Monday Trivia, No. 125 [Mark Thompson wins!]
Arbitrarily, I’ve limited my search to cities in the United States with populations estimated for 2012 to be in excess of 500,000. As it turns out, there are thirty-six of them. Milwaukee, Charlotte, and Nashville may be incorrect, by a margin I cannot readily calculate, owing to peculiarities about the solution to this week’s puzzle. But I found the best information I could for them, and based on that, I’ve ranked the biggest cities in the United States, thusly:
- Jacksonville, FL
- El Paso, TX
- Oklahoma City, OK
- San Diego, CA
- Austin, TX
- Phoenix, AZ
- Albuquerque, NM
- Milwaukee, WI
- Charlotte, NC
- Portland, OR
- Houston, TX
- Louisville, KY
- Nashville, TN
- Dallas, TX
- San Antonio, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Fort Worth, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Columbus, OH
- Indianapolis, IN
- Washington, D.C.
- Los Angeles, CA
- Denver, CO
- Atlanta, GA
- Seattle, WA
- Detroit, MI
- Baltimore, MD
- Boston, MA
- Tucson, AZ
- Philadelphia, PA
- San Francisco, CA
- Honolulu, HI
- Las Vegas, NV
- New York, NY
- Chicago, IL
- Fresno, CA
Your challenge: figuring out before all the others: why did I rank them in that order?
Hmm, can’t be % Latino or immigrant because Fresno is so low, and can’t be AA because Chicago is low. Maybe it’s youth unemployment rate.Report
Average age of the citizenry?Report
Acres of park per resident?Report
Err, residents per acre of park I mean.Report
There you go. New York seems a bit surprising with that rather large and famous park right there in the middle of Manhattan, until you realize that the acreage gets totally swamped by the huge population. San Diego stands out to me because its very large Balboa Park, which consists of some very, very rugged terrain that is not easily usable by a lot of people.
Charlotte, Milwaukee, and Nashville do not have municipal parks and recreation departments; they are co-extensive with the parks departments of their counties, so it’s not quite clear how many parks are in their city limits rather than in the outlying counties.
Have you seen a list like this before, Mark?Report
I can’t say that I have. I just thought it anomalous that Fresno finished at the bottom of a list in which the very densely populated NY and Chicago were the next two cities at the bottom. When I checked Fresno’s wikipedia page, I saw that it had just gotten named the worst city in the country in terms of its commitment to public parks. I thought that was interesting and it occurred to me that Chicago and New York are densely populated enough that it would be really hard for them to have a lot of park acreage per capita. So I played around with the data for the three cities at the top and bottom of the list and it seemed to correlate closely enough that it was worth the guess.Report
Charlotte, Milwaukee, and Nashville do not have municipal parks and recreation departments; they are co-extensive with the parks departments of their counties, so it’s not quite clear how many parks are in their city limits rather than in the outlying counties.
Do you know if your references included the Denver Mountain Park system? This is 22 developed parks (plus some undeveloped areas) totaling more than 14,000 acres (16 times the size of Central Park in NYC) owned and operated by Denver, but outside the city boundaries. The city’s modest buffalo herd resides in Genessee Park, and the Red Rocks Amphitheater is well known. The system used to be bigger, but Denver sold the Winter Park ski resort ten years or so ago.Report
Nashville and its county are coextensive.Report
There was supposed to be a comma and then the word period there. So, “Nashville and its county are coextensive, period.” Nashville is Davidson County.Report
Charlotte, Milwaukee, and Nashville do not have municipal parks and recreation departments; they are co-extensive with the parks departments of their counties
Jacksonville absorbed all but a small part of Duval County back in the 60s — Duval County government functions are provided by the city. As a result, Jacksonville also has the distinction of being the largest, by area, of all cities in the contiguous states. Some of the things counted as “city parks” at this site appear to be coastal wilderness areas at a considerable remove from the city center. 90% of the park area attributed to El Paso at that site is actually Franklin Mountains State Park, which falls inside the city limits but is not owned or operated by the city.Report
Land area.Report
An impressive share! I’ve just forwarded this onto a co-worker who was doing a little homework on this. And he in fact ordered me lunch simply because I found it for him… lol. So let me reword this…. Thanks for the meal!! But yeah, thanks for spending time to discuss this matter here on your website.Report