Just to add to my post to more directly answer the OP:
The thing I love the most however is the fact that I still regularly go to pubs and restaurants that are new to me and wondrous.
I can make a fantastic discovery about London every week (if I wanted to and maybe every day with some effort). The other thing is the history. I’m constantly learning some new crazy fact about an area or finding out something cool about a local park or building. There’s so much history here, it bursts out the seams.
My 5 minute walk from the underground station to my work alone takes me past: a) the place that JM Barrie lived and the park opposite which he must’ve imagined Peter Pan flew up from. In the corner of that park (Brunswick Square Gardens which is also mentioned in Jane Austin’s Emma) is a beautiful old tree that has huge branches that bend right down to the ground. b) the magazine headquarters that George Orwell wrote from, c) Charles Dicken’s house (now a little private museum) and probably a bunch other interesting sites I’m yet to learn about.
Behind my office is a place called Mount Pleasant. I found out recently it was named ironically when it was used as a medieval shit pit. The road names give you a clue: Laystall Street is nearby and that’s an old English word for dung heap. Near that is the site of a Victorian debtors prison - some of the original brick work still faces the street in one corner of a back road. I’m willing to bet Dickens used to wander down that road and consider the fortunes of the people inside. The road my work is on features prominently in Vanity Fair. At the end of the road is the location where (apparently) table tennis was invented. It’s now a bar filled with dozens of tennis table tables.
I don’t even work that centrally. None of the regular London walks that explore the history of London go round this area - all the big history is further south and east of me.
Kansas City actually has some cool stuff to do. Not a huge amount, and it’s barely what I’d call a “big city” (in the context of Dallas, it would be a suburb like Arlington or Plano) But still some VERY cool stuff- the National WWI museum is one-of-a-kind and is comparable to the Imperial War Museum in London or the Les Invalides museum in Paris. There’s also the Truman Library in Independence, the Truman house, the Negro Leagues Baseball museum, and several other good museums. The Steamboat Arabia is really interesting as well.
One advantage to living in or near a big city that no one has mentioned is health care. If you need a particular type of medical specialist (say, a neurologist that specializes in geriatric diseases, or an ophthalmologist that specializes in double vision) a big city will likely have at least one who is taking new cases.
Depends on what you mean by “local cultural experiences”. I mean I’m not visiting the Statue of Liberty or going to the Empire State Building observation deck every weekend.
I think I noticed after I first moved to NYC. It’s just a very different lifestyle than one experiences at most other places. Even when I lived in Boston, me and most of my friends didn’t live in Boston proper. We lived in various suburbs like Waltham, Malden or Newton around the outskirts. “Going out” was very much a concerted effort of coordinating people, getting into cars, driving, parking and then finding some bar or club until it closed at 2am. Like “going out” because this big “event”.
Living in the East Village, I’d have friends come visit. We’d just kind of wander around all these various eclectic local pubs, dive bars, rooftop bars, etc, get something to eat at 3 am, find another bar where maybe one of my friends knew the owner who would let us hang out after hours. I’d find myself apologizing because “it’s kind of a slow night, not much going on” but for them it’s like the greatest night ever.
OTOH, the downside is there is this constant buzz that can be hard to escape from. It makes it hard (at least for me) to just sit home and relax.
(I’m trying to think of less obvious reasons that make big city living great.)
I like having 50 different grocery stores in range. I’ve got a Filipino grocery that used to be a Kmart (Seafood City, Elston Ave, Chicago). And a Korean one that use to be a warehouse club-type store. (Super H-Mart, Niles) Another Korean store used to be a national sporting goods store {Assi Market, Niles). Then there’s the Indian grocery that used to be a Toys R Us (Patel Brothers, Niles). These are all vastly enormous stores. These are others, though. We have Polish, Middle Eastern, Greek, Italian, Mexican groceries that also cater to populations from other nearby countries and regions.
For me it’s more like 100K in the city limits proper but even that can vary. It’s more by services offered, for instance I live in a place with hundreds of thousands of people but it feels like a small city because the downtown shopping area is less than 10 square blocks and we have a bad bus system.
As opposed to the Orlando area which feels like a large city, but not a metropolis, even though the larger area has well over a million people (2.5 million according to Wikipedia but I am skeptical), because the downtown area is still relatively small, the bus system is okay, and the light rail system has only one line which doesn’t really count in my book.
You need to have a functioning dedicated-pathed public transportation system to have arrived as a metropolis. But Orlando otherwise counts as a “large city” because it has more than the minimum amount of culture one would expect from a city, with a modicum of museums, concerts, and parks, even if you discount the theme parks.
LA is separated into two by a range of hills that run west to east. Will Rogers SHP is a place where you are in nature (deer, rattlesnakes even a rare bob cat) while being in the heart of the city. Its a great place for hiking/biking.
I’d settle for a grocery store in range.The nearest grocery store from me is over half a mile away and that is about the closest possible due to the huge size of my apartment complex, and it isn’t a supermarket, only a regular-sized grocery store of the size you’d expect in a city but it is in the suburbs with nonexistent sidewalks.
I didn’t know how good I had it when I lived with my dad in the heart of the downtown of a small town where I was a few hundred feet from a grocery store. When he had more children he moved a few blocks away to a larger house and it felt like he had moved all the way to the middle of suburbia because the new place was half a mile away from downtown without trees or sidewalks.
Needless to say, I loved the second and third times visiting London where I was again only a few hundred feet from a grocery store where I could stock up for my walks around the city with some fine Kentish apples and Red Bull. (The first time I stayed in Mayfair which was easy to get to and close to the touristy areas, but not very obviously close to grocery stores.)
Fair enough, but when my brother lived in chicago he had to drive 20-30 minutes to get to a grocery store. I guess they were in the suburbs and he was in the city itself. Food deserts in a large city can be a problem.
I live in a city of a million and its easy to find grocery stores near me as well as a wide range of ethnic restaurants and groceries. I don’t know if having grocery stores nearby is what separates a big city from a small one. When I was in college our city had about 70k people, around 200k in the metro area and I also had multiple grocery stores nearby there including various ethnic stores.
I’m not sure there is any area considered an urban food desert where there wouldn’t be a grocer inside of a 20-30 minute drive. Usually, the term is meant for areas without groceries that are easily walkable or accessible via public transportation. And I’m not saying there are 50 groceries within what I’d consider walking distance of my place. Rather, they’re within what I’d consider a reasonable driving distance which is perhaps 10-15 minutes.
I forgot about airports. I have family and friends scattered all around the country. I like visiting. I like when they visit. DC is the first place I’ve lived near a major airport, and that’s made both visits and visiting easier.
You sound like me ten years ago. Thought I could only ever work in London for purely practical career reasons. Turns out it wasn’t true! You don’t have to move to the middle of nowhere, just a city which offers you both options. I now have a house and a garden, and can walk into the centre of Bristol in 15 minutes.
(Still miss the restaurant scene though, even though Bristol is pretty great for it as ‘not London’ goes).
Here in Texas and I suspect elsewhere, the ethnic groceries are often anchors of entire ethnic retail areas and communities, with groceries, restaurants, bakeries, and other sorts of shops and services.
It is super-cool to be able to go get say… Korean fried chicken for dinner, and then go by Super H-Mart and pick up groceries, and then get pastries at 85C Bakery all within about a quarter mile. And then the next weekend, do something similar with vietnamese food or middle eastern food, or several different Latin cuisines, or whatever.
Meanwhile, cities of like 100k have things like “Asian Buffet”.
I grew up near a village which was adjacent to a city both of which were around the same size but much less than 30K total. The city had cannery jobs and a riverfront park, but that’s about it because they didn’t have convenient spaces to grow.
The village had the college, the grocery stores (although I’m sure there were grocery stores in the city, we never went to them), and while we didn’t have a mall, the village was also closer to the strip malls as it had more open space close to the highway.
The one thing I’m nostalgic about the city per se is it had an old school independent department store, which we never went to except at christmas when a floor of it turned into a christmas shop and I can still remember smelling the probably artificially-pumped-in pine smell throughout the place.
Both places had one 2-screen cinema. There was also a drive-in theater but I don’t remember exactly where it was.
I never lived in town per se, usually on the outskirts, but looking at a map it turns out that even though a lot of the places I was at were quite rural, they were still closer to a “downtown” area than I have been in most of my suburban life. Definitely closer time-wise with all the traffic.
The “city” designation is obviously arbitrary. For whatever reason, Virginia’s “independent cities” aren’t part of the surrounding county. And the smallest, Norton, is like 4k.
Meanwhile my Chinese friends laugh at what we think a big city is. 2M doesn’t even break top 50 there. Whereas that would put you in the top 5 here. Caveats about metro area vs city proper apply.
To me, 25k is a large city…