Less urban

Random observation spawned by looking closely at towns in Massachusetts for my next tech history item.

The downtown areas in smaller Mass towns look much less urban than the downtowns in Kansas and Oklahoma small towns.

In Mass, industrial buildings and stores are mixed randomly among houses and apartments. In the plains, stores are grouped in solid blocks, each storefront 25 feet wide.

Hypothesis: Towns in the plains, founded from 1850 to 1910, aspired to be the next New York. They chose city names and street grids imitating NYC. Massachusetts towns gained maturity before New York was THE CITY, so they followed British village tradition.

The aspiration was literal. Here’s an 1890 map of the new Manhattan. Note the densely packed buildings in downtown, the grid with numbered streets, and Battery Park next to the river.

Compare with this map of Brockton from the same era. No grid, factory and store buildings are separate, interspersed with houses.

Later when expanding this topic in a comment on substack, came up with a useful food analogy. Mass is salad and Kansas is steak. A salad is more airy than a steak, but a salad has high variety density. Each cubic inch includes two or three kinds of food. The steak has low variety density. Every cubic inch is beef.

In Mass each downtown block includes stores, houses, and factories, with space between. In Kansas each downtown block is all stores, no houses or space.