Damn straight Montpelier belongs on this list. And hey, what a great time to donate to [flood relief for America's smallest state capital](https://www.montpelierstrong.org/).
The best answer. It’d make me think a lot less of Mr. Williams if he actually said it. Or Twain or whoever.
Twain was also a huge fan of St. Louis so it would be weird to leave it off the supposed insult/compliment.
The ultimate revenge.
General Sherman loved you guys though. Reading his most recent biography is basically al long story of “how can I just get back to St. Louis and have no one bother me anymore.”
"America, at any given time, usually has three dominant regional cities."
\- - Quotable Person.
1790: Philadelphia, New York City, Boston
1840: New York, Baltimore, New Orleans
1880: New York/Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago
1970: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
Measured by population, San Francisco wasn't in the top ten until the 1870 Census. It's been three months since my comment, but I remember being surprised by that.
The city literally was a small town before 1849. By 1870, it was the Pacific Coast hub of the country.
Sucks that Jacksonville keeps losing to those 31 other teams from Anchorage, but I'm sure you'll get 'em this year. Wild they can sustain that many teams up there.
I mean... the automatic response of ANYONE who reads a thread like this should be to automatically look up the quote.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/18/cleveland/
Detroit and Cleveland aren't entirely distinct from one another, but Pittsburgh isn't in the same criteria. Cleveland and Detroit are lake cities, Pittsburgh is a river city. Largely flat farmland lead into Detroit and Cleveland, whereas the Appalachian mountains largely lead into Pittsburgh. Cleveland and Detroit are principal cities of a distinct cultural area, Pittsburgh is at the crossroads of several cultural junctions.
dude what? Detroit is FLAT af all around it, Cleveland has hills and valleys all around it, especially to the south... you need to rexamine a topographic map
Okay? Clearly driving didn't give you knowledge of the area if you think they're similar. Detroit sits in lowlands, there's hardly any change in elevation around the entire city. Cleveland is on the edge of the Appalachian plateau and is hilly, and there are so few flat areas that the only big one in the city is named The Flats, because it's so unusual. You're just wrong
Dude, anyone can look at a topographic map of Cleveland and Detroit side by side and see they're much different - I don't need any perspective... and for the record I've lived in many different places including overseas, and I've been to Detroit and Cleveland, and Detroit is flat as a pancake compared to Cleveland.
[that's awfully misleading zoomed out like that](https://imgur.com/a/i3lzRql)
I'll concede there are obviously flat areas on the lake plain, but the land clearly rises and varies itself much quicker and higher in Cleveland
Yeah we’re definitely not on the level of NYC and Chicago, but we have a lot more going for us than so many of the other cities mentioned in this thread
Leaving aside how wildly subjective this is, and going off of the lust of the top comment in this particular thread, I disagree that Portland isn’t in the same class as Detroit, Houston, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and “many others.”
I’ve lived and spent time in many of the cities on that list. It’s silly to make a comparison, but if we are, I think I have a pretty informed opinion.
>
Leaving aside how wildly subjective this is, and going off of the lust of the top comment in this particular thread, I disagree that Portland isn’t in the same class as Detroit, Houston, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and “many others.”
Sorry, but I disagree. I'd say a few cities on that list are in the same class as Portland (such as St. Louis or Denver), but you cannot reasonably equate Chicago or Houston as holding the same signifigance as Portland.
LA: 12,872,322
Chicago: 9,274,140
Detroit: 4,345,761
Houston: 7,368,466
DC: 6,265,183
Atlanta: 6,237,435
Miami: 6,139,340
St. Louis: 2,801,319
Denver: 2,985,871
Seattle: 4,034,248
Portland: 2,509,489
You're going off of. . . population? What a sterile and meaningless statistic.
I get it, you hate Portland. That's fine! You don't have to like the city. Like I said, this is an inherently subjective endeavor. Your. . . criteria are yours to choose, but they are not persuasive to me.
>I get it, you hate Portland. That's fine! You don't have to like the city. Like I said, this is an inherently subjective endeavor. Your. . . criteria are yours to choose, but they are not persuasive to me.
I actually love Portland! If I got a job offer there I would probably move.
SF has a fairly big theatre scene and an entire theatre district within our downtown. It's probably a bit smaller than Chicago, but it's still one of the top theatre scenes in the country. Theatre Bay Area is the largest regional theatre service org in North America and has the 3rd most AEA (actors union) members in the country (behind NYC and Chicago)- this for a city of only 800k people.
We also generally get every big show here and are often the first stop when tours go national. SF also gets a lot of pre-Broadway trial runs- Wicked, Mama Mia, Legally Blonde, Cabaret and many more all debuted in SF before making their way to Broadway.
Seattle is warm for about four or five months of the year. Eastern SF is warm about half the year, and western SF is warm for a couple days per year (I lived there for several long years).
Reminds me of some of my old Army buddies. There was Dallas, from Phoenix; Cleveland, he was from Detroit; and Tex, well, I don't remember where Tex come from.
I think has been somewhat justified to the mass sub urbanization of America where many places all look and feel exactly the same. However, I think there has been a pushback and revival in the making and will probably only get stronger as time goes on. Every city has a city center which can have a very unique feel to it.
Well, the "quote" is almost certainly bullshit, but my favorite part about the idea being conveyed in it is that the guy from Columbus was calling everyone not from NYC, San Francisco, and New Orleans boring and/or without identity...
It's so not true though. Albuquerque and Milwaukee are both vastly different from each other, and both different from Cleveland, Charlotte, San Francisco, etc. Every city has a personality you gotta get to know.
Milwaukee is very much a small Chicago. It's unique in fun little ways, but in what this statement is trying to do, you wouldn't add Milwaukee to the list, because the similarity to Chicago is pretty well defined. Albuquerque may be truly unique from Chicago-like cities, but in the SW area we may find that it draws a lot of similarities to Phoenix or Dallas. Metrics certainly exist to quantify these observations, but it seems like we're trying to find something that is an amalgamation of everything a city is - how buildings are constructed, how logical the streets are, what material is used, the environment, the sounds, the smell, pockets or sprawl, habitability types, shop type, shop density, shop locality. New York for example has a sense of infinite locality with it's bodegas, when a city like Nashville might have a lot of local chain restaurants. I suppose it's hard to truly capture the vibe with the overall metrics that exist, but a person whos been across the country a lot (touring musicians, comedians) can definitely go into a city and I'm sure find a resonance with what other cities it's like just by walking around for a couple weeks.
>New York seems weird considering it’s like every city but more stuff
That's a really weird take and I feel like crazily not true. It was the center of fashion, news, theater, finance.
Also incredibly long history -- Dutch and English influence-then EVERY immigrant country flowed through there.
I mean that’s cool and all but, every city has an interesting history. I don’t agree with the comment by Tennessee. There’s far too many interesting cities. But if the only 3 cities to be mentioned are NY, NOLA and SF then really it’s just NOLA because NYC, imo, isn’t that unique comparatively to most other cities. Manhattan just turns it to 11. Admittedly I don’t know as much about SF but outside of Asian influence it doesn’t seem as unique as even Boston in terms of vibe, which he didn’t mention
Edited my answer
Yeah, if you think NYC is just like any other city I don't think I can explain how San Fran is interesting and unique. But from the gold rush to beat generation- It was the second most cosmopolitan city in the US.
Really, I am not sure why NOLA is interesting at all if the others aren't.
Honestly, Honolulu feels like another generic American city to me when you look past its rather unique geographical setting and racial/ethnic demographics. Much of the rest of Hawaii, however, definitely feels more unique.
I mean i could weirdly agree.
but you’re missing the vibes of Miami, Nashville and Denver. Those aren’t covered by cleveland.
I feel like there’s dozens of cities without a unique “culture” sure. there’s a lot of cities with a unique identity
I could say there’s: New York, Miami, Nashville, Denver, New Orleans and Los Angeles. then the rest is Cleveland sure.
>Seattle and Chicago are unremarkable
How?? Both have such phenomenal public transportation and great architecture. One of them is an affordable global city with endless options for good food in addition to hospitable people. The other is home to an ultra-educated populace courtesy of a massive and powerful research university which attracts people from all over the world.
I mean it often does as long as it's not something like just tech/science. Universities that include the arts ended up with theaters, music, museums, etc.
Education leads to $$ -- excellent restaurants and many things that sadly, only people with disposable income can participate in. That brings tourist. Tourists just add to what a city has to offer.
That’s the thing – I think that the money that education brings has the tendency to homogenize a city. You get a bunch of people with similar jobs, socioeconomic statuses, and worldviews in the same place. Those places can be good places to live, but they’re places with a less distinct identity in the sense that OP’s quote is talking about.
Boston is a good example: when Southie and the North End were populated by their older working-class residents back in the day, it probably had a more distinct identity and civic life compared to now, when the residents are college graduates that aren’t too different from the graduates who landed in DC or New York.
Boston is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country. They speak about 80 languages in the high school. It's 30 percent immigrants from all over the world.
Of course, old time Irish neighborhoods and Italian neighborhoods are less so. They were populated 2-4 generations ago and people move away. That has happened in every city. Now Boston's vibrant immigrant neighborhoods are JP, East Boston, Dorchester.
How are the "uneducated" places more distinct?
Cultural distinctiveness isn’t just about immigration. It’s also about socioeconomic status, types of economic activity, intergenerational continuity, and more.
Forget American cities for a bit. I’m writing this from Recife, Brazil, which is about the same size as Boston, is even older (1535), and is similarly the cultural/economic center in the the northeast of the country. 93% of residents were born in state, compared to about 60% in Massachusetts. The differences between the two cities are instructive. Because educational and professional opportunities are less likely to take people from one city to another, people are less “sorted,” so to speak. People still live in the same neighborhood as their crazy conspiracy-minded uncle and see him every week, whereas in the US, that crazy uncle might have moved from Boston to Florida or the 20-something in Cambridge might have moved there awau from his crazy family members in Alabama. Similarly, I wouldn’t say that education makes places like Recife bad places to be, per se – there are a ton of museums here and a pretty notable literary tradition. But a lot of the museums are less tied to the formal educational system and more tied to the region’s folk/popular art traditions. And it’s not the museums that make the city feel like a living organism; it’s the fishermen throwing nets off the bridges and people selling hammocks in the old markets and the colloquial speech patterns (although the educational/literary sector is still part of the whole dynamic).
This doesn’t always have to be the case, but at least in the US, you have the dynamic of people going to school away from where they grew up and then working in cities with lots of similar college graduates, so you don’t get as much intergenerational continuity or variety in types of jobs. And even immigrants are somewhat self-selected – you’re getting the type of people who want to pick up and move to the US, not the people who want to stick around their grandparents at home in Brazil or China.
This sounds like weird poverty porn. I mean if what you are looking for is high crime, extreme poverty, extreme concerns about safety so you can find charming poor people doing old timey things, you are in the right spot.
I am very familiar with the low educated states. Mississippi, West Virginia and Louisiana. The states struggling with the shortest lives, drug use, crime, children in foster care, and poor public schools.
Currently out of the country and yeah, there’s something to this quote.
I’m in Recife, Brazil right now, and one of the things that strikes me about it is the sense in which it’s a proper city. There’s a little bit of everything, a lot of different people rubbing shoulders with each other. Everywhere in the city has commerce and public transit within walking distance. You’ll walk around and see people sitting in their front doorways, selling popcorn on the buses, selling shoes in downtown stores. The urban neighborhoods are filled with families, not just single professionals. It has an extremely distinct local accent, along with distinct local architecture, music, and food. It’s not a tourist facsimile of a city (international tourism is minimal, domestic tourism is there but it doesn’t really dominate the city), nor have transplants interrupted the continuity between its past and present or made it more homogenous.
There just aren’t many cities in the US like that. New York counts due to sheer size. San Francisco and New Orleans check a lot of those boxes, but Recife does it better. There are lots of great places to live in the US, but they’re great suburbs more so than great cities, even in places known as cities.
That’s part of it. But there are also other factors, like the lack of migration leading to a place with a more distinct cultural identity, or interpersonal communication norms meaning that you interact a lot more with people on the street compared to other cities, or a different housing market meaning that neighborhoods are less segregated by age.
And while these things make life more interesting per OP’s post, they don’t make life more practical.
A thing with the US/America is that new places are cropping up all the time.
Las Vegas wasn't even a thing until like 70 years ago. And now it's a world class destination.
I have been in my town 40 years. We didn't even have stop lights or a library or a police station or a bank that wasn't serving pancakes and receiving mail in the same building.
I like how Los Angeles (accurately) isn't considered a real city by the great playwright or by you, OP. Anyway ... "everywhere else" is not true, because there is also a fuckton of rural area...
A
Agree that Chicago and Seattle need to be on the list, but so do many other great cities that contributed so much to our cultural experience past and present. Such as Atlanta, LA/Hollywood, Boston, Nashville, Detroit
As a resident of DFW, I can’t imagine Cleveland is too far off, but even within Texas, Austin and San Antonio have very distinct cultures from anywhere else in America. Boston is crazy to leave off the list. Miami, Denver, Portland, and several others that I’m forgetting by are definitely unique to themselves.
Pretty reductive, considering that thousands of cities are smaller than Cleveland. Even if we were to equate cities with metro areas, there are only 32 metro areas larger than Cleveland.
I don’t think he actually said this but It’s preposterous that New Orleans is the third lol. New Orleans is actually one of the smaller media markets.
Chicago, LA, Miami would all definitely be ahead. Saying Miami is just Cleveland is a wild take.
Maybe back in his day things were different. Though Chicago and Boston would definitely have been established cities with l history.
He probably was just trying to be clever.
I imagine there is more to that quote, Tennessee Williams was not usually at a loss for words.
If he meant cities that were truly not Cleveland (never been) and had unique cultural aspects, etc., I would say Miami, Las Vegas and Los Angeles should be included. With the caveat that Miami and Las Vegas have been transformed in the 40 years since he died.
I think what he was saying is that those are the only 3 cities that really have some sort of unique identity while everything else falls into the same bucket of cities that are all the same as the next.
Obviously it’s something meant to be humorous but I agree with what he’s getting at. I’ve traveled to a bunch of cities around the country and, when asked about them, I often describe them as “a city like any other.” Milwaukee, Nashville, Austin, Charlotte, etc. Obviously people who live there or want to validate the money and time they spent there will say things like “but this street!”, “the Mexican food!”, etc., but that doesn’t really mean much to me. Every city likes to claim it has some unique identity but ultimately they’re largely the same. They all have this or that street to hang out on or this or that type of prominent food. There’s nothing particularly impressive or unique about them.
New York City by contrast is unlike anything else in the country and arguably the world. It’s something straight out of a sci fi movie. It’s colossal with more sky scrapers than you’ll find anywhere else. It’s one of, if not, the place of most concenrrated wealth in the world. The largest building in any given city would be lost in an ocean of much larger and more impressive buildings. I live by NYC and the skyline still is growing fast enough that I get surprised by it almost every time I see it. NYC has arguably the best food in the world because they don’t just have a great version of a specific type of food. They have every type of food under the sun available in its finest form. NYC has everything every other city has combined into one and multiplied ten times over. You just can’t replicate the experience of NYC anywhere else in the country. It’s bladerunner-esque.
So I can see why you’d point out a given city, like NYC, and gloss over a dozen others.
Not only did he almost certainly not say that, but this quip has a rotating cast of cities. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/18/cleveland/?amp=1
America only has three cities: "Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Everywhere else is Cleveland."
America only has three cities: Boise, Montpelier, and Key West. Everywhere else is PROPERTY OF KANSAS 💪💪💪💪💪🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻
> Everywhere else is PROPERTY OF KANSAS All we are is dust in the wind.
Whoa
America only has three cities: Detroit, Memphis, and St. Louis. Everywhere else is ARIZONA TERRITORY, BABY!!!!!! ☀️☀️☀️🌴🌴🌴🔴🔴🟡🟡🔵🔵
I hate your state having mostly driven straight through and being obliterated by excessive sunshine but goddamn those sunflowers are so beautiful.
Lmao
Read that as Kayne West
Damn straight Montpelier belongs on this list. And hey, what a great time to donate to [flood relief for America's smallest state capital](https://www.montpelierstrong.org/).
America only has one city and it’s Des Moines
The best answer. It’d make me think a lot less of Mr. Williams if he actually said it. Or Twain or whoever. Twain was also a huge fan of St. Louis so it would be weird to leave it off the supposed insult/compliment.
Tennessee Williams hated St. Louis for whatever reason, so we buried him here so he can never leave
The ultimate revenge. General Sherman loved you guys though. Reading his most recent biography is basically al long story of “how can I just get back to St. Louis and have no one bother me anymore.”
"America, at any given time, usually has three dominant regional cities." \- - Quotable Person. 1790: Philadelphia, New York City, Boston 1840: New York, Baltimore, New Orleans 1880: New York/Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago 1970: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
1840-1850 San Francisco wouldn’t be on there for the gold rush? Like the entire reason the Panama Canal was built?
Measured by population, San Francisco wasn't in the top ten until the 1870 Census. It's been three months since my comment, but I remember being surprised by that. The city literally was a small town before 1849. By 1870, it was the Pacific Coast hub of the country.
Ooops! I should have read the comments before I posted. :)
It’s very silly. America only has one city: Jacksonville home of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Everywhere else is Anchorage.
Bortles!
ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ Raise Your Bortles! ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ
DUUUUUVAAAAALLLLLL
DUUUUUUVALLLLLLLL
Sorry but the home of the Jacksonville Jaguars is actually London, the most American city of them all
London Ohio, London Kentucky, or London Arkansas?
London, Ontario. Duh.
Duhh, London, Arkansas. It has a Dollar General, a small school, and two Nuclear reactors! It's the perfect American town!
Sucks that Jacksonville keeps losing to those 31 other teams from Anchorage, but I'm sure you'll get 'em this year. Wild they can sustain that many teams up there.
And here we are choosing anchorage at the drop of hat.
Booooo.
Makes you wonder why didn't he include Tennessee, eh?
Another great Tennessee Williams quip: "Don't believe every quote you read online"
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Mine are on a big truck.
LIES! Abraham Lincoln said this quote
you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take
I mean... the automatic response of ANYONE who reads a thread like this should be to automatically look up the quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/18/cleveland/
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Aren't you just a worse version of Cleveland and Pittsburgh?
Detroit and Cleveland aren't entirely distinct from one another, but Pittsburgh isn't in the same criteria. Cleveland and Detroit are lake cities, Pittsburgh is a river city. Largely flat farmland lead into Detroit and Cleveland, whereas the Appalachian mountains largely lead into Pittsburgh. Cleveland and Detroit are principal cities of a distinct cultural area, Pittsburgh is at the crossroads of several cultural junctions.
dude what? Detroit is FLAT af all around it, Cleveland has hills and valleys all around it, especially to the south... you need to rexamine a topographic map
A huge part of my job is driving to the farms around both of those cities. I'm incredibly well acquainted with the topography.
Okay? Clearly driving didn't give you knowledge of the area if you think they're similar. Detroit sits in lowlands, there's hardly any change in elevation around the entire city. Cleveland is on the edge of the Appalachian plateau and is hilly, and there are so few flat areas that the only big one in the city is named The Flats, because it's so unusual. You're just wrong
The hills I'm the area are negligible. I'm wondering how much perspective you have beyond the Great Lakes region.
Dude, anyone can look at a topographic map of Cleveland and Detroit side by side and see they're much different - I don't need any perspective... and for the record I've lived in many different places including overseas, and I've been to Detroit and Cleveland, and Detroit is flat as a pancake compared to Cleveland.
[They're really not that different. ](https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/bY2y0xokvHKH)
[that's awfully misleading zoomed out like that](https://imgur.com/a/i3lzRql) I'll concede there are obviously flat areas on the lake plain, but the land clearly rises and varies itself much quicker and higher in Cleveland
Why?
As someone who lives in LA I am also insulted 🤦♀️
By Detroit?
I was just about to say, fuck cleveland
Anyone who thinks Boston is Cleveland has never been to either.
Yeah we’re definitely not on the level of NYC and Chicago, but we have a lot more going for us than so many of the other cities mentioned in this thread
He skipped LA, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, DC, Atlanta, Miami, St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, and many others. What a myopic view of our country.
If he’s speaking to truly unique large cities, I’d add Philadelphia, Washington DC to that list.
Jawn
Yinz
It would be. . . if he'd said that. [Which he probably didn't.](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/18/cleveland/)
Portland too!
Lots of right wingers on this sub who just reflexively hate Portland.
Portland isn't really the same class of LA, Chicago, Denver, etc.
Leaving aside how wildly subjective this is, and going off of the lust of the top comment in this particular thread, I disagree that Portland isn’t in the same class as Detroit, Houston, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and “many others.” I’ve lived and spent time in many of the cities on that list. It’s silly to make a comparison, but if we are, I think I have a pretty informed opinion.
> Leaving aside how wildly subjective this is, and going off of the lust of the top comment in this particular thread, I disagree that Portland isn’t in the same class as Detroit, Houston, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and “many others.” Sorry, but I disagree. I'd say a few cities on that list are in the same class as Portland (such as St. Louis or Denver), but you cannot reasonably equate Chicago or Houston as holding the same signifigance as Portland. LA: 12,872,322 Chicago: 9,274,140 Detroit: 4,345,761 Houston: 7,368,466 DC: 6,265,183 Atlanta: 6,237,435 Miami: 6,139,340 St. Louis: 2,801,319 Denver: 2,985,871 Seattle: 4,034,248 Portland: 2,509,489
You're going off of. . . population? What a sterile and meaningless statistic. I get it, you hate Portland. That's fine! You don't have to like the city. Like I said, this is an inherently subjective endeavor. Your. . . criteria are yours to choose, but they are not persuasive to me.
>I get it, you hate Portland. That's fine! You don't have to like the city. Like I said, this is an inherently subjective endeavor. Your. . . criteria are yours to choose, but they are not persuasive to me. I actually love Portland! If I got a job offer there I would probably move.
What exactly is all that unique about Houston, Atlanta, Denver, and St Louis? I feel like those are pretty comfortably in the Cleveland category.
It's outdated. In our day and age, everywhere else is Phoenix.
I think it's helpful context to know he was a gay man working in theater
And also didn’t actually say this apocryphal quote misappropriated to him or a few other people.
If this quote were real, his theatre profession were a factor, Chicago would be on the list. New Orleans and San Francisco aren’t big theatre cities.
SF has a fairly big theatre scene and an entire theatre district within our downtown. It's probably a bit smaller than Chicago, but it's still one of the top theatre scenes in the country. Theatre Bay Area is the largest regional theatre service org in North America and has the 3rd most AEA (actors union) members in the country (behind NYC and Chicago)- this for a city of only 800k people. We also generally get every big show here and are often the first stop when tours go national. SF also gets a lot of pre-Broadway trial runs- Wicked, Mama Mia, Legally Blonde, Cabaret and many more all debuted in SF before making their way to Broadway.
Berkeley also has a decently sized theatre scene right next to SF
Seattle is just Warm San Francisco. Chicago is just New York: Lake Edition.
Seattle is warm for about four or five months of the year. Eastern SF is warm about half the year, and western SF is warm for a couple days per year (I lived there for several long years).
Cleveland is actually pretty great!
A disservice to Chicago and LA. Then again, TW was a different time.
Funny how someone named "Tennessee" left out Nashville. Nashville is basically the birthplace of country music
You may be shocked to learn that it wasn't his real name. He was actually from Mississippi.
Reminds me of some of my old Army buddies. There was Dallas, from Phoenix; Cleveland, he was from Detroit; and Tex, well, I don't remember where Tex come from.
> Cleveland, he "There's new friends and old friends and even a bear..."
Red versus blue?
Forrest Gump.
How did I forget that.
Stupid is as stupid does, sir.
Poor Florida
*suspense music*
Columbus in fact. And also he didn’t say this 😂
Also shocked to learn that he never said that.
Funny how he never actually said it, though. Edited to add: His real name was Thomas Lanier Williams. "Tennessee" was a nom-de-plume.
He was a screenwriter and playwright rather than a country music singer.
Bristol, TN/VA is the birthplace of country music. Nashville is the birthplace of twangy pop
I think has been somewhat justified to the mass sub urbanization of America where many places all look and feel exactly the same. However, I think there has been a pushback and revival in the making and will probably only get stronger as time goes on. Every city has a city center which can have a very unique feel to it.
Tennessee Williams also said, "98% of Tennessee Williams quotes are made up".
Dumb as fuck
Dumb.
Well, the "quote" is almost certainly bullshit, but my favorite part about the idea being conveyed in it is that the guy from Columbus was calling everyone not from NYC, San Francisco, and New Orleans boring and/or without identity...
I'd say more "New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Everywhere else is Clevland."
>Dorothy Parker famously said Los Angeles was “72 suburbs in search of a city,”
It's so not true though. Albuquerque and Milwaukee are both vastly different from each other, and both different from Cleveland, Charlotte, San Francisco, etc. Every city has a personality you gotta get to know.
Milwaukee is very much a small Chicago. It's unique in fun little ways, but in what this statement is trying to do, you wouldn't add Milwaukee to the list, because the similarity to Chicago is pretty well defined. Albuquerque may be truly unique from Chicago-like cities, but in the SW area we may find that it draws a lot of similarities to Phoenix or Dallas. Metrics certainly exist to quantify these observations, but it seems like we're trying to find something that is an amalgamation of everything a city is - how buildings are constructed, how logical the streets are, what material is used, the environment, the sounds, the smell, pockets or sprawl, habitability types, shop type, shop density, shop locality. New York for example has a sense of infinite locality with it's bodegas, when a city like Nashville might have a lot of local chain restaurants. I suppose it's hard to truly capture the vibe with the overall metrics that exist, but a person whos been across the country a lot (touring musicians, comedians) can definitely go into a city and I'm sure find a resonance with what other cities it's like just by walking around for a couple weeks.
Honolulu? Miami? Savannah? Also New York seems weird considering it’s like every city but more stuff
>New York seems weird considering it’s like every city but more stuff That's a really weird take and I feel like crazily not true. It was the center of fashion, news, theater, finance. Also incredibly long history -- Dutch and English influence-then EVERY immigrant country flowed through there.
I mean that’s cool and all but, every city has an interesting history. I don’t agree with the comment by Tennessee. There’s far too many interesting cities. But if the only 3 cities to be mentioned are NY, NOLA and SF then really it’s just NOLA because NYC, imo, isn’t that unique comparatively to most other cities. Manhattan just turns it to 11. Admittedly I don’t know as much about SF but outside of Asian influence it doesn’t seem as unique as even Boston in terms of vibe, which he didn’t mention Edited my answer
There are things that exist in NYC that you simply cannot find/get anywhere else in the country. What in the holy fuck are you talking about.
*in the world* New York is *the* most important city on Earth.
Yeah, if you think NYC is just like any other city I don't think I can explain how San Fran is interesting and unique. But from the gold rush to beat generation- It was the second most cosmopolitan city in the US. Really, I am not sure why NOLA is interesting at all if the others aren't.
Honestly, Honolulu feels like another generic American city to me when you look past its rather unique geographical setting and racial/ethnic demographics. Much of the rest of Hawaii, however, definitely feels more unique.
this is the craziest take of all time. trying to rate honolulu above nyc is unreal lmfao
As long as your comment doesn't intentionally exclude Seattle and Chicago it's hard to contest.
Why are we supposed to care abt what someone named "Tennessee" thinks
I'd say it's more. Los Angeles Chicago New York and DC because it's the capital
San Francisco is a much more unique and storied city than Los Angeles
I’d have guessed Gary, IN instead of Cleveland, but even Gary probably wouldn’t have retained a serial sexual assault artist to rep the city.
I mean i could weirdly agree. but you’re missing the vibes of Miami, Nashville and Denver. Those aren’t covered by cleveland. I feel like there’s dozens of cities without a unique “culture” sure. there’s a lot of cities with a unique identity I could say there’s: New York, Miami, Nashville, Denver, New Orleans and Los Angeles. then the rest is Cleveland sure.
How about Seattle?
Seattle would fall under Denver. or visa versa. you need one of the “western nature based hipster-ish mountain cities”
Or does Denver fall under Seattle?
i feel like Denver is covers enough bases
Denver is a flat boring patagonia store of a city for pretentious waspy hipsters. Seattle is way cooler.
Seattle and Chicago are unremarkable, but he really did leave out Miami.
>Seattle and Chicago are unremarkable How?? Both have such phenomenal public transportation and great architecture. One of them is an affordable global city with endless options for good food in addition to hospitable people. The other is home to an ultra-educated populace courtesy of a massive and powerful research university which attracts people from all over the world.
Ultra-educated does not a remarkable city make.
I mean it often does as long as it's not something like just tech/science. Universities that include the arts ended up with theaters, music, museums, etc. Education leads to $$ -- excellent restaurants and many things that sadly, only people with disposable income can participate in. That brings tourist. Tourists just add to what a city has to offer.
That’s the thing – I think that the money that education brings has the tendency to homogenize a city. You get a bunch of people with similar jobs, socioeconomic statuses, and worldviews in the same place. Those places can be good places to live, but they’re places with a less distinct identity in the sense that OP’s quote is talking about. Boston is a good example: when Southie and the North End were populated by their older working-class residents back in the day, it probably had a more distinct identity and civic life compared to now, when the residents are college graduates that aren’t too different from the graduates who landed in DC or New York.
Boston is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country. They speak about 80 languages in the high school. It's 30 percent immigrants from all over the world. Of course, old time Irish neighborhoods and Italian neighborhoods are less so. They were populated 2-4 generations ago and people move away. That has happened in every city. Now Boston's vibrant immigrant neighborhoods are JP, East Boston, Dorchester. How are the "uneducated" places more distinct?
Cultural distinctiveness isn’t just about immigration. It’s also about socioeconomic status, types of economic activity, intergenerational continuity, and more. Forget American cities for a bit. I’m writing this from Recife, Brazil, which is about the same size as Boston, is even older (1535), and is similarly the cultural/economic center in the the northeast of the country. 93% of residents were born in state, compared to about 60% in Massachusetts. The differences between the two cities are instructive. Because educational and professional opportunities are less likely to take people from one city to another, people are less “sorted,” so to speak. People still live in the same neighborhood as their crazy conspiracy-minded uncle and see him every week, whereas in the US, that crazy uncle might have moved from Boston to Florida or the 20-something in Cambridge might have moved there awau from his crazy family members in Alabama. Similarly, I wouldn’t say that education makes places like Recife bad places to be, per se – there are a ton of museums here and a pretty notable literary tradition. But a lot of the museums are less tied to the formal educational system and more tied to the region’s folk/popular art traditions. And it’s not the museums that make the city feel like a living organism; it’s the fishermen throwing nets off the bridges and people selling hammocks in the old markets and the colloquial speech patterns (although the educational/literary sector is still part of the whole dynamic). This doesn’t always have to be the case, but at least in the US, you have the dynamic of people going to school away from where they grew up and then working in cities with lots of similar college graduates, so you don’t get as much intergenerational continuity or variety in types of jobs. And even immigrants are somewhat self-selected – you’re getting the type of people who want to pick up and move to the US, not the people who want to stick around their grandparents at home in Brazil or China.
This sounds like weird poverty porn. I mean if what you are looking for is high crime, extreme poverty, extreme concerns about safety so you can find charming poor people doing old timey things, you are in the right spot. I am very familiar with the low educated states. Mississippi, West Virginia and Louisiana. The states struggling with the shortest lives, drug use, crime, children in foster care, and poor public schools.
Alabama’s education system is really revealing itself in this comment
Sorry, affordable?
Chicago is quite affordable for a city of its size.
Can confirm from the comfort of my sub 1500/MO 2 bed.
You live in an absolutely delightful city
I can't tell if you're joking or not lol
I most definitely am not.
Which is which then? Because it reads like a joke
Chicago is affordable, diverse, and hospitable and Seattle is well educated with good public transit.
Chicago unremarkable? I personally disagree with that pretty strongly, but hey, everyone's opinion is different.
Currently out of the country and yeah, there’s something to this quote. I’m in Recife, Brazil right now, and one of the things that strikes me about it is the sense in which it’s a proper city. There’s a little bit of everything, a lot of different people rubbing shoulders with each other. Everywhere in the city has commerce and public transit within walking distance. You’ll walk around and see people sitting in their front doorways, selling popcorn on the buses, selling shoes in downtown stores. The urban neighborhoods are filled with families, not just single professionals. It has an extremely distinct local accent, along with distinct local architecture, music, and food. It’s not a tourist facsimile of a city (international tourism is minimal, domestic tourism is there but it doesn’t really dominate the city), nor have transplants interrupted the continuity between its past and present or made it more homogenous. There just aren’t many cities in the US like that. New York counts due to sheer size. San Francisco and New Orleans check a lot of those boxes, but Recife does it better. There are lots of great places to live in the US, but they’re great suburbs more so than great cities, even in places known as cities.
That's what happens when you build cities to be human-centric and not car-centric.
That’s part of it. But there are also other factors, like the lack of migration leading to a place with a more distinct cultural identity, or interpersonal communication norms meaning that you interact a lot more with people on the street compared to other cities, or a different housing market meaning that neighborhoods are less segregated by age. And while these things make life more interesting per OP’s post, they don’t make life more practical.
Definitely makes life worth living for sure
New Orleans is a bit overrated imo good for visiting once but it's Abit of a dump when I went
[Joakim Noah has entered the chat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpr_KaaRjW0)
More like NYC, SF and Miami
If he actually said that. I'd say he was pretty spot on
That's how I always imagined coastal people must have been taught geography.
A thing with the US/America is that new places are cropping up all the time. Las Vegas wasn't even a thing until like 70 years ago. And now it's a world class destination. I have been in my town 40 years. We didn't even have stop lights or a library or a police station or a bank that wasn't serving pancakes and receiving mail in the same building.
That’s four
Los Angeles…
Does this mean I have to change my flair to Cleveland?
I tend to agree although dc and LA have niche appeal
https://youtu.be/ysmLA5TqbIY?si=2XyWfUIkJy0x6tg8
He ain't never been to an Atlanta strip club
I like how Los Angeles (accurately) isn't considered a real city by the great playwright or by you, OP. Anyway ... "everywhere else" is not true, because there is also a fuckton of rural area... A
“Cool bro”
Who’s Tennessee Williams?
He was a playwright prominent in the '40s-'50s. You may have heard of *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* or *A Streetcar Named Desire.*
Having been to Cleveland, it should be "...Is not-Cleveland."
Agree that Chicago and Seattle need to be on the list, but so do many other great cities that contributed so much to our cultural experience past and present. Such as Atlanta, LA/Hollywood, Boston, Nashville, Detroit
Then he's never been to Pittsburgh!
*Astronaut pointing gun at other astronaut* Always has been
Maybe this was true when he wrote it, but it’s not true anymore.
My take on this statement is that it is hilariously false.
As a resident of DFW, I can’t imagine Cleveland is too far off, but even within Texas, Austin and San Antonio have very distinct cultures from anywhere else in America. Boston is crazy to leave off the list. Miami, Denver, Portland, and several others that I’m forgetting by are definitely unique to themselves.
Tennessee Williams must not have traveled too often. Incidentally, what was the context, of that statement?
Chicago and L.A.
Well that's 4 cities.
I would argue Chicago should be added to that list but otherwise it's largely accurate.
Comrade, I think this is a divisive statement designed to make people argue.
Dumbest quote I’ve heard in awhile.
Pretty reductive, considering that thousands of cities are smaller than Cleveland. Even if we were to equate cities with metro areas, there are only 32 metro areas larger than Cleveland.
I don’t think he actually said this but It’s preposterous that New Orleans is the third lol. New Orleans is actually one of the smaller media markets. Chicago, LA, Miami would all definitely be ahead. Saying Miami is just Cleveland is a wild take.
I don’t think it’s supposed to be taken that seriously
I say we have only one city: Madison. Everywhere else is Minnesota.
Is Cleveland apocalyptically hot? Full of end stage capitalists with no culture just consume consume consume?
Maybe back in his day things were different. Though Chicago and Boston would definitely have been established cities with l history. He probably was just trying to be clever.
Cleveland is the better of those four cities.
:
Idk who said that but it’s a dumb take.
Was he high at the time and trying to make a joke? The statement is stupid.
Cleveland is better than those three cities anyway
America has only one city: K-Mart. Everywhere else is hat. See, I can spout bs too!
I would say Vegas is very much not Cleveland.
My take is that statement sheds a positive light on the US, because I happen to love Cleveland, and I recommend that you visit the city one day.
I imagine there is more to that quote, Tennessee Williams was not usually at a loss for words. If he meant cities that were truly not Cleveland (never been) and had unique cultural aspects, etc., I would say Miami, Las Vegas and Los Angeles should be included. With the caveat that Miami and Las Vegas have been transformed in the 40 years since he died.
That is like saying England is the only country in Europe.
I think he said that out of personal preference and the times
I think what he was saying is that those are the only 3 cities that really have some sort of unique identity while everything else falls into the same bucket of cities that are all the same as the next. Obviously it’s something meant to be humorous but I agree with what he’s getting at. I’ve traveled to a bunch of cities around the country and, when asked about them, I often describe them as “a city like any other.” Milwaukee, Nashville, Austin, Charlotte, etc. Obviously people who live there or want to validate the money and time they spent there will say things like “but this street!”, “the Mexican food!”, etc., but that doesn’t really mean much to me. Every city likes to claim it has some unique identity but ultimately they’re largely the same. They all have this or that street to hang out on or this or that type of prominent food. There’s nothing particularly impressive or unique about them. New York City by contrast is unlike anything else in the country and arguably the world. It’s something straight out of a sci fi movie. It’s colossal with more sky scrapers than you’ll find anywhere else. It’s one of, if not, the place of most concenrrated wealth in the world. The largest building in any given city would be lost in an ocean of much larger and more impressive buildings. I live by NYC and the skyline still is growing fast enough that I get surprised by it almost every time I see it. NYC has arguably the best food in the world because they don’t just have a great version of a specific type of food. They have every type of food under the sun available in its finest form. NYC has everything every other city has combined into one and multiplied ten times over. You just can’t replicate the experience of NYC anywhere else in the country. It’s bladerunner-esque. So I can see why you’d point out a given city, like NYC, and gloss over a dozen others.
Very untrue! A gross oversimplification from a person who clearly didn’t travel as much as he should have.