AHC: Have Boston as the US current largest city

The location of the capital was a major point of discussion back then in a barely unified United States. What do you give the south in exchange for the capital being in New England?

Of course, the capital being in the heart of what became abolitionist territiry could lead to slavery tensions getting even worse, faster...

I like the idea of a timeline with Boston as the capital; I think it's a much nicer city than DC.

Of course, if Boston is the capital, there will be no significant city on the site of OTL's Washington, DC.

How about have the Northern colonies of the British Empire, like Nova Scotia and Quebec, secede from Great Britain instead of Georgia and the two Carolinas, like what happened in Glen's Dominion of Southern America TL. Then, instead of being way too far north, Boston is smack dab in the middle of the USA.
 
That brings up a good point. Keeping the five boroughs, or at least New York and Brooklyn, separate would go a significant ways toward making Boston the biggest city.

But even then, Brooklyn by itself has over 2.5 million people. Boston would have to annex a ton of adjacent land to catch up to it.
 
Skyscraper laws

Many cities, for various reasons, limited the maximum height of new construction. If New York has such a law for a while, it could hold back development significantly. In an era of machine politics, such a law could be passed purely to manipulate the value of certain lands--to the detriment of growth.
 
Have New England develop opposite of how they did and support merging of cities rather than umpteen small towns leading to Boston gradually annexing the surrounding metropolitan areas in the state and gradually drawing immigrants and/or established populations from New York.

Boston certainly could be a lot bigger both in area and population if it was as easy for the city to annex adjacent areas as it is for cities in many other parts of the country to do so. Problem is that changing the system of having all land incorporated into towns would need a POD going back to the 17th century.

The problem with railroads is that even by rail Boston is still farther from the trans-Appalachian interior than most other cities on the east coast. It's hard to get around that.
 
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