Tell me more about 2nd and 3rd tier cities

pittsburgh, louisville and cincinnati are decent places to live.

Our travel brouchures still make dubious boasts like the fact that we have the tallest skyscraper between St. Louis and Dallas. But real estate is cheap and everything is less than thirty minutes away. And in thirty years, maybe we'll have a dead president buried here, too.

I think your first tier might be larger than most, though.

It seems like the part of our brain that works in categories can only really handle one "main" city per state -- apart from like California and Texas -- so everything else fades a bit. Plus naturally if one city in an area is kinda culturally dominant, it tends to pull people from cities nearly as big and become the center of gravity for identity / personality / culture. E.g., job-wise, arts-wise, and school-wise, plenty of people wind up leaving Grand Rapids for Detroit (or Ann Arbor).

The main ones I can remember liking = Lincoln NE, Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo MI, San Diego CA, Bloomington/Normal IL, and most of the Colorado front range (from Pueblo up through Boulder, though Colorado Springs is admittedly wacko).

Fuck those people.

richmond, va seems to have potential maybe

i guess 2nd tier cities have the possible problem of being too big to be college towns, but too small to be primate

I've always heard GREAT things about Richmond VA over the years.

Then I moved back. Place hasn't been the same since. (It really has grown over the years, and whenever I go down that way I'm always creeped out by just how big the sprawl has grown.)

Indianapolis has mods and the annual Black Expo, but is creepy in any number of other ways.

But also I prefer second tier cities.

and i recently saw an 80's movie starring diane lane called LADY BEWARE that is set in pittsburgh and it looks SO CUTE! it has MOUNTAINS! and bridges and things!

I just took the train down from Seattle to Portland (finally!) and I was amazed at how much snazzier both Tacoma and Centralia look from the train station. I mean, really, Centralia!

xpost That's the nicest thing I've ever heard about Omaha by a long shot.

What does everyone think of Raleigh? I've had great times there, but it does seem like one's options in terms of bars, food, etc. are very limited. I did not like teh Chapel Hill.

I really liked it there! It is pretty consistently excellent.

Basically, places that most people could point to on a map tell you a couple of broad concepts / historical facts / landmarks / nicknames about them - Motown, Boston Tea Party, The Windy City, Bourbon Street, South Beach, Liberty Bell, Space Needle, Golden Gate Bridge, Big Apple, Gateway Arch, deep-dish pizza, and so on.

I kind of just wanted to hear random anecdotes about other places that most people have probably heard about, but don't necessarily know anything about.

I think you should weigh a range of factors - population, density, walkability/transit, arts/high culture presence, nightlife, and history, in addition to pop-culture identity. the hard part is weighing small cities against big ones, i.e. Providence v Phoenix, Santa Fe v San Jose. and also where to draw the line between cities - how do you weigh cities or dense suburbs that are part of other metro areas, like Bridgeport or Baltimore or Fort Worth or Long Beach?

uh, no

It's still the home of many significant indie labels.

I think Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Indpls follow closely, maybe in that order.

I consider Chicago first-tier but I'll qualify that by saying I've spent very little time in NY/LA/SF.

Above Jersey post fails to mention my current home of Jersey City - 2nd largest in population in the state and largest city in land area (there are larger municipalities in area, but they're sprawling). I guess I'd rate JC 3rd tier at best as a city - small, decent art museum, weak library, no real music venues, one or two decent galleries, good food, meh nightlife, etc. But it's basically an sub-boro or a very very close suburb of NYC, depending how you look at it. I still think it's a good place to live.

While we're talking about run-down minor Jersey cities of some cultural significance - how about Paterson?

Paterson's great--like 8th-tier in the grand scheme of things, probably. New Jersey is full of nice places that seem bigger than towns but smaller than cities--areas that used to be vital and industrial and are now either dirty and decaying or sort of quaint and homey (like the entire Northern half of the shore).

Not to mention it gave us Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams.

like san diego, the tampa/st pete area has grown exponentially in the last decade or two. another old friend of mine moved there around the same time I moved to NYC (early 80s) and he always says it's like a completely different city now.

michael jordan
al capone
oprah
a frank gehry building......
and they might get the olympics in 2016!

this is kinda a funny debate, but i think really the 1st tier cities in america are just like NYC, LA, Chicago. If any others, SF, Miami.

There's a good aquarium there and lots of Civil War history, not to mention the charming, venerable tourist traps Rock City and Ruby Falls.

It is also the world headquarters of Krystal and the Birthplace of Putt Putt Golf. Talk about culture...it's like the Florence of Tennessee.

By this standard Oxnard, CA may move up a tier! The Twin Centers mall (the collection West of Saviers) was remodelled by Gehry (or possibly his office) in the late seventies, before he was very famous. It was not very flamboyant - no curves, etc - and I don't think the locals liked it much; in fact it may have been re-done since then. He left plywood and chain-link fence exposed in the ceiling area.

Would Fresno be 2nd or 3rd tier?

An attempt to define and categorise world cities was made in 1999 by the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC), based primarily at Loughborough University in Loughborough, Leicestershire, England. The roster was outlined in the GaWC Research Bulletin 5 and ranked cities based on provision of "advanced producer services" such as accountancy, advertising, finance and law, by international corporations. The GaWC inventory identifies three levels of world cities and several sub-ranks.

Note that this roster generally denotes cities in which there are offices of certain multinational companies providing financial and consulting services rather than other cultural, political, and economic centres. There is a schematic map of GaWC cities at their website.

Alpha world cities (full service world cities)

12 points:

London
New York
Paris
Tokyo

10 points:

Chicago
Frankfurt
Hong Kong
Los Angeles
Milan
Singapore

Beta world cities (major world cities)

9 points:

San Francisco
Sydney
Toronto
Zürich

8 points:

Brussels
Madrid
Mexico City
São Paulo

7 points:

Moscow
Seoul

Gamma world cities (minor world cities)

6 points

Amsterdam
Boston
Caracas
Dallas
Düsseldorf
Geneva
Houston
Jakarta
Johannesburg
Melbourne
Osaka
Prague
Santiago
Taipei
Washington

5 points:

Bangkok
Beijing
Montreal
Rome
Stockholm
Warsaw

4 points:

Atlanta
Barcelona
Berlin
Budapest
Buenos Aires
Copenhagen
Hamburg
Istanbul
Kuala Lumpur
Manila
Miami
Minneapolis
Munich
Shanghai

Evidence of world city formation

Strong evidence

3 points

Athens
Auckland
Dublin
Helsinki
Luxembourg
Lyon
Mumbai
New Delhi
Philadelphia
Rio de Janeiro
Tel Aviv
Vienna

Some evidence

2 points:

Abu Dhabi
Almaty
Birmingham
Bogotá
Bratislava
Brisbane
Bucharest
Cairo
Cleveland
Cologne
Detroit
Dubai
Ho Chi Minh City
Kiev
Lima
Lisbon
Manchester
Montevideo
Oslo
Riyadh
Rotterdam
Seattle
Stuttgart
The Hague
Vancouver

Minimal evidence

1 point:

Adelaide
Antwerp
Aarhus
Baltimore
Bangalore
Bologna
Brasília
Calgary
Cape Town
Colombo
Columbus
Dresden
Edinburgh
Genoa
Glasgow
Gothenburg
Guangzhou
Hanoi
Kansas City
Leeds
Lille
Marseille
Richmond
St. Petersburg
Tashkent
Tehran
Tijuana
Turin
Utrecht
Wellington

Oxnard is easily second tier.