Your challenge is simple: Have a sizable American city be as prominently known for its canal network as Venice.
Sea Level rises by ten feet, New York is Venice.
I'm not sure how to accomplish this exactly, but I feel like New Orleans or something in that general area might be a good candidate under the right circumstances.
New Orleans, or somewhere similar, is a good shout.
The issue is that you don't just need canals. It's a fact that's been repeated so often that it's now a joke, but Birmingham (the original, not Alabama) has more miles of canal than Venice. The difference is that most people move about Birmingham by road. The canals have to be integral, rather than just there.
Drift less mentioned a key point: before railroads.
This fictitious "American Venice" needs to fixate on its canal system before another transportation mode (e.g. railroads). It also helps if the city is so far offshore that boats are the only practical access.
It also helps if the mainland is routinely ravaged by hostile armies. That forces a trading city to build on a series of islands that is too far offshore to be attacked by cavalry or drive engines (e.g. early artillery).
So which American cities are built on swampy estuaries of major rivers?
Boston was built on a peninsula only connected to the mainland by a very narrow isthmus, at the mouth of the Charles River, so from the geographical standpoint it could work. Not sure why they'd go about digging canals there, though.
names don't mean much, that's whyI've never been to southern California, so I assume this is a dumb question. But why isn't Venice Beach a perfect fit here?
That's a pity. If that precludes New Orleans, then the two ideas quoted below might be good shouts.The Mississippi can rise or fall several feet (as much or more than tidal levels) - it's just that it's so hard to predict, unlike tidal changes.
You don't actually need to dig canals to get Boston to the point. A very large part of the land of Boston is actually infill. So, you would need to convince the Bostonians to include canals into their landfill projects.
I think there were a couple of (abortive?) attempts in Florida to do something like that, as an affectation to draw tourists and residents. Have something like that happen in a city that manages to become fairly large-not necessarily as large as, say, Jacksonville or Miami-and you could have a pretty good sized canal system develop along with it.
Anyone who's taken the boat tour of Chicago would see the potential of a canal system. An added benefit is the lack of tides, though this eliminates the beneficial flushing out of sewage.Your challenge is simple: Have a sizable American city be as prominently known for its canal network as Venice.