Alternate Large US Cities

inversepieta

inversepieta

I'm very interested in small-scale alt history changes - linguistics, demographics, cultural shifts, etc. One aspect I haven't seen explored nearly as much as I would like is alternate major cities.

The US currently has 10 cities with a population over 1mil. However, I think with just a bit of demographic shifting, one could pretty easily get more (or fewer!) large cities. Austin is an obvious option for a large city, for example.

What other US cities could have reached a population of over a million by 2018?

(note: this is in After 1900 because that's when most 1mil+ cities, well, grew to over a million people, but a POD pre-1900 is fine.)
 

Unknown

I can see San Antonio becoming a bigger city than OTL in a Texas divided in two states by the Colorado River TL...
 
SsgtC

SsgtC

Banned
Charleston, SC. Prior to the Civil War, Charleston was a major port and economic center in the South. After the war, the city had been leveled and most commerce went through northern ports instead. Handwave away the ACW (and maybe keep the Capitol there too) and Charleston would be much larger than it is today.
 
varyar

varyar

If things play out differently during/after WW2, I could see Buffalo as the aviation capital instead of Seattle; that might bring it back into the big leagues.
 
Cook

Cook

Banned
SsgtC said:
Handwave away the ACW (and maybe keep the Capitol there too) and Charleston would be much larger than it is today.
Click to expand...

You don't even need to do that; just have the Union army or navy seize Charleston without a prolonged siege and use the city as the main logistics hub for campaigning in the Carolinas and Georgia.
 
Fearless Leader

Fearless Leader

Donor
If one of the Canal projects in Clarksville Indiana gets completed before Louisville, in the early 19th century, that city might end up becoming the state capital instead of Indianapolis.

Though it's 21st Century population would likely not be equal to the populations of Louisville and Indianapolis combined, I'd wager that it could easily be over 1 million.
 

thatsbunkers

Banned
Nauvoo had about the same population as Chicago in the 1840s. It could become a large city if the Mormons aren’t expelled from Illinois
 

FillyofDelphi

Banned
Have Minneapolis and St.Paul/Pigs Eye Landing incorporated together rather than seperately. The Great Plains Ag. boom is the perfect opportunity for the milling capital of the world even in our timeline to develop into a major rail and refining/production hub that would create the urban sprawl and infastructure backbone for a metropolis.
 

RightHoJeeves

Banned
Keep the Arizona territorial capital in Tucson instead of moving it to Phoenix and it maybe tops a million by the end of the 20th century.
 

Arkenfolm

Big Stone Gap, Virginia, might have been a regional industrial city based on steel manufacture and probably turned the "Tri-Cities" area in northeastern Tennessee/southwestern Virginia into the "Quad-Cities". Supposedly it would become the Pittsburgh of the South according to the group which had planned it, but realistically going by the terrain and regional prospects, I think growing to be the size of Kingsport or Johnson City (50-60K) in Tennessee might have been more likely.
 

kernals12

Banned
Pretty much any village with water access and enough fertile land could become a teeming metropolis. It's pretty much a random chance since it's ultimately caused by a snowball effect. If the French had established their fur trading post further north, Milwaukee could be the 3rd largest city in America while Chicago is just some ordinary midwestern city.
 

kernals12

Banned
thatsbunkers said:
Nauvoo had about the same population as Chicago in the 1840s. It could become a large city if the Mormons aren’t expelled from Illinois
Click to expand...
Chicago is on Lake Michigan which makes it very convenient for trade especially with the Erie Canal. Nauvoo doesn't offer such advantages.
 

kernals12

Banned
SsgtC said:
Charleston, SC. Prior to the Civil War, Charleston was a major port and economic center in the South. After the war, the city had been leveled and most commerce went through northern ports instead. Handwave away the ACW (and maybe keep the Capitol there too) and Charleston would be much larger than it is today.
Click to expand...
Charleston had fallen out of the top 10 largest cities by the 1850 census.
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
Delay the expansion of home air conditioning by a few years and that might alter the development of the Sun Belt and Rust Belt to some extent
 
SsgtC

SsgtC

Banned
kernals12 said:
Charleston had fallen out of the top 10 largest cities by the 1850 census.
Click to expand...
Yes. But without the city getting destroyed in the ACW, it would have rebounded. Charleston and NYC have the two best deep water ports on the east coast. With intact infastructure, Charleston would have quickly reclaimed it's spot in the top 10 as more and more industry relocated to the South to take advantage of lower wages and easy access to a major deep water port.
 

1940LaSalle

Baltimore came close to a million IOTL, peaking at ~950,000 in the 1960 census. Had the 1959 steel strike been (significantly) shorter, that city would have remained a major steel city (Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point). And a shorter strike has lots of ripple effects for US smokestack industries, meaning a number of other old-school Rust Belt cities like Baltimore could have topped the million mark had their industries kept booming.
 
Dustin

Dustin

Driftless said:
Delay the expansion of home air conditioning by a few years and that might alter the development of the Sun Belt and Rust Belt to some extent
Click to expand...
Couldn't this also have influnce on Atlantic City's continuing relevance?

In addition, I know it's not quite the same as the OP's request, but Boston would have easily passed one million a long time ago had it had a similar level of success in annexing nearby cities like Cambridge, Brookline, Somerville, and the rest of Suffolk County. There's a lot more detail that would go into this situation though and it would involve a POD before 1900 though.
 

kernals12

Banned
1940LaSalle said:
Baltimore came close to a million IOTL, peaking at ~950,000 in the 1960 census. Had the 1959 steel strike been (significantly) shorter, that city would have remained a major steel city (Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point). And a shorter strike has lots of ripple effects for US smokestack industries, meaning a number of other old-school Rust Belt cities like Baltimore could have topped the million mark had their industries kept booming.
Click to expand...
I think the 1967 riots were much more important in depopulating Baltimore.
 
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