I think we’ve established by now that this is common for American municipal jurisdictions. Los Angeles is nothing special in this respect.
Dayton, Ohio, has such a narrow strand connecting the main part of the city with the airport, that the strand doesn’t even show up on the same scale map.
An independent city is a city that is not part of any county. New York is part of five counties and San Francisco is part of a county, albeit a county that is merged with the city. So those aren’t independent cities.
And take a look at the City of Riverside, Ohio, which is adjacent to Dayton. It’s made up of several discrete, non-adjacent chunks. That happened after the City of Dayton had already annexed several chunks of Mad River Township, and the remaining bits of the township decided to merge with the Village of Riverside to forestall any more annexations.
Interesting article on complex enclaves on the Belgian/Dutch border:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/02/most-complicated-border-town-world/1267/
I also understand that Switzerland has enclave issues with Germany and Italy, where portions of Germany and Italy are enclosed by Switzerland.
There are plenty of urban and suburban landscapes that straddle a seemingly arbitrary state line here in the US, where one side of town is in one state and the other half is in another, but it doesn’t usually get too complex and there are relatively few true enclaves. Many of the state borders on the east coast are based on rivers, so you have the phenomenon of a single urban area bisected by a river, and the two halves are considered separate municipalities in separate states (e.g. Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ), but in practice function as a united economic and cultural area.
There is a similar situation on the border of West Bengal and Bangladesh.
San Jose is one of the notable annexers with a highly irregular shape and several unannexed enclaves:
I think it’s one of the contributory factors to San Jose being much larger than people think it is (larger than SF). It sprawls. I was once told by a realtor that they annexed Alviso so that they could claim status as a “seaport”, in spite of the fact that getting anything much larger than a rowboat into the defunct, silted shut port of Alviso is pretty much impossible. There are suggestions floated from time to time about restoring Alviso as a port. AFAIK, the suggestions are the only things that have floated.
There was an area like that in Albuquerque. Willamina Cole (sp?) was a long time holdout. She had a small spread that the city completely grew around. She left it to a church, and now it is close spaced mcHousing, except for the big new church at one end.
This pre-dates the internet, so I am unable to find anything online about her.
Yeah. San Jose’s official area is 10 times that of San Francisco. In fact, its land area is almost exactly the size of Los Angeles’ and that’s famous for its sprawl.
The extension was annexed to give them control of what became the Port of Los Angeles. They didn’t take the whole bay, though. I know that Long Beach operates from part of it, too.
There is no strand. It’s a separate “island.” I assume it was allowed because the city owns and runs the airport.
But O’Hare airport does have a thin strand connecting it to Chicago. Maybe that’s what Acsenray was thinking of?
Perhaps. In some states those strands are required. In Ohio, they apparently aren’t required.
I doubt how unique that is. The Rochester airport is part of the city and yet sits entirely separate from the city boundary.
Not a great image but that white blob in the southwest is the airport and there’s no connection, even though the thick blue boundary implies one.
Where did you get your figures?
I stick by the “sprawls” statement, but I wasn’t prepared to believe that the SJ land area is as large as LA. According to Google, it’s actually smaller in area than SF, too:
San Jose: 178.2 sq mi
San Francisco: 231.9 sq mi
Los Angeles: 502.7 sq mi
Note that SF is a compact shape - basically the tip of the SF Peninsula (with a couple things like Treasure Island thrown in). San Jose has tentacles sticking out all over the place, hence the “sprawl”. San Jose has a larger population than SF in spite of the smaller area.
Good ol’ Wikipedia. No two pages are in the same format.
You’re half right and half wrong, and so am I. The number I looked at for San Jose is the number of sq. kilometers. :smack:
But I specified land area, not total city area which includes water. When water is removed, San Francisco is one of smallest big cities in the country.
So, land areas only, in sq. mi., according to Wikipedia:
San Francisco: 46.9
San Jose: 176.5
Los Angeles: 469
Ah. That sounds more reasonable. San Jose looks obviously bigger than SF on the map, as LA looks obviously bigger than SJ. SJ’s population is only about 20% more than SF - SF SHOULD have a higher population density (particularly since SJ’s city boundary seems to include a chunk of land around Anderson Reservoir, and a few other undeveloped areas). I wonder how much of the mudflats over by Alviso is counted as “land”.
