Dear fellows, I have recently been contemplating what a city named ‘New Amsterdam’ which was NOT a copy-past of New York City might look on a map: my key inspiration was to make this a city based on what NYC might look like as an East Coast metropolis, not THE Metropolis of the United States.
Having looked at the list of Most Populous US cities, I noted that there were a number of historic & interesting US cities on the Atlantic Seaboard in the 600,000-900,000 residents range: looking up the population of New York City over time, the last point at which the cities’ population was so small is at some point between 1860 and 1870.
However, this was quite so time ago, so I’m not quite sure how to update the geography of a 19th century city to suit a 21st century burg: I would like to distinguish any map of New Amsterdam from it’s original to a degree sufficient to make it seem a ‘little sister’ to NYC and to make that smaller size seem plausible in context.
May I please ask for suggestions on how I might accomplish one or more of these ambitions? (For the record, this city is meant to be a City of Adventure for a superhero setting, so there’s a certain amount of room to ignore national geography, so long as the local geography of the city itself looks convincing).