This edition of Closer Than We Think ran in the July 23, 1961 Chicago Tribune, and illustrates the megacities and metropolises of 1975.
As a St. Paulitan . . . St. Paulite . . . resident of St. Paul, I find the map's indication of "St. Paul Metro" pretty hilarious. You see, St. Paul has an inferiority complex due to it's big twin brother, Minneapolis, which gets all the national attention. News reports describing the upcoming Republican National Convention in "Minneapolis" are about 10 miles off.
Tomorrow's map will be vastly different from today's. Great patches over much of it will indicate the super-metropolis cities which are already evolving out of our once-separated urban centers.
The "regional cities" of tomorrow will be nearly continuous complexes of homes, business centers, factories, shops and service places. Some will be strip or rim cities; some will be star-shaped or finger-shaped; others will be in concentric arcs or parallels; still others will be "satellite towns" around a nucleus core. They will be saved from traffic self-suffocation by high-speed transportation - perhaps monorails that provide luxurious nonstop service between the inner centers of the supercities, as well as links between the super-metropolises themselves.
See also:
Closer Than We Think
1980-1990 Developments (1979)
I've always liked the demonym "MinneaPaulitan" to cover all of us who live in the core cities. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought San Franscisco would have been a rim city (ba-dum ching!)...
ReplyDeletePrescient to include Phoenix as a major metro area (it's now the U.S.'s 5th largest), but rather dropped the ball on Michigan (last one out turn off the lights), and ascribing the big southeastern metropolis to Chattanooga, not Atlanta.
I didn't think Michigan was so hard up in 1975, back when cars from Asia were kind of a joke.
ReplyDeleteHmm, Salt Lake City instead of Denver, and is St. Louis supposed to be considered central Missouri somehow? (surely not KC)
I also just noticed from the map that apparently by 1975 we were to have incorporated New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into the USA...
ReplyDeleteOh, how I miss Minnesota....
ReplyDeleteMark Pisano at SCAG, our regional transportation planning agency, is STILL promising this - only now he calls it a MagLev (for magnetic levitation) system.
ReplyDeleteSame pie in the sky. No reason it wouldn't work, but then, there was a perfectly sound transit system in place until the 1950 -- street cars and interurban rail. Other cities kept theirs - LA was "too modern'
Los Angeles was one of many cities that had a huge streetcar network - it's generally accepted that the conglomerate of GM and Standard Oil and others purchased various streetcar companies for the sole purpose of dismantling them to increase the sale of buses and automobiles.
ReplyDeleteOdd to leave out Houston and have so much around Mississippi and Louisiana. Of course they didn't know half of Detroit would move to Houston in the 70s.
ReplyDeleteNor does the map predict the rise of the glop. Portsmith VA to a bit north of Boston is pretty much one urbanized area, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are almost a glop. Still some empty quarters between Houston and Dallas.