Small City Feel

In the post below I list 'small city feel' as a reason I chose to live in Hoboken. I like that the downtown area is only 14 blocks long and centered mostly on Washington Street. I like the fact the fact that the city is a square mile (basically 16 blocks north to south and 15 blocks east to west) which allows one to walk easily just about anywhere. And with the densely packed population living in brownstones, row houses, and now new apartment buildings this city has the energy that 40,000 people can generate. Kind of best of both worlds.

When I was thinking of this point I thought of another small city I once lived in, Charleston, SC. The greater Charleston area had more than 500,000 people when I lived there in the early 90s but the downtown historic area south of Calhoun Street is probably only a little smaller than Hoboken with about the same amount of people. I mention this because Charleston is not next to a city the size of NYC. I found this made Charleston a more complete city. What I mean by this is that Hoboken is more homogeneous than Charleston at least with regard to age. What I found walking around Hoboken is a lot of young singles or couples with small kids. In Charleston there seemed to be more of a mix of young people, young families and senior citizens. To me that leaves something to be desired here in Hoboken.