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AHC: Make a city in the Deep South larger than NYC with a POD after the Louisiana Purchase

I think the best bet is The War of 1812 goes slightly differently and the proposed Erie Canal is considered too vulnerable - maybe the British acquire Buffalo. So instead, the Illinois and Michigan Canal is built, so all the trade that historically went to NYC now goes down the Mississippi to New Orleans. This leads to much less growth for NYC and much more for New Orleans.

Eventually rail lines will be built and the relationship with the British improved (although if they've taken Buffalo that will be more difficult) and routes to NYC will be established, but that gives New Orleans 40 years of supremacy. In that time physical and financial infrastructure would have been established in New Orleans, and many trade, banking, and industrial HQs will be located there and so New Orleans would remain the chief US port. Its presence would retard the development of Houton and maybe even Tampa.

New Orleans is somewhat limited by geography, but if it were a larger trade center large engineering works would be possible. The city would expand mostly westward and to an extend south of the river, and incorporate adjacent cities like Metarie and Gretna as boroughs. No Eerie Canal is also good news for Quebec. Industrial Midwest states like Michigan would remain more agricultural and industry would tend to develop where it can take advantage of the Mississippi.

I can't imagine any other city having the potential to surpass NYC - Altlanta is big, but there's nothing that would really make it so big that it eclipses NYC. And no city that can be the entrepot for such a gigantic area like the Mississippi basin. The only problem with the scenario is that the US's trade is chiefly with Europe and New Orleans is much further away than NYC (NYC-Liverpool is 3,471 nm vs NO-liverpool 5,473 nm).

On the other hand, NO can take slightly better advantage of an trans-oceanic canal (with Panama, SF and NYC are 6,210 nm and NO-SF 5,777), and Nicaragua would get a boost as the preferred location.
 
New Orleans is limited by geography. If the flow of the river was allowed to change and go towards the Atchafalaya River, Lafayette might be a suitable substitute which would be able to grow due to being in higher ground than surrounding areas (somewhat akin to how Memphis and Vicksburg are on bluffs along the Mississippi).

The basin would probably run deeper and wider than OTL due to the extra water running through.
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I mean frankly if you count it as Southern and not Midwestern, STL is the obvious candidate. Otherwise, one obvious possibility is for the default trade entrepot to not be at present-day New Orleans at all (maybe we butterfly a natural event that makes the instability of the delta more obvious, or there's concerns with the port facilities, or whatever) and the main entrepot/transshipment point is say by Natchez or Ft. Adams?
 
Roger II said:
I mean frankly if you count it as Southern and not Midwestern, STL is the obvious candidate. Otherwise, one obvious possibility is for the default trade entrepot to not be at present-day New Orleans at all (maybe we butterfly a natural event that makes the instability of the delta more obvious, or there's concerns with the port facilities, or whatever) and the main entrepot/transshipment point is say by Natchez or Ft. Adams?
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1. My dad is very insulted that you called him a Southerner.
2. Even if he was, the challenge stipulates the Deep South, not just the South.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
New Orleans is limited by geography. If the flow of the river was allowed to change and go towards the Atchafalaya River, Lafayette might be a suitable substitute which would be able to grow due to being in higher ground than surrounding areas (somewhat akin to how Memphis and Vicksburg are on bluffs along the Mississippi).

The basin would probably run deeper and wider than OTL due to the extra water running through.
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Is that doable at the beginning of the 19th c? I think that's a great solution, but is it practicable given existing resources and logistics, and would New Orleans agree to it? The city had been there 100 years by then.

9-11 took out so much infrastructure to a large extent because all of lower Manhattan is constantly flooding and the power was cut to the pumps. That flooded the Verizon Central Station and killed all the phones. The point being non-autocracies generally don't move cities - they spend a huge amount of resources to make the current site work. New Orleans is a terrible site for a major city - but you could say that about lots of major cities - NYC would have been better off being established in Brooklyn, Dacca floods all the time, Venice, etc. Couldn't you keep building west then north and have a Baton Rouge-New Orleans metro area?

San Franciso is a lovely site, but it should have been put where Oakland is, and it should definitely have moved there or annexed it once the rail line was completed (the weather is also much better). To solve the problem when space ran out, they planned to annex most of the Bay Area. It was too late by that point, and as the most expensive scheme possible was chosen for SF's water supply, nobody was interested in increased taxes to foot the huge bill (that was also one of the drivers for the scheme).

On the other hand, that supports your position to an extent - SF failed to maintain it's domination of the Pacific because it had nowhere to grow - but New Orleans can, a bit awkwardly, and is on the Mississippi, whereas SF can be (and was) bypassed with Oakland as the main terminus of the rail line. Hydraulic mining silted up rivers and led to Sacramento being almost entirely underwater - the basements of old buildings are actually former ground floors. But they didn't even move THAT city - instead there's a massive levy system which is very expensive to maintain.
 
Maybe have a Northern secession of some sorts, which destroys much of the Northern US, and leaves the Mississippi basin, as the main hub for trade and shit like that.
 
Ricardolindo said:
North Florida and East Texas are often included. I would also argue the Arkansas Delta is Deep South.
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Born in South Arkansas here, I'd argue that pretty much all of the state not in the Ouachitas, Ozarks, or Little Rock area is the Deep South, but yeah. You could also make the argument that Memphis could be considered "Deep South" but that's pushing it. I might make a map of what I'd personally consider the Deep South later TBH just for the hell of it.
 
SpudNutimus said:
Born in South Arkansas here, I'd argue that pretty much all of the state not in the Ouachitas, Ozarks, or Little Rock area is the Deep South, but yeah. You could also make the argument that Memphis could be considered "Deep South" but that's pushing it. I might make a map of what I'd personally consider the Deep South later TBH just for the hell of it.
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I also thought of mentioning South Arkansas and even Arkansas, as a whole, but decided not to. One of the arguments against Arkansas being Deep South is that it never had as many blacks as the states always considered Deep South.
 
New York is never federated into one city, and instead remains a close-knit group of five cities. The resulting difficulty of coordinating infrastructure and services means that all five cities are slightly smaller; it also means that there is more investment in the Houston Ship Channel, boosting Houston's population past that of Brooklyn. (Normally I wouldn't consider Houston Deep Southern, but whatever, we can say that a lot of that growth comes from Cajuns moving west after the failure of Old River Control or something. It's not as though it has fewer Southern characteristics than Atlanta anyway, when you think about it, it's just very visibly Its Own Thing, and nobody says New Orleans isn't Southern for that.)
 
If New York City underwent a demographic collapse similar to that seen in other major cities it would be much smaller. Perhaps the city isn't able to turn itself around and the decline that started in the 1970s starts to snowball?
 
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