sites for cities in North America **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 12, 2012, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517 "2012-10-12T15:08:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/21 "2012-10-12T19:22:30Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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. Maybe some day they’ll go to work on the fetid, open sewer known as Congress. > [@Ludovic](#): > > It’s amazing that Cairo, Illinois is as small as it is. Confluence of two of the largest rivers in America and it’s barely a city. If they could only learn to pronounce it! KAY-row, indeed! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/22 "2012-10-12T19:27:48Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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. Washington’s not unusual in that. A lot of cities had open channels or canals in the 19th century that got paved over by the 20th. Salem Massachusetts has solid ground now where it used to have channels. Southbridge Massachusetts used to have waterways near the river that water ran through, driving water wheels for the lensmaking industry. Onre of these survives, but the one in front of American Optical was filled in before the beginning of the twentietrh century and is now a park. ---
**Author:** ![jasg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f0a364/32.png) [@jasg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jasg)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/23 "2012-10-12T21:20:01Z")
> [@Ludovic](#): > > It’s amazing that Cairo, Illinois is as small as it is. Confluence of two of the largest rivers in America and it’s barely a city. Could be because it is the lowest elevation in Illinois and surrounded by levees. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/24 "2012-10-12T21:27:52Z")
> [@jasg](#): > > Could be because it is the lowest elevation in Illinois and surrounded by levees. I’d think it was because before the levees it was often submerged. No one would have bothered building roads and bridges and erecting a lot buildings when they’d get flooded most springtimes. But that wouldn’t be a hard and fast rule because it didn’t stop them in New Orleans. ---
**Author:** ![Tastes\_of\_Chocolate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tastes_of_chocolate/32/3232_2.png) [@Tastes\_of\_Chocolate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tastes_of_Chocolate)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/25 "2012-10-12T21:39:09Z")
The location of Chicago is pretty inevitable, at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Minneapolis/St Paul is also going to happen, being at the northern most point of the Mississippi that can be accessed by a boat. Des Moines seems kind of random. There is going to be something in that general area, but it could easily be 100 miles in any direction. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/26 "2012-10-12T21:45:36Z")
Sure there are going to be a lot of development in Puget Sound, but there’s no particular reason for Seattle to be the biggest city. The center of the metropolitan area could have been anywhere. I think the only feature of Seattle that made it the main port was the Duwamish waterway. ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/27 "2012-10-12T22:29:29Z")
> [@](#): > > 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) Disagree. ATL is right at the bottom of the Appalachian Mts. Kind of a geographic turning point. You’re headed south by south west, and then, you hang a right and go west. ---
**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/28 "2012-10-12T22:54:29Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Sure there are going to be a lot of development in Puget Sound, but there’s no particular reason for Seattle to be the biggest city. The center of the metropolitan area could have been anywhere. I think the only feature of Seattle that made it the main port was the Duwamish waterway. The story I’ve heard is that because Tacoma was owned by the railroad and didn’t allow gambling and prostitution so when the Yukon gold rush passed through, Seattle (which did allow such things) became the major port. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/29 "2012-10-12T23:23:49Z")
> [@SpoilerVirgin](#): > > San Francisco seems inevitable to me. People are going to want to access the bay and protect its entrance. Actually, I would disagree with that. San Francisco has limited fresh water and, at the time it was settled, many many many sand dunes. If the early settlers/explorers has just kept going and landed in Oakland or Berkeley, they would have had more fresh water and easier access to the rest of the region. It’s worth putting a fort there to guard the Golden Gate, but the same thing could be said for the Marin headlands and it was probably a coin toss as to whether the first explorers turned left or right (and actually, I would list the Sausalito area as a more likely place for the city, if it’s got to be on the coast, because it’s closer to fresh water than San Francisco). Of course, in Berkeley, there would have been all those natives to contend with… ---
**Author:** ![Saltire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saltire/32/553_2.png) [@Saltire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saltire)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/30 "2012-10-12T23:39:35Z")
I don’t really know the geography there, but if things were a bit different I’d expect a major port somewhere in the Gulf of California. If the US-Mexico border hadn’t ended up where it is, a lot of the SoCal population might be closer to the mouth of the Colorado. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/31 "2012-10-12T23:49:57Z")
If we’re talking about North America as a whole, Montreal is where it is because that’s the farthest up the Saint Lawrence River large ships could travel until the 20th century. ---
**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2012, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/32 "2012-10-12T23:58:22Z")
I would suggest that all the big cities of the intermountain west region are big cities for entirely non-geographic factors. You can point to the reasons why there’s a settlement in the first place, and see in hindsight why they got big, but there’s really nothing geographically special about Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Salt Lake or Las Vegas. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2012, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/33 "2012-10-13T00:58:58Z")
For that matter, Washington is built at the Fall Line too, along with Trenton, Richmond, Fayetteville, Columbia, Augusta, etc. Those spots are the farthest you can take a boat upstream before you get to the falls where you have to pull your boat out of the water and unload it if you want to get it any farther, so you may as well stay right there. Lots of people bringing lots of stuff and setting it down: A city is born. The name of the Potomac River itself literally means ‘they bring stuff’. ---
**Author:** ![Flyer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/flyer/32/7298_2.png) [@Flyer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flyer)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2012, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/34 "2012-10-13T03:19:54Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > 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. Denver was the site of the Cherry Creek gold rush of 1859, one of the major gold rushes in American history. ALSO, it has the South Platte River, which is one of the biggest rivers between the Rockies and the Mississippi. ---
**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2012, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/35 "2012-10-13T03:46:29Z")
> [@Flyer](#): > > Denver was the site of the Cherry Creek gold rush of 1859, one of the major gold rushes in American history. ALSO, it has the South Platte River, which is one of the biggest rivers between the Rockies and the Mississippi. I think that’s hindsight bias, though. There were all sorts of other towns in the west that had large gold rushes and were on important rivers but failed to become big urban centers. There’s no fundamental geographical reason why Denver became one of the major metro areas in the US but, say, Helena, MT or Rapid City, SD did not. Although I think **Quercus** is wrong. Las Vegas is far and away the most arbitrarily-located city in the US. Maybe it would have survived as a small city after the dam was finished, but there’s no real reason why a city needs to be there. It owes its entire existence to the imaginary line in the desert that allows gambling. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2012, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/36 "2012-10-15T01:57:37Z")
> [@Saltire](#): > > I don’t really know the geography there, but if things were a bit different I’d expect a major port somewhere in the Gulf of California. If the US-Mexico border hadn’t ended up where it is, a lot of the SoCal population might be closer to the mouth of the Colorado. Well the area around the Colorado is some of the driest and hottest regions of the US so that’s unlikely. In such a case, Southern California probably remains far less populous than in reality. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2012, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/37 "2012-10-15T02:54:20Z")
> [@Saltire](#): > > I don’t really know the geography there, but if things were a bit different I’d expect a major port somewhere in the Gulf of California. If the US-Mexico border hadn’t ended up where it is, a lot of the SoCal population might be closer to the mouth of the Colorado. If they had done so, and if they had moved there before Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson got to be big population centers in the 20th century, they could have seriously stunted the growth of those desert metropolises. Because politically they never would have tolerated the upriver desert-dwellers stealing their river. The damn Colorado doesn’t even make it to the Gulf any more! The Southwest would come to look _very_ different on account of that. ---
**Author:** ![treis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@treis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/treis)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2012, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/38 "2012-10-15T03:20:20Z")
> [@Ludovic](#): > > It’s amazing that Cairo, Illinois is as small as it is. Confluence of two of the largest rivers in America and it’s barely a city. There’s not much of a benefit to being at the confluence of those rivers. Until steamboats, you couldn’t travel upstream easily and the Ohio doesn’t go all the way to the ocean. Since most of the people lived on the east coast, that made the Ohio not very useful for commerce. Shipping going directly to the East Coast would go to somewhere on the Great Lakes. Any shipping going down river would go all the way to New Orleans, and then be transferred to sea going ships. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2012, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/39 "2012-10-15T03:56:47Z")
If you want to talk really bad city sites, Winnipeg is rather brilliantly built directly on a flood plain. Until the completion of the Red River Floodway (a huge canal that carries the Red River waters completely around the city when needed), the city regularly found itself underwater, and even now things can get pretty damned dicey. Also, millions and millions and millions of mosquitoes. Not that other prairie towns are necessarily glowing models of planning, either: > [@](#): > > [Regina](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina,_Saskatchewan) was established in 1882 when it became clear that Edgar Dewdney, the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories, eschewed the previously established and considered Battleford, Troy and Fort Qu’Appelle (the latter two both some 30 mi (48 km) to the east), as the territorial seat of government: these were widely considered more amiable locations for what was anticipated would be a far more major metropole for the Canadian plains than actually eventuated, situated as they were in amply watered and treed rolling parklands whereas “Pile-of-Bones,” as the site was then called, was in the midst of arid and featureless grassland. […] > > Lieutenant-Governor Dewdney had acquired land adjacent to the route of the future CPR line at Pile-of-Bones, which was distinguished only by collections of bison bones near a small spring run-off creek, some few kilometres downstream from its origin in the midst of what are now wheat fields. There was an “obvious conflict of interest” in Dewdney’s choosing the site of Pile-of-Bones as the territorial seat of government.[18] and it was a national scandal at the time.[19] But until 1897, when responsible government was accomplished in the Territories,[20] the lieutenant-governor and council governed by fiat and there was little legitimate means of challenging such decisions outside the federal capital of Ottawa. There, the Territories were remote and of little concern. ---
**Author:** ![Mr\_Downtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2012, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517/40 "2012-10-15T04:28:51Z")
Chicago is a classic entrepôt, where goods had to change from one mode of transport to another: water to railroad or vice versa. Cairo is not, for the most part, though some grain and produce _could_ have been transferred there from the Illinois Central Railroad to barges. An unappreciated factor is what the riverbank/wharfage situation is. At Chicago, boats could pull right up under the grain elevator and the stuff could be poured into the hold by gravity. At St. Louis, it had to be toted in sacks across a wide wharf. Huge pricing advantage for Chicago. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-sites-for-cities-in-north-america/637517.md?page=3)