I've been thinking about this lately, and I'm sure this has to be on the site somewhere, but I haven't been able to locate anything or come up with a way to rank the sizes of downtowns. Thus, I'm taking a guess based on my visits to some and my knowledge of other cities.

 

Large to small:

 

Cleveland

Cincinnati

Columbus

Akron

Toledo

Dayton

Youngstown (never been there)

Canton

Springfield

Hamilton

Lima

Middletown

Lorain (again, never been)

 

(I know I've left some smaller ones out and thats because of I haven't been to any of them)

 

I'm considering heights, density, total blocks, and feel. So, let the discussion begin!

Well, size and "feel" are two different ideas.

 

In terms of "feel" though:

 

Cleveland

Cincinnati

Columbus

Dayton

Toledo

Akron

Youngstown

Canton

Springfield

Hamilton

Lima

Mansfield

Elyria

Lorain

Middletown

Sandusky

 

Is my list.

Census tract downtown? Ward Downtowns? City's official? What people think? They are all different. In cleveland, I Consider downtown everything hemmed in by the innerbelt and the river. But the city has it a bit smaller than that, some of that is central and payne neighborhood

Yeah, I've been kind of fuzzy on what to base it on. I guess feel is a good way to go, but I wouldn't mind having some statistical list also.

It would be interesting to see people draw on a map what they think "downtown" is.

Office square footage+Retail square footage+Industrial square footage+Hotel units+residential units (or total building square footage)=mass of downtown?

 

Mass of downtown/aerial extent of downtown=density of downtown?

Yep, lets stick with feel.

Well, I do know this:

 

Downtown Cincinnati is officially 0.8 sq miles.

Downtown Cleveland is 2.8 sq miles.

Downtown Columbus is 2.4 sq miles.

Downtown Dayton is 1.0 sq miles.