As a born and bred country person, I've always found pretty much all cities claustrophobic for me. My son, I guess as part of his youthful rebellion, told me at the age of five that he was going to go to school in NYC, and he followed through on the threat. This past summer we drove down to the Bronx a few times in preparation for his attending Fordham University, and I found the Bronx very uncomfortably busy and loud. Well, this past weekend I went down to parent's weekend at the school, and stayed in Manhattan, which I hadn't been to in at least 25 years. After an evening in Manhattan, I took the train up to the Bronx and suddenly thought, "wow, this is so quiet and nice!" Clearly perspective is very important.
I've been living in Brooklyn for just shy of 20 years and I'm very comfortable in dense cities. After spending about a month in India, primarily in Delhi and a bit in Jaipur, I remember getting back to Manhattan and thinking "wow, look at all this space, there's no people here! What a peaceful, relaxed city".
Something that surprises often is that NYC used to be far, far denser. See the second image: https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...
I recommend to people the Tenement Museum for their second trip to NYC - it was eye opening (but pretty grim)
What amazes me is that people did not flee. I assume the hand-to-mouth existence they had in these slums was apparently a little better than their prospects elsewhere. Or perhaps they were moving out but immigration and reproduction was more than making up for it…
To where?
You have no money, very little skills, you don't speak English. Even if you cobbled together money to take the train to some small town in Ohio or Iowa or something, what are you going to do as a complete social outsider who doesn't speak the language?
The idea was to stick around in the LES where you had an actual community. Try to make some money, learn English, develop some skills, and then move out. Which is exactly what people did. And the new immigrants took their places.
Also -- they had already fled. This was the fleeing. From Ireland, from Italy, from Poland, etc.
Sure, my point is that - no matter how bad this looks, it was approximately better than their alternatives. So it's a testament to human resilience.
That aside, that there was literally no going back, given the travel to get to NY. I had an ancestor come to NYC in the 19th c. and return back to Sweden, but he was not in the desperate straits that many were. I'm sure some would have returned, given the opportunity.
There is a real human tendency to stay in a known but bad situation instead of making the risky leap into the likely better but unknown.
You see it time and time again.
Their kids were the ones who were better educated and could move on.
It’s still happening today.
This is the entire reason why people emigrate.
A lot of these people were in immigrant enclaves. Their neighborhoods may have been the only place in the country people spoke their language or shared their religion, so serving that community was their best bet for employment.
Who does the best job managing density? Tokyo is lovely and orderly, but it’s not that dense—similar to San Francisco. Maybe Seoul?
Of all the places I've been, Singapore.
They have a population of 6 to 7 million people in an area of 700 square kilometers, resulting in a population density of 8300 people / km^2. Substantially more than that if you account for the fact that a large percentage of the island is still tropical jungle.
Despite that fact, their city planning is so good with large open spaces everywhere interspersed with greenery, that you almost never feel claustrophobic. Even the so-called "hearland" neighbourhoods with rows after rows of high-rise residential HDB buildings are quite pleasant.
The most claustrophobic place I've been in Singapore are the few squares in the center of CBD filled with skyscrapers that almost obscure you the view of the sky.
You aren't kidding! I picked a random intersection in what looks like an urban part of the city and it's beautiful: https://maps.app.goo.gl/P3aUTtYejh5YHvFF6
Depends where in San Francisco. A lot of business travelers in particular perceptions of SF are probably colored by the areas near the Moscone (and Fishermans Wharf). Though most of SF is relatively sane in general--certainly not like the Times Square area in NYC.
> Times Square area in NYC.
quick funny story, my family and i were in Times Square last year for New Year's. Thousands of people everywhere as you can imagine. We're walking down the sidewalk and right as rain my wife runs into someone she knows from all the way back in Texas. Among all those people from all over the world she still manages to run into someone she knows. My wife and her talk while me and the boys hang around waiting just like we've had to do at our local grocery store back home. My kids and I still laugh at that story.
I’ve read about the “international airport paradox” which says you’ll likely see someone you know at an international airport - because if you’re in the group to use them, you’re already in a pretty small group.
I've actually run into people I knew in Manhattan. But they were from the Northeast so it wasn't that unusual.
San Francisco doesn’t feel dense to me at all.
San Francisco is the 5th densest county in the USA, the top four are also the four densest burroughs of New York City.
There is a good argument that San Francisco could and should be denser than it is, but its ludicrous to call it not dense at all.
I live in a US city with a higher population density than SF that has barely any structures taller than 3-4 storeys. Most of SF is low density for a city of global importance. The Richmond, Sunset have essentially not changed since the early post-war era.
You can argue the global importance of Silicon Valley or even California generally. I'm not sure I get the "global importance" of the city of San Francisco specifically, which besides an attractive location and relatively easy access to Silicon Valley isn't especially unique among medium to large US cities.
Honestly, I feel like Paris does a great job. I know it's relatively small population wise for a major international city (~2 million), but it's population density is about 50% more than NYC without ever feeling overwhelming. Just having those 6-story Haussmann style buildings everywhere with wide boulevards makes it feel very human scale.
Good point. It’s dirty, but the density does seem nicely managed.
When I have been in NYC recently, it's seemed remarkably quiet to me. In particular, I don't see many cars.
(Only the subway is loud. But that doesn't stress me out, because I don't have to do anything. You get on, you let your mind wander, you get off, you take a little walk.)
When I was a child, I saw movies set in New York, and the streets were always choked with traffic. The sound of a car horn was almost a shorthand for the city. You'd hear it in music. They'd use it in establishing shots in films. Always yellow cabs.
Even a decade or two ago, you'd stand, as a pedestrian, at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change.
Now, often you look both ways and the street is clear for a whole block. You don't wait, you just cross.
Sure, there's a rhythm to it. Even decades ago, the Financial District, choked during rush hour, was spookily-empty on the weekends. So maybe I have more recently walked around in the places and times that are at the troughs of that rhythm.
But I suspect there is also a longer-term trend, or perhaps a step change, caused by COVID: Cities just seem quieter now.
To an extent it is good. I'm happy to see a city by for and of people, rather than ditto for cars, their manufacturers, and their buyers (who lack alternatives). By all means, let restaurants build decks on the street; decorate them with flower boxes; let people meet there for brunch or after work.
There is also a negative aspect. There is still, I think, a suburban hangover. I see this in friends who it is now difficult to drag out of their apartments and away from their video games; in other people who one might frustratedly describe as "suburban women voters" who, in rare acts of personal courage, mask up and use the subway (they stand out from the people who actually live and work in the city. ... I shouldn't mock them; at least by seeing the reality they will overcome their fears); and in the rhetoric of the political Right, which seems more grounded in Escape from New York than in reality.
So I suppose several forces have made the city quieter. Some positive, some negative. And popular perception lags (as it must; this is the nature of information transmission).
Apparently the surge tolls they implemented recently contributed to less traffic, in Manhattan at least
The loudness of cities is generally a product of cars.
Very busy areas of cities without many cars are fairly quiet.
Tire noise, exhaust noise, horns, etc all make a ton of noise. Living near a highway in the suburbs is probably inherently more noisy than many cities.
I like to think about the time around 1900 when the population was far far higher than today, but there were no cars. Horses don’t make the same noise.
Of course there was heavy industry in that day so that would be loud and filthy.
How quiet was dense NYC in 1830 though?
I guess it would depend on where you were. If you're in a high traffic area full of horses wearing metal shoes stepping on cobble stones and handcarts with metal rims rolling over cobble stones, it could probably get pretty loud.
I bet it could get pretty quiet, even with the density.
College campuses are often pretty dense but also pretty quiet.
I had the same experience being in downtown SF (near Market) for the first time in a few years, but I attributed it to the number of electric cars.
The whole visit felt weird, and eerie, and off somehow, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And then I was standing waiting for a crossing light and heard the clicking of a scooter's turn signal ~20 feet away. It stood out because it took a few seconds to realize that I shouldn't be hearing it because of other noise.
Its funny for me, born and raised in the endless river valleys of the PNW, that I am so used to this topology that I'm much more comfortable in cities with an "opposite valley wall" (even if it's a building facade on the other side of the street and not the next row of hills a couple miles distant) in sight, than I am in Florida, on islands, or other big flatlands areas with nothing at all to break up the great sweep of the horizon.
I’m the same. Land that isn’t mountainous is terrifying to me. It’s like an instinct that The Horde could approach from any angle.
The Midwest creeps me out.
I come from a part of North America as jagged as Norway.
I'm the opposite, I'm always more at ease in the great plains (I'm from Eastern-Europe, for context), while when I'm at the mountainside I feel like there's something that's just about to "fall on my head" or similar, something that hangs over me.
The sun either rises way too late or sets too early if you’re right up against the Rockies.
It IS weird to now live where there aren’t noticeable mountains as landmarks.
Midtown Manhattan is “too much” even for a lot of New Yorkers. I try to minimize my time there.
I work in Midtown and live in (a still very dense) part of Brooklyn. When I come home in the evenings and come up those subway stairs I always breathe a sigh of relief.
That’s interesting. When I lived in Manhattan I didn’t mind the density at all. But I was apartment hunting in Brooklyn one day and literally had a panic attack at how chaotic it was. I made it two blocks from the 4/5/6 station (I forget which one) before heading back.
> made it two blocks from the 4/5/6 station (I forget which one)
4 or 5. If you fall asleep on those, you go to Brooklyn or the Bronx. If you fall asleep on the 6, you always wake up in the Bronx. (Well, or City Hall. But then you can get dumplings.)
What he is studying at Fordham? Is he and his friends worried about the job market after graduation?
The fact you present this obvious distinction as meaningful insight suggests your preconceptions about the city were not based in reality that even the most basic differences apear revelatory.
what were his preconceptions about the city other than "they're all loud and claustrophobic?"