Show us your home City's skyline

[AndreNolde 0]

[AndreNolde 0]

[un1 41]

Well this is a new thread for me!!!

My city has 2 downtown because the cities were merged together!!

Here's the "North End" one/ Port Arthur!!

Here's a building just barely out of the pcture:

Thunder Bay, Ontario!!!

[Micah 16]

AndreNolde, can you please not post several posts one after the other? Simply combine all of the posts into one and delete three of them.

[kawan 6]

Not seen many UK ones here, I might as well contribute. Fitting that this relates to Micah's signature right now at the last post.

Manchester, the home of Oasis, Morrissey, the Hacienda, Norman Foster and the person immortalised in my avatar.

Lovely.

[montrouge 2]

Paris  France

Sorry to break the dream of many people.

[Wrightguy0 40]

Saint John NB

[egranado 0]

Here's my home city... Edmonton, Alberta

Facing NW...

Facing north...

[un1 41]

Edmonton is much nicer than what I thought!!!

[thinboy66 6]

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Click on them for...

FULL RESOLUTION!

[wallasey 8]

Liverpool in the peoples republic of Merseyside, UK

River Mersey and Three Graces

Building work around Princes Dock and Old Hall Street

Waterfront in its entirety

South John Street...Liverpool 1. Western Europe's Largest Commercial redevelopment.

All images from my Flickr Site

[Drengs 18]

The is my city, Recife, in NE of Brazil.

It's not a rich city, but it's a big one. It has 1,5 million inhabitants, and beautiful beaches.

One curiosity: here, about 80% of the skyscrapers are residential, and not comercial, as it is normal in other citys.

Part of the Old Recife, and the Capibaribe river.

Boa Viagem beach, with it's High Wealth residential bulidings.

The Casa Forte neihborhood, a high density residential area.

Recife have a LOT of problems, as every Brazilian city, but I still love it.

[Sim-Yorker 0]

http://www.reorealtorgroup.com/dc%20skyline%20compressed.jpg

Washington DC (view looking southeast. White house and Washington monument easy to find, capitol's off to the left.)

Not exactly midtown Manhattan, but its a good city nonetheless.

All the modern glass skyscrapers are actually across the river in Arlington, Virginia (where there's no height limit) but I couldn't find any good photos of them.

[jayo 44]

London.

Just part of it

[Odainsaker 2,136]

Here is San Antonio, the queen city and old traditional heart of Texas, and a relatively old city by U.S. standards, being scouted by Spanish missionaries in 1691 and founded as a Spanish colonial settlement in 1718.

Note the very red building on the far left...that is the modern downtown Central Library by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta , whose boldly "enchilada red" coloring was a source of some controversy for an American city which you will see is architecturally conservative.

Of course, the night scene is charming, dominated by the gleaming syringe of the popularly beloved Tower Life Building.

Did I say conservative?  Maybe old-fashioned is more apt, hehe.  San Antonio's defining skyscraper building boom was just before the Depression and primarily styled neo-gothic and Spanish revival.  The locus of the postwar state economy would shift to Dallas and Houston, and for the most part San Antonio missed out on much of the shiny glass box crazes.  It's a mixed-bag, though, as much of the survival of older structures comes from lackluster downtown real estate economics, and even today not every structure is fully occupied.  Just as well, perhaps, for San Antonio's marketable charm as a tourist mecca comes from its history, much of which has not been destroyed by runaway urban renewal.

What modern and primarily post-modern construction there was strives so much to blend in with the brick and terra cotta coloring and stepbacks of the older buildings that the new towers are actually too bland.  Even the landmark Tower of the Americas is conservatively unassuming in comparison to other observation towers of its type.

Of course, we should be honest and show how most residents see the city--from their cars stuck in traffic on the highway.  Like all major sunbelt cities, San Antonio is a textbook case for classic automobile sprawl, boasting essentially 3 highway ring loops.  On the plus side, this image from mrcambell07 on Flickr shows that the city has lots of greenery, hopefully helping to dispell the image of a dusty desert town falsely popularized by Hollywood westerns.  I won't lie...though the city is green, it is also very hot South Texas climate, usually alternating hot and dry with hot and humid.  Modern centralized air conditioning can trace much of its birth largely to San Antonio and its experiments with centrally cooled office towers in the 1920s.

If we are going to be stuck in our cars, at least the roads in downtown are interesting.  Though, ostensibly following the grid-with-plaza pattern of Spanish colonial cities set down in the Spanish Law of the Indies, adjustments had to be made to fit the ideally regularized pattern around the city's lazily meandering San Antonio River.  The result is numerous irregular diagonal kinks and triangular building sites making for wonderful perspective views.

While we are at gound level, how can we pass up the Alamo, the Shrine of Texas Liberty, and requisite pilgrimage site for every Texas tourist.  The celebrated mission on the outskirts of the old town from which Texican settlers and American adventurers battled for independence from Mexico is now the number one tourist attraction in Texas.  This great Flickr image by jmtimages shows us not only roofline that would seemingly be replicated on half the buildings in the city, but also the exquisite gothic revival tower of the Emily Morgan Hotel.

The Emily Morgan is another triangular lot with commanding streetscape perspectives.  Interestingly, it was seemingly designed for a wall-to-wall urban environment which never quite materialized.  The half-pyramid behind it on the left is the classicist Masonic Scottish Rite Cathedral, and peeking out further right is the terraced Art Deco tower of the Express-News Building.

Looking in the other direction in this Flickr image by Jonathan D Blundell, we see lots of period buildings from the late 1800s through the 1920s.  We even still like to fly flags from the skyscrapers!  The rooftops in the foreground are of the historic Menger Hotel, and the green area are the grounds of the Alamo and its plaza.  The blandly postmodern towers have forgettably non-descript corporate names like "One _____ Center" or "One ______ Plaza," but at least they tried to terrace them in a manner reminiscent of the city's older towers.

This Flickr image is even better.  Anyone spot the Casino Club BAT?  I wish there was more time in the day to make these, as there is lots of material just in this one image.  Does this image seem brown to you?...no doubt it is all the brick and terra-cotta.

Same cluster of buildings, but from a different direction in this stormy Flickr image by lannadelarosa (I think from an apartment in the Exchange Building).  At middle-ground center is the towering gothic-revival Nix Medical Center, while peeking out on the right is the scalloped pediment of the Spanish Rococo revival Majestic Building, which houses the exuberantly atmospheric Majestic Theatre.  A quintessential American downtown scene almost bordering on nostalgic.

Speaking of atmospheric and nostalgic, here is a great Flickr image by StevenM_61 showing the human scale of much of the historic downtown, especially here with the Clifford Building on Commerce Street.  Nope, definitely not Dallas or Houston, and if you lean over the rail of the Commerce Street Bridge to the left you will see...

...the River Walk one level down.  The one time drainage ditch of the San Antonio River has been reorganized into the second great tourist attraction of Texas, which fully encircles and meanders through the downtown core in a second interconnected pedestrian network of restaurant-lined paths and linear grottoes.  Many buildings now boast both a street facade and a lower Paseo del Rio riverfront entrance to partake in what is now the single most important economic engine in downtown.

With the River Walk, San Antonio has a multiple levels of public space, with historically protected buildings at streetlevel above, and lush linear parks and waterfeatures below, all intersecting with picturesque bridges and staircases.  In this image we see the sculptural Torch of Friendship by Mexican artist Sebastián set against the art deco former-Joske's section of the Rivercenter Mall.  Like the "enchilada red" Central Library, the controversially modern red Torch, a gift to the city by Mexico celebrating San Antonio's strong cultural heritage with Mexico, is still being slowly digested by residents.  Fortunately, San Antonio, as a minority-majority Hispanic city, has been spared much of the open racial tension of other big U.S. cities.  The attitudes towards modern architecture and public art, obsessed as it is with preserving what image we currently have, may still seem slightly provincial, but everyone will come around, eventually.  Unfortunately, we can't say the same for our historic preservation board, which has already let too much slip away under the wrecking balls.

It doesn't even look like Texas!  Of course, skylines do not make a city.  This is the St. Mary's Street Bridge, with the Richardsonian Romanesque red Bexar County Courthouse in the background followed with the Granada Retirement Homes (former historic Plaza Hotel) and Tower Life Building to the left.  Nope, it is not flooding, the pathways of the River Walk literally are at river level.  Of course, the boat tour through the "Venice of Texas" is almost mandatory for tourists.

But, this is a skyline thread, so here is a charmingly layered one of Woodlawn Lake by john.fisch of Flickr.  Even Deep in the Heart of Texas we have a lighthouse!  In the middle ground is the landmark Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, with the towers of downtown beyond.  Surprisingly, a hotel building boom is starting again, with the starkly modern Grand Hyatt approaching completion (finally finished now).  It must have been an odd bleary day, as San Antonio does not yet have the runaway smog problems of larger American cities and its air and water remain comparatively clean, though the summer heat domes do bring occasional ozone days familiar to sunbelt suburban sprawl cities.  Maybe it is dust from the far west or smoke from burning Mexican agricultural fields, or *gasp* pollen sweeping down from the Rockies (San Antonio and Austin usually pair off as ranks #1 and #2 in worst pollen and pollen-related allergies among U.S. cities).  Still, its just so picturesque...just missing only the many park-goers feeding the birds and ducks flocking the lakeshore.

In my haste I forgot another important modern definer of our skyline:

The Alamodome, San Antonio's 65,000-seat White Elephant.  This was lauded as the state-of-the-art, Super Bowl-class, mega-stadium which would finally attract an NFL team to the city, however, since it's opening in 1993 it has so far failed in that primary mission.  The truth is San Antonio has the smallest viewing market among America's major cities, and so long as that remains true, no NFL franchise will permanently locate here...the economics simply will not work, so instead we amuse ourselves in the dome hosting special events, out-of-town games, and Monster Truck shows.  The Spurs basketball team used to play here, but the football-configured structure is simply too large for a basketball arena, and the Spurs were given a new AT&T Center arena a few years ago.  At any rate, the Alamodome's tensile support towers make a great pairing with the old modernist Tower of the Americas, though it can still be jokingly called the four-post bed or the birthday cake (yes, the four tower tops light up at night!).  Unlike the older historically preserved sections of downtown, the tower area and its base convertion center and Hemisfair Park is the product 60's scaleless World's Fair mega-planning, while the site of the Alamodome was formerly a steel works and rail yard.  It's scale makes for nice civic money shots, however, it is not the place to be on a hot sunny day as a pedestrian.  Incidently, the charmingly historic Sunset Station with its collection of steam engines was restored as an entertainment venue beside the Alamodome, and Amtrak's cross-country Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited lines (Los Angeles-Chicago-New Orleans) stop at the newer adjacent San Antonio Station, making for great railroad photographs set against the Alamodome backdrop.

I hope this was enjoyable, and ya'll come down to visit us, ya hear!

[jsieczka 19]

Well I live in Rochester, NY now and am from Buffalo, NY orginally so here are both of them. 

Downtown Rochester from the South

High Falls Downtown Rochester looking South

Buffalo, NY from Lake Erie

[pedronc 0]

@ Lisbon, Portugal

[JackStraw 19]

Believe it or not,  but Philadelphia is slated to have the third tallest building in the US by 2012.

You can read an article here.  http://phillyskyline.com/acc1.htm..

Here are some renderings of what can be expected.  

Both pictures are property of skyscraperpage.com and the people who took or made them.

Looks like Philly will finally have a world class skyline.  BTW, niether of pics included the current construction of three 500+ ft towers now going up.

[edcase2k4-thugangel1983 1]

nice dodklands photo jayo. very nice... trying to work out where that was taken from. i can see the Canary Riverside residential development at the very front, so it's probably south of the river in Rotherhithe. though it could be taken from the northside, looking across the bend in the river from Shadwell. great view either way! London Docklands is the only UK area i know of which even slightly resembles most US cities' skylines.

Romford doesn't really have a sky-line to show... the tallest buildings in the town centre are very few and far between.

[andre.xx 0]

well, my city - Porto (Portugal) - doesn't have any skyscraper or tall buildings. but is certainly gorgeous!

The standard photo of Porto - Ribeira.

The tallest thing in Porto: Clérigos Tower

The music house

The city that I live actually - Maia in suburbs of Porto - has one tall building:

The center of Maia

[balkair 6]

this is my city, Thessaloniki, capital of the REAL Macedonia, located in northern Greece. Unfortunately we dont have high buildings here [too many eartquackes?)

[balkair 6]

Thessaloniki and the suburbs (Panorama, Thermi [ancient macedonian city], Pylea and so on)

Thessaloniki: capital of the state of Central Macedonia, and the peripherarchy of Thessaloniki. Population: 1500000 (500000 in the metropolitan "central" area). Metro under construction. It has an International Airport. Major economic center in the Balkans (wealthiest city in the region of Macedonia [not the "country"]). Big port (almost everything that comes from the countries north of Greece pases through the port of Thessaloniki). The city was founded by the King of Macedonia, and he named it after the sister of Alexander the Great himself (whose name was Thessaloniki, meaning Victory against the Thessalians). In the Roman Empire Thessaloniki was a major city, the roman emperor built an Imperial palace in Thessaloniki, arches, temples, and other Roman buildings (which can still be found today). In the Byzantine Empire Thessaloniki was the Co-Capital, second largest city in the Byzantine Empire, after Constantinople. Even in Ottoman Turkey Thessaloniki was the second largest city in the Empire. [Athens was just a village back then - Thessaloniki was always a big city due to its very strategic position on the map of the Balkans] if u want to know anything else about my city, search it on wiki ^^

[balkair 6]

The White Tower of Thessaloniki - symbol of the city

The Roman Arch, known as Kamara in Greek (meaning Arch)

Christmas celebrations at the Aristotelous Square (aristotelous= [the square] of Aristotle)

the Ladadika, the old district of Thessaloniki. Only part of it remains today (most was burned in the Great Fire of Thessaloniki)

The annual military parade in celebration of OHI day (no day), when Greece won the war against Italy (WWII)

The Megaro Mousikis, the Concert Hall

one of the 5 entrances to Mediterranean Cosmos Mall

the Roman Forum and Theater ruins

ruins of the Roman Imperial Palace of Galerius (the buildings on the back are typical "we-dont-care-about-what-it-looks-like" 70's Greek urban architecture. thank god they dont make buildings like that anymore...)

Magic Park, the second largest amusement park in Greece.

the sidewalk at Nikis (victory) Avenue

The Old Promenade. scientist say that the sea level will rise by 6 meters. The metropolitan area of Thessaloniki is only 2 meters off the ground. You get the picture (picture taken from Makedonia Palace)

Makedonia (Macedonia) Palace Hotel, best hotel in the entire city, located by the New Promenade (extension of the old one, can be seen on the pictures above).

[Pampa_uy 10]

Punta del este |Uruguay| ,

spa busy throughout the summer by tourists

inhabitants: 8.890

capacity: 230.000<

[Follarch 326]

Unfortunately I live in a small american city where its highest building is three stories.

[GreyStreak 0]

I live in Fremont California, a suburbial type place in the San Francisco Bay Area. City of about 210,000

The Pacific Commons Sign is probably one of the tallest manmade things within cit limits

[Simtastico 0]

i've been looking through this thread now and I must say there are some really nice pictures.. you guys live in great cities! Seems like it is mostly bigger cities which makes me aware of how "small" my own country and hometown is compared.. but what the heck, I love it anyways!

[torontotransit 2]

Toronto again!!

[torontotransit 2]

And this is Belgrade, Serbia, my birthtown/whatever/idk how to call it

[forever ever x29 0]

http://www.worcesterresources.org/admin/text2HTML/UploadedIMages/Worcester_city1.jpg

^^ thats mah hometown skyline right therre, worcester all the wayyyy![ even tho its kind of a lame skyline](8

[sorry, i didn't know how to put th actual picture in th message, so i just put the link!](: