Old train tracks?

This is the part in Sim City where I restart.

At least with places like Denver and other western cities it's pretty straightforward how it happened - everything built along the river. Access to the river was key.

Being a boom/bust city means that a much later boom they adjusted.

Then even older cities (think Boston) grew before any opportunity at planning could happen.

My favorite is how 15th St just boings off of Colfax (15th ave)

I can't see the pic in your comment, but I am gonna guess Broadway and Lincoln between 19th and 20th?

Interestingly enough, Denver has 3 main grids:

The range and township grid as the typical NS/EW grid, the Araria grid by DU which is largely built over, and the downtown grid, the last two of which are aligned to Cherry Creek and the Platte River, though I'm not certain which one to which waterway. If it wasn't for one-ways, that area would be screwed up beyond belief. As it stands, it just looks a little odd and everyone needs to try to pick their lanes in advance. :D

So much more room for delicious maple syrup.

Waffle.

Jacksonville Beach, FL

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16%2F30.27980%2F-81.39504

In my experience, many cities old enough in the US. Almost every biggish city where I live has the center of town laying differently than the newer, surrounding areas. There was a time when they oriented things different than how they plan it out now so now the older downtown areas look cock-eyed on a map/satellite image.

Reverse image search has mixed results... A few say Florida, but the top one says Wyoming. I'd guess the one that says Jacksonville, Florida is most likely.

I was thinking maybe an old Spanish Land Grant or something maybe. But, that doesn't seem to be the case. That block is orientated north, while the surrounding blocks are oriented parallel with the coast, just east (right) of the crop. So then, I thought that maybe it was one weird plat of lot and the city grew around it. Nope. The thing is, you can look up all the plats (thanks to Florida's sunshine laws) back to the original bureau of land management surveys (thanks to the BLM & labins.org).There aren't even that many. This neighborhood has been like this from it's beginning as far as I can tell. Around 1911 the whole town, then called Pablo Beach, was platted. And right there in the middle is this weird block, seemingly by design and without explanation. It was replatted in 1922, keeping the twisted block intact. It's been residential neighborhood and largely unchanged since then (at least as far as the parcels and streets are concerned).

Inb4 Hank Green does a video about this.

I've lived here for years and never realized that's why everything in the center looked slightly off center. Thanks!

Speaking as someone who has been living in towns with rivers for most of my life:

This is the way.

My experience clearly says that you will loose orientation and get confused the moment you go to a district that is not alligned with the riverbank.

Looks like everyone started a new road perpendicular to the shore line, and the mess occurred when the roads got long enough to meet.

Still a better system than Boston, having navigated both MANY times. To call Boston's streets a "system" is an insult to the very concept of order.

Came here to say the same. This design (or accident) forces north/south traffic to use the arterials on either side of the neighbourhood instead of going through the neighbourhood.

Or cities skylines 2 because the grid system is shit and breaks if you sneezed in the last decade.

To me what's wild about it is that it's completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.

You'd think that they'd say "Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let's just make this a park", or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.

I think that area was built when nothing else was there, without the developer thinking too hard about its orientation.

As time went on, new development started nearby, oriented to a different geographic element, like a shoreline, or a river, etc. eventually that development met the old development, and they were lined up differently, and the municipality stuck with the new grid system orientation and just built around the old one.

Damn, capitalism is fucked up