Which cities in North America still have very vibrant downtowns?

Including good shopping, culture, restaurants, safe to walk around? A downtown in 2007 as important as downtown was in the 1950's before the malls and urban decay...

Vancouver is small (side to side in 30 minutes) but it qualifies. Panhandling is rampant but the streets are relatively safe. The scenery is fantastic and the weather is pretty good half the year.

I thought Chicago met those descriptions although I was only there for about a week. To me the town seemed smaller than it was made out to be, seemed relatively safe at night in the downtown areas, great shopping, historic areas and very diverse, close to museums and the waterfront, close to sporting events and clubbing, musically very diverse as well, and lots of good restaurants.

SF
NYC
Boston

Originally Posted by TheHoff

Click to expand...

Vancouver is small (side to side in 30 minutes) but it qualifies. Panhandling is rampant but the streets are relatively safe. The scenery is fantastic and the weather is pretty good half the year.

Is there a scary part where all the junkies congregate? I read a fairly terrifying description somewhere, but maybe it is not in the downtown area....

Mexico City is very vibrant.

Montreal
San Antonio
Indianapolis

Silver Spring, Maryland

Originally Posted by dkzzzz

Click to expand...

Mexico City is very vibrant.
Mex City's Centro Historico was abandoned by the bourgeois for about half a century until the last decade, when efforts of the gov't and Carlos Slim have cleaned up and revitalized some parts of it. Minneapolis is still vibrant, due to the Skyway system and some other good decisions back in the 60s and 70s.

I remember liking portland, oregon's city center. Dunno if I was ever really in the downest of downtown though.

Originally Posted by Jodum5

Click to expand...

Silver Spring, Maryland

Bethesda, MD

Originally Posted by Fabienne

Click to expand...

San Antonio

Downtown San Antonio is really small, like you-could-walk-from-an-end-to-another-in-15-minutes small. If you could look past that, then I guess it qualifies. Austin is bigger, and a bit better IMHO.

Originally Posted by romafan

Click to expand...

Is there a scary part where all the junkies congregate? I read a fairly terrifying description somewhere, but maybe it is not in the downtown area....
Yes, there is a strip of hell a few miles long stuck right in the middle of the city called the Downtown East Side. It is unfortunate that the mild weather compared to the rest of the country makes this the prime city to live as a junkie or panhandler, but no one has come up with a solution. It will be interesting to see how they make it go away for the Olympics in 2010... the area is adjacent to the most affluent shopping -- you can be shopping at Chanel or LV one minute and in the middle of meth/crackville the next. The actual scariness of it though can be debated. It is a disgusting area but the level of gun violence and violence overall seems lower than the worst areas of the States. Vancouver really is lovely, though!

Originally Posted by Joel_Cairo

Click to expand...

I remember liking portland, oregon's city center. Dunno if I was ever really in the downest of downtown though.
I lived in Portland for a while; it wants to be a downtown but it isn't really. It is good for what it is but too small to be interesting for long.

Originally Posted by mack11211

Click to expand...

Minneapolis is still vibrant, due to the Skyway system and some other good decisions back in the 60s and 70s.

Maybe I went there at a bad time, but I stayed in Minneapolis for a weekend downtown last year, and it was completely dead.

As I recall, St. Paul's downtown is actually nicer than Minne's. Philly has a decent dowtown. Littler cities like Charleston and Savannah are nice too, and quite walkable.