Seeing Pittsburgh's PPG Place at age 4.  Fell in love with Pittsburgh immediately and constantly dreamed about living there... that dream has not yet been fulfilled at age 24.

And bridge & girders (or something like that)

 

 

As a child, I wanted to be an architect (I know, weird when most little boys dreamed of being fireman or pro wrestlers).  My love of architecture led me to fall in love with skyscrapers.  Since scrapers are located in urban environments, I became very interested in the environment that surrounded me; thus, my continued interest in all things urban.

I remember playing with that Fisher Price set as a kid!!!!!  :D

 

When I was in grade school, my mom took me to down town Cincinnati a lot.  Many Saturdays we would go down town to eat lunch, do some shopping, and stop at the public library to return books and pick up more.  I even have a few memories of going to meet my dad during his lunch break during the week. 

 

When I had an internship down town during college, I realized how neat it was to be able to walk to shops during lunch.  I loved the fact I had several lunch options without needing a car.  When it was time to find a full-time job after college, one of my priorities was finding something downtown.

Growing up in a suburb of Akron, my father never liked malls and always took us shopping for anything in Downtown Akron and I always loved it.  I also realized around 4th grade that my Mom would loosen up and buy name brand merchandise if I got her to go to Downtown O'Neil's because she was nostalgic about shopping there as a little girl. 

 

I grew up just south of downtown Akron, so many of my childhood memories involve trips to O'Neil's and many of the other old storefronts that once lined Main St.  I loved going downtown for shopping with my mom as a kid, especially around the holidays.  There is just something magical about the holidays in the city.

I can't believe I've never played Sim City.

^The most recent SimCity is da bomb!!!  You get to deal with things such as:  commutes, lack/surplus of jobs/housing, education/health levels of citizens, city budget, regional growth/metropatterns, economies of scale, regional transportation......oh my it is a dream come true!!!!!!

 

Create your own thriving megopolis today!!!! :-D

 

Alright....I'm done with the SimCity comments for now.

Haha last night I was at my friend's house and we were playing some games which I rarely do but I asked if he had sim city and he had this really old wack version that looked like it was for windows 3.1. I picked out the body of water which was a lake, with the intention of building a downtown completely wrapped around it. Then he got on and added a power plant and put it next to the lake, I'm like dude wtf are you doing; that's lakefront property!! Put the powerplant in the ghetto next tp the social services...my condo goes there, not a powerplant :] It was a lot of fun; I think i'll buy a copy of the latest one.

I had Sim City once...it took over my life and I had to join a Sim City 12 step program

Legos, schmegos - it was all about the Micronaut Cities!!! http://www.micro-outpost.com/pictures/city/city.html

I had Sim City once...it took over my life and I had to join a Sim City 12 step program

 

I saw that Sim City 4 was on sale for $20 last weekend.  I really had to resist the urge to buy it (because I know all my time I'm supposed to spend on writting or working will go to that).

And yes I remember the original Sim City from back in the early 90s. (had to laugh, I had a city where I took out all the roads and had all rails instead, and I would continously get a message saying I had to build more roads! :-)

 

And yes I remember the original Sim City from back in the early 90s. (had to laugh, I had a city where I took out all the roads and had all rails instead, and I would continously get a message saying I had to build more roads!

 

Clearly you had the Michigan version.

Because I like History, Architecture, understanding societies and how they work, Beautiful Women, Money, and Real Estate.

^Somebody else has figured out the "beautiful women" angle? Dammit. Competition everywhere now...

Ah, SimCity.  I do enjoy cheating at that game! :-D

Anyone remember the "secret" codes you could use in the original SimCity to have crazy stuff happen? I don't remember the full range of catastrophes you could manage, but I do remember Godzilla rampaging across my beautiful city.

^Clearly you had the Tokyo version.

Actually, I had that same version...

 

I had some combination of housing and industry and such that threw off money every year, but was a highly non-ideal city that would sustain itself.  So I'd start that up and let it run over a weekend, just building up cash while the people got angrier and angrier.  Once I had hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, then I could build a utopian city that hemmoraged cash, but made be extremely popular...that was kinda fun...

 

I bought Sim City 4, but never play it.  It's for sale if anyone wants it.

I wanting to play right now, its been 3 or 4 years...

BUMP!

 

This seemed like a fun thread and a good way to get to know some of the newer members...

SimCity. 1970s Version.

 

Oh my God!  Good times; Good times.

 

Edited : Huh, it didn't take the pictures of the Fisher Price set?

Interesting topic. I really don't know? As a kid I studied and collected maps and sketched skylines (oh what a nerd). Frequent trips as a child to Pittsburgh and Cleveland may have something to do with it.

My uncle is a pilot for United and when I was little, he'd send me postcards from every city he was in at the time.  He worked his way up from commuter jets to trans-pacific 747 so I have cards from Des Moines, IA to Hong Kong.  It sort of stemmed from comparing those photos to Cleveland.  I was also drawn to airports since they're this tiny dynamic node in our vast world that connects everyone and are many times millions of peoples ONLY impression of a city. 

 

Come on CLE!!!

My first trip out of this country landed me in Barcelona in 1986.  I had never seen such a beautiful, funky lived-in city with kids all over and tall sycamores, and huge ocean ships all within a few minutes walk of each other.  What an eye-opener! 

I attribute it to three things:

1. Legos

2. Matchbox cars and playsets

3. Sidewalk chalk*

 

 

When I was very young, a friend and I would use sidewalk chalk to draw huge cities for our matchbox cars. We would usually fill an entire suburban driveway (2 cars wide, 3 deep) in a matter of hours. This eventually led to discovery of sim city and the destruction of my social life.

My father was a pipefitter who worked on jobs such as Society Center (Key Tower), Jacobs Field, Gund Arena (The Q), Tower City and many other projects. He would always take me and my brothers to his jobs while under construction. And being a kid who grew up working on farms in Ashtabula county this was awesome. This is what ultimately got me interested in construction and development and the big city. He was born in a house on E. 90th and St. Clair so i guess im somewhat going back to my roots. I now work in the construction industry as well as investment properties while residing in Lakewood.

When I was very young, a friend and I would use sidewalk chalk to draw huge cities for our matchbox cars. We would usually fill an entire suburban driveway (2 cars wide, 3 deep) in a matter of hours. This eventually led to discovery of sim city and the destruction of my social life.

 

Man...what would the world be like today if it weren't for SimCity?!?!  We would probably have even fewer urbanites than there already are!  Ahhhh SimCity...I dusted it off last night and was adding a new elevated rail line through my extremely dense city.  FYI, I have no highways in my SimCity region...just commuter rail, air travel and avenues for longer trips.  :-D

And yes I remember the original Sim City from back in the early 90s. (had to laugh, I had a city where I took out all the roads and had all rails instead, and I would continously get a message saying I had to build more roads!

 

Clearly you had the Michigan version.

 

I think it mighta been the Southwestern U.S. version.  I'll call it a toss up ^^

 

 

My start involved

1. roadway network drawings and easy memorization

2. a lot of walking

3. viewing other cities and nations, especially Europe and Asia

I was raised on an all-work-and-no-play farm and chafed at the isolation.

 

After I graduated from high school and got a factory job in the city, I soon moved there and found out it was a lot more interesting. That was in the fifties, when cities, even the smaller ones, were, in fact, much more interesting.

 

At some point I realized that that's where the available men were, too.

 

Now that I'm older and realize that just because men are available doesn't mean they're worth the trouble, I'm ready to go back to the farm and get away from the traffic noise.

Wow, before reading some of these post on here, I used to think my brother and I were had some screws lose growing up.  We used to create huge cities in our basement using anything we could find that was stackable.  We'd stack the boxes to make skyscrapers and apartment buildings, use some mega sized boxes for the convo center and an arena.  We used spare parts from race track sets to build highways.  I even went as for as to build a baseball stadium for our city using our erector set and some dominos (it was pretty cool!!).  It used to drive our dad nuts, he would come downstairs and half the basement would be taken over by our mega city.  Ah, the memories.

My interest started with simcity... then my sisters started going off to college visits and I was exposed to different architecture on every vacation... a month in Tucson, A week in historical Savannah, Chicago, Lake Forest, San Antonio, Daytona, Jacksonville, Charleston, Memphis... not to mention all those sweet Ohio towns that I go on to get to Ohio Northern where my oldest sister is a senior... Wilmington, Xenia, Yellowsprings, Urbana, Bellefountaine

I still need to get Sim City.

Sim City 4 is CRAZY. It's literally like running your own city. It's amazing how advanced they've made it now. Only play it if you have lots of free time on your hands. Because. It. Will. Consume. Your. Life.

 

I've always loved cities. Back in the day, I would ask my parents to take me downtown just so I could look at the buildings and be downtown. I loved seeing the new developments as they went up, knowing that the city was changing and growing. As a teen, I would clip articles from the PD about new developments coming up and keep them in a scrapbook. Good times.

Host it and send it to me! Pllleeeeasssseeeeee

I'm not sure how to do that.

 

It's like $30 or something. Not that expensive.

That's it? I can do 30. I'm still licking my wounds from ArcGIS, Sketchup, etc. Paying for software is obnoxious (when you know you can get it for free).

Well its really a culmination of things that all converged into an interest/obsession in cities.  First of all ever since I can remember I always had a fascination with maps.  Looking at them, drawing them, I remember looking back in my elementary school notebooks and seeing intersections, street grids and highway interchanges drawn all over the place.  I used to play Sim City A LOT.  I would build cities and really wished I lived there.  Also I am somewhat fascinated with street grids, complex intersections, etc., and I started noticing that interest in Ocean City, Maryland when I was younger. That kind of blossomed for a few years and now I catch myself taking pictures of JUST the intersections and forgetting about everything else.  I am also into trance and house music and I love cruising around bigger towns while listening to it.  It's somewhat enlightening.  So I guess if that made ANY sense at all to any of you thats how my interest got formed.  I think.. haha

That's it? I can do 30. I'm still licking my wounds from ArcGIS, Sketchup, etc. Paying for software is obnoxious (when you know you can get it for free).

 

I understand. Being a graphic design student is also expensive. But you might be able to write them off come tax time. Not Sim City. The other stuff.

I'm sure the price of Sim City 4 is way down now.  It's been out for like 4 years.  I'm seeing it for $19.99 on Amazon, so it's probably even cheaper at the store.  Be sure to get the Deluxe Edition, though.

What is this "SimCity Societies" jazz?!? Is that a spinoff from the original series or is it the latest? Gotta have the latest.

Aren't they due to come out with a newer version soon?    Not that SC4 isn't a kick ass waste of time!  More addictive than cigarettes!

There will be no Sim City 5.  Maxis, the developers of the game, are off of the project.

 

The new developers, Tilted Mill Entertainment are the ones putting together "SimCity Societies", which is more cartoonish and not really an urban simulation at all.  They have even said as much.

 

Sim City 4 is the best you'll do until someone puts out a new simulation.

I wonder if they hire architects and urban designers to do the modeling.

Well its really a culmination of things that all converged into an interest/obsession in cities.  First of all ever since I can remember I always had a fascination with maps.  Looking at them, drawing them, I remember looking back in my elementary school notebooks and seeing intersections, street grids and highway interchanges drawn all over the place.  I used to play Sim City A LOT.  I would build cities and really wished I lived there.

 

Same for me. Even before that it was a huge box of Legos. I would build cities with them, spend hours with my brothers, and recreate buildings I saw in bigger cities. A fascination with geography, geometry and scale would probably be my start.

Almost the same as everyone else:

Visiting downtown (CLE) and drawing or building what I saw on the kitchen floor, intrest in geography, density, Legos, SimCity2000.

But model railroading looks like it's absent from the thread.  I got my first set as a 5 year old, probably to eliminate me covering the entire kitchen in blocks, and spanning well into my teenage years.  Building all the models of train stations, factories, commercial buildings, etc., and just all the details that are involved in creating the gritty/industrial/transportation based urban scene.

A semester abroad in college also helped.

That's it? I can do 30. I'm still licking my wounds from ArcGIS, Sketchup, etc. Paying for software is obnoxious (when you know you can get it for free).

 

I understand. Being a graphic design student is also expensive. But you might be able to write them off come tax time. Not Sim City. The other stuff.

I love graphic design. I had to take some classes on it. Im curious, what all programs do you/did you have to learn? Do you guys have to learn Corel programs in addition to Adobe? I know Adobe is the industry standard.

But model railroading looks like it's absent from the thread.  I got my first set as a 5 year old, probably to eliminate me covering the entire kitchen in blocks, and spanning well into my teenage years.  Building all the models of train stations, factories, commercial buildings, etc., and just all the details that are involved in creating the gritty/industrial/transportation based urban scene.

 

Yeah I forgot to put that actually. My dad has a large collection of HO scale railroad stuff and I'd find myself looking in catalogues just for buildings, street accessories, cars, etc. more than the train's and track. Haha.. I guess I was more interested in that stuff.  Hopefully if my dad is up for it I want to make a small town, he can do the train stuff and I'll be in charge of the town..

 

Found on the internet: gritty details of New York City from about 1970.

 

 

 

 

The letter V: Color TV! Woo hoo!

College, I suppose. I grew up right next to Old Groveport, so I could walk or ride my bike to do most stuff (except school early on because I went to school in Victorian Village). When we moved to semi-rural Pickaway County when I was 12, I was in a pissy mood until I got a car at 16. When I started attending Shawnee State in Portsmouth I could once again walk or ride a bike to accomplish most tasks, I was ecstatic. The car was once again reserved for fun rather than drudgery. What really sealed the deal was and internship in D.C. that i did in 2004. I felt so free being able to go out and do stuff in the evenings without getting a two ton, 75-square-foot killing machine involved.