What's the most walkable small city you've visited in the United States?

Minneapolis.

My mother lives in Naples, FL and it’s beautiful and quite walkable.

Frisco

Just being proactive here based on other city and town threads, but OP you may want to provide what your definition of small city might be and give some parameters to that.

Frisco, Texas R3?

I really loved the few years that I spent in Long Beach, California and would spend better parts of weekends walking everywhere. It’s got the perfect year round temperature and very little precipitation. There are beach paths both on top of the cliff as well as on the beach. There’s a very urban downtown and a huge waterfront to explore including piers and cruise ship landings out into the water. There are all these different neighborhoods, many with their own identity and architectural styles. It’s very level with very few hills unless you go to Signal Hill, which is an enclave. There are plenty of bars, restaurants, coffee shops and stores scattered throughout that make for good stop overs and interruptions on a walk. The o ly thing missing were prominently placed grocery stores that you could do shopping without a car, which I did have in Redondo Beach.

Providence, RI, is a great mix of flat and hilly, business and residential and has an architectural stock that cities exponentially larger (Hi Toronto!) would kill for.

Portland, ME, is also good.

Portsmouth, NH, is a jewel box of 18th century mannerist architecture.

Albany, NY, gets a lot of flack, but it has a downtown crammed with eccentric gems and great rowhouses, as does its neighbor Troy.

Annapolis, MD.

New Jersey has an abundance of small walkable towns, generally centered around a train station that offers access to NY. Maplewood, Montclair, South Orange, Cranford, Metuchen etc. The type of walkable suburban areas that you those cheesy Hallmark movies.

Boston, Cambridge area

Is a city walkable if it gets a decent amount of snow?

We have now called San Francisco, Minneapolis and Boston "small cities"

Why not, R10? Can't people walk in snow and do you think that cities that get snow have snow 12 months of the year?

R11 They are for me - I live in a city with over 5 million population.

I nominate Boston.

Atlantic City, NJ--a nice stroll along the boardwalk. Just kick the homeless people out of the way and don't engage with the Asian masseurs, you'll be fine. Also it has all the pizza and funnel cakes a fat DL whore can eat!

Boston is the heart of 10th largest metro area in America r13. It is in no way a small city.

1) Hood River and (tied) Astoria, Oregon 2) Brattleboro, Vermont 3) New Orleans 4) What r7 said, except I haven't been to Albany or Providence yet 5) Quebec City -- so sooory -- that's not in the US

San Francisco is only 7x7. It's a small city relatively. It's somewhat walkable but there are some very steep hills as well. The distances might be short but the hills can be brutal.

R15 Well based on your criteria the city that I live in has population of 8.5 million.

Relax, R15 - nobody said that you gave a tiny peepee !

^^^ “have”, obvs. Still stands re your tiny little penis!

New York City

Bravo, R20!

This thread was probably just an excuse for a pun, but it does open the question of what "walkable" and "small" mean to most people. I used to love walking around Seattle - the hills and bridges and water make for great views (and exercise), and a lot of the streets/neighborhoods are just labyrinthine enough. Also plenty of parks and coffee shops and book stores to stop at. The rain usually wasn't so heavy that a light coat with a hood didn't suffice.

The worst places to walk are probably sprawling, samey burbs that were designed for cars, but honestly, you can find good places to walk almost anywhere if you really want to.

Saratoga Springs, NY

Sedona, Arizona

At age 60 and with a spine injury and recently no ability to drive, my hometown of San Francisco is no longer walkable. Our hills and how they carve out unique neighborhoods is what makes this city interesting. Actually, no city is walkable to me anymore. But these hills are brutal. I live four short but steep blocks up the hill from a great shopping area and transit center. Used to run down the hill to the liquor store and sprint back up in 7 minutes when in my 20's-40's. Now I can walk down it in 15, shop for 20, then wait 20-30 minutes for a one minute bus ride to take me back up the hill. Going to try surgery, but if that doesn't work, a wheel chair could not handle the sidewalks here. Thus, looking for a "walkable" (densely populated) small city that's relatively level for retirement. Any suggestions? It must be in a Blue state.

Burlington VT

Ojai.

I spent a few days in Boston a few years ago, and I found it quite easy to walk to things. It took me a couple of days to figure that out. We spent the first couple days getting cabs and public transportation before we realized we could easily walk to most places.

r2, Any city in Florida is walkable - during the months of December through March. November through April if the walker is somewhat tolerant of heat. May through October would be like the death march of Bataan anywhere in Florida. Blazing sun, consistently high temperatures, unbelievable humidity, random torrential thunderstorms. No thank you. St. Augustine, Tallahassee, and Gainesville have some age to them, so they have some historic interest. March is probably the best month, because of cool temperatures and spring flowers (camellias, dogwoods, azaleas). The historic part of Savannah makes a nice walk.

The best kind of urban walking for me involves interesting neighborhoods with picturesque architecture and nice landscaping. Densely populated neighborhoods are more interesting than spread out suburban-style neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods in Palm Springs are nicely walkable (winter only, of course) - for instance the neighborhood around Ruth Hardy Park. Seattle Capitol Hill around Volunteer Park makes for some nice walks, along Alki (the waterfront) in West Seattle, Queen Anne Hill. Portland west hills area is a nice walk. Santa Fe downtown is walkable, but the altitude might cause problems for some people. There are lots of nice walkable small to medium sized cities and towns in New England. Almost all have some sort of village Greens marking the original towns with the oldest architecture surrounding them and picturesque old churches around the greens. I think Provincetown is quite walkable. Almost anywhere in the East, South, or Midwest, your walks have to be timed to the seasons, to avoid bad weather or mosquitoes and other bugs.

Boise is small, walkable, has a gay nightlife and everyone is really friendly. Being from a big city, I don't know if I could live there, but it's so clean and the people are beyond friendly.

Could Madison, Wisconsin qualify? Never been but intrigued.

Ferndale, Royal Oak and Birmingham, Michigan

Providence. Rhode Island!

Key West

Carmel-By-The-Sea.

Pensacola, FL

Santa Barbara

I was visiting SF recently and wondered, not for the first time, why people saw that crazy topography and thought “yup, good place for a town.”

La Jolla

Many college towns are very walkable.

New Orleans- flat and everything seems to run off Canal Street.

Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Between the world wars suburbs (just about every medium to large city has them even sprawlburgs like Atlanta). Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights & Lakewood in Cleveland. Evanston and Oak Park near Chicago. Atlanta has Decatur, as well as neighborhoods developed as suburbs like Inman Park and Candler Park, with Little Five Points in between them.

College towns are obvious examples, except many of them aren't very interesting and their cores often have been eclipsed by suburban sprawl. Bloomington, IN is "walkable" but the downtown struggles decades after the mall went in. Ann Arbor is more interesting. When I lived in Bloomington, someone said Ann Arbor was too urban. It was all I could do to laugh at them---they lived in some carbound part of Bloomington, of course. Champaign-Urbana is also not very interesting.

r38, keep in mind that SF was the first major city in the new US west, a port city built overnight with minimal planning during the Gold Rush when there were no cars, trains, or bridges. Commerce was centered around the chaotic shipyards. Ever heard of the San Francisco Fourty Niners? All the men had cute butts and made passes at each other. It was paradise! Then it was rebuilt overnight again after much of it burned or fell down after the 1906 earthquake. It ONLY makes sense from that perspective.

My little house with no garage was built on a steep hill (which happens to be solid bedrock -- I do not feel quakes under 6.0) in the 1880's out in a part of town that was cattle ranch and dairy farms. Land became scarce as the City grew and rail lines began to spread out from Market St. Logistically, it was more cost effective to build dense housing -- even on the hills -- after the land was subdivided on a flat map and drawn up into a grid of streets. I've met people from the Midwest who say that the hills should have been "contour plowed". And that started to happen with the arrival of the automobile in undeveloped neighborhoods until every square inch was built.

[quote]San Francisco Fourty Niners?

You're a fourth-generation San Franciscan and you can't spell Forty-Niners? For shame.

New Orleans is only walkable if you never intend to leave the French Quarter/CBD.

r45, I rely too much on spellcheck these days and usually post here only when stoned.

R44 One side of my family goes way back in SF history also ... to around 1870, anyway. Italian immigrants, and they owned farms in the southern part of the city (Visitacion Valley). My dad was born there in 1922. I was going through some boxes the other day and found his high school yearbook (Balboa, class of '39.)