Nyhaven: Views From Within (Nuclear City - 5/8)

[Kergelen]

wow, I really love the last couple of updates!

The park in a hilly terrain, the river, the downtown, the university,....all looks very realistic

[threestooges]

With much fanfare, please welcome, for its fourth time, Nyhaven to OSITM!



Also, I find it amusing that, as an MD that is from "an engineer's point of view" this MD will be featured in this month (March, 2014. aka: 3-14, 3.14, pi).

Looking forward to the month ahead.
-Matt

[woodb3kmaster]

Vítor Dos Santos: Thank you, Vítor, and welcome to Nyhaven! I hope you'll like today's update too.
Guglielmo (Gugu3): Thanks, Guglielmo!
Kergelen: Thank you, my feathered friend! Coming from a master of realism like you, that's some high praise, so I really appreciate your compliments.
Matt (threestooges): Thanks for giving me a fourth opportunity to shine, Matt (and the whole OSITM committee, of course)! The irony isn't lost on me.



When I came to Nyhaven to play soccer, I had heard about the city's athletic facilities.



There was ColumbiAir Arena, one of the easiest venues to get to, due to its location in midtown and having its own subway station. As the new rookie in town, I got the chance to ask some of the Huskies basketball players what they thought of their home court. "I've never played anywhere like it," one of them told me. "The atmosphere during games is simply electric, and the neighborhood really adds to the arena's appeal with locals. It's easy to head over to Ebenezer Square after a game for a night on the town, so the stands are always packed."



The three venues at Sporthaven weren't as close to the excitement of central Nyhaven, but they still made for great places to play and watch games. Walking along the waterfront gave me unparalleled views of the skyline!



What really knocked my socks off, however, was the place where I would train and play for the Nyhaven Cruisers - at Puget Island Athletic Park. It was enormous, and with such good transportation connections, I could practically live anywhere in the metro area and be just minutes from work. No wonder the city chose this park as its Simlympic park back in 1980!



The park's Melkovitch Center for Athletic Development was full of young, up-and-coming athletes like me, so it made the perfect place to train. With three different venues, each with a different focus, I could get a full workout in one place.



Right across the street from there was Crown Insurance Park, where I would play all my home games as a midfielder for the Cruisers. The stadium had just reopened after a massive reconstruction program, and it had all the best amenities.



With my interest in playing for Lower Columbia's national soccer team, though, I couldn't help but visit Jean Le Conte Simlympic Stadium, where the kingdom's greatest athletes had won so many medals all those years ago.



I ended up renting an apartment in the park's former Olympic Village, which had been opened to the public as low-cost housing after the Games. It was close to work, and with a station on Saint Mark's Line close by, I could hop on a train and be anywhere I wanted to be in Nyhaven in just minutes.



When I came to Nyhaven, I was skeptical that it was what people claimed it was - the sports capital of Lower Columbia. They couldn't be more right!

[benedict]

Wow, those are some incredible mosaics.

And congratulations on being OSITM - I'm looking forward to seeing what you are going to share with us this month.

[vortext]

Congratulations on being OSITM! 

And holy  ! What an amazing sports complex, outstanding work.

Looking forward to what else you have in store for this month!!

[art128]

Fourth award, congrats!

Wonderful update. Really nice work on the sports equipment.

[Buzzit]

Spectacular !

[threestooges]

Lovely selections and wonderfully assembled cityscapes. I never realized there was so much variety in the sport arenas out there. I'd be tempted to ask for a list of what all you've used here, but that would be a massive feat to assemble, I'm sure. Is there a particular trick, ratio, or something that you use to get your downtown cores looking as realistic as you do? They're dense, but not in that skyscraper forest way, and it's a lovely result.
-Matt

[Kergelen]

Congrats on the OSITM 

Fantastic sport complex. I agree with Matt on how you manage the spaces on your cities and the good results you get.

[benedict]

Well done, you're number one on Ben's Top Ten this week.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else you have in store during March.

[woodb3kmaster]

Benedict (x2): Thank you, Ben! I'm surprised it took me this long to reach #1, but I'm glad it finally happened. I'll try not to go too long without updates of some sort, so as to maximize my time in OSITM.
Erik (vortext): Thank you, Erik! It's a real pleasure being honored a fourth time, and I appreciate your awed compliments.
Arthur (art128): Thanks, Arthur! I'm happy the committee chose me a fourth time.
Buzzit: Thank you!
Matt (threestooges): Thanks, Matt! Many of the arenas and stadiums I used in the big park are, unfortunately, no longer available, since they were among dmscopio's creations, and his website has vanished. I might see if the STEX moderators would allow me to upload the missing ones, just so that people can enjoy them again. As for my downtown cores, I think the main reason they're not very big right now is that this new version of Nyhaven is still relatively small (its region population is less than 1.4 million at the moment, while the population of Nyhaven 2.0's region was over 4.6 million when I stopped playing it), so there isn't very much commercial demand yet. I'm glad that the business districts meet with your approval, though, so I might just try to keep them relatively small.
Kergelen: Thank you, my friend!

Based in part on a comment elsewhere regarding the rail lines feeding into Nyhaven Central Station, and in part on my dissatisfaction with having a big hole in the downtown skyline, I decided to extend the rail tunnels all the way to the station, which required me to switch to a different station. After an exhaustive search and a helpful discussion with Fox, I ended up going with a transit-enabled version of the vanilla Grand Central Terminal landmark. After reconfiguring the area behind it, this is what the area east of Royal Square now looks like (click for full resolution):



To give you a better idea of how intercity rail fits into Nyhaven's transit setup, I've added it to the MetroRail map. Once I have more commuter-oriented rail lines in the region, I'll add those as well, but for now, here's an updated map (again, click for full resolution):



I'll post more pictures of the area soon, but first I need to expand the suburbs. I'm out of CO demand, so I need all the extra residents I can get to balance it out and get my commercial zones growing again.

[Gugu3]

I missed the last update
Nice one by the way!

[FrankU]

A beautiful Grand Cental station, but where do I park my car when I want to take the train? Or where do I catch the bus, the subway, or a taxi? And is there a place where I can kiss my mother goodbye when I bring her to the station by car?

In short: I do miss some of the terrible amount of infrastructure and traffic that is usually killing the beauty of the surroundings railway stations.

Or is it all underground?

[kelis]

I agree with the great comment of Frank and is true what He said, anyway I like so much that Square and all those monuments surrounding the station, so fantastic job as always.

[vortext]

Nice map! 

[woodb3kmaster]

Frank (FrankU): That's quite the but there. I recommend looking at the actual Grand Central Terminal for some idea as to why I used it the way I did; the real station is in a dense urban environment, so there isn't enough room for many of the facilities you mentioned on the surface. There's an elevated roadway encircling the station, however, which may (or may not) be used for at least some of the purposes you listed. For now, though, I'll just say that all those facilities for my station are underground; I've reconfigured the one-way roads on either side of it to accommodate your nitpicking attention to detail.
kelis: Thank you!
Erik (vortext): Thanks, Erik!

After doing a bit more work on the station area and the new business district to the east, I think I'm finally happy with how everything's arranged (aside from RCI zones, which are as fickle as ever). Here's an updated picture of the station:



The only real change I made is turning the one-way roads on either side of the station into ramps into an underground parking garage, taxi rank, and bus stop. The land that the OWRs previously occupied is now home to a pair of short pedestrian malls; removing the extra OWR intersections behind the station allowed me to add the lane reduction I wanted on Station Street as it approaches Royal Street.



The area east of Central Station is now home to another business district along East Center Street. Most of these skyscrapers are newer as a result of urban renewal in the 1970s and '80s. They also have improved highway access, now that the R-3 has new ramps connecting to Center Street (along with an added connection to Nybro Street).



The previous view of the East Center Street District faced west, toward Royal Square. This view faces east, with the university at the top.



Here's an updated view of Royal Square at night, with the updated station and its surroundings.



To put the redesigned station and new business district into context, here's a wider shot of downtown Nyhaven, facing north. Royal Square is roughly centered; the major business districts visible here are (clockwise from top) the Financial District, the East Center Street Corridor, the Market Street Corridor, and the West Center Street Corridor. Also visible at top are Old Town (north of the opera house), with its more chaotic streets and the Western Cross Church; and the Kilterby neighborhood, with its angled grid, north of East Center Street. We'll take a closer look at each of these two neighborhoods in due time...



Finally, here's a closer view of Royal Square at night. Click on it to view (and download, if you like) a full-size version that can be used as a 1920x1080 desktop background.

Please excuse the game grid that's visible in some of the above pictures. I was having trouble with an anti-malware tool that prevented me from turning the grid off when I took those pictures.

[kelis]

Excellent views of your city !! I like so much the buildings selection, congrats for your work my friend 

[Gugu3]

Nice pictures

[threestooges]

Love a good transit map, and I love a good update. Double layer highways like that are something you wouldn't likely see around here, thanks to our predisposition to earthquakes, but they've always struck me as an interesting engineering solution to crowded areas which require additional traffic capacity. Your systems must function quite well given the density of that overview picture. Would it be possible to see a picture of the same area (just after the night shot of the opera house) with the zone map on so we could see the transportation network around it?
-Matt

[woodb3kmaster]

Jonathan (kelis): Thank you, Jonathan!
Guglielmo (Gug3): Thanks, Guglielmo!
Matt (threestooges): Thank you, Matt! That point about double-deck highways is something I hadn't thought about before; I suppose it might also be an important concern in Nyhaven and other Lower Columbian coastal cities, due to them being in the Pacific Northwest. Of course, there are also examples of them in San Francisco, most notably the western span of the Bay Bridge, so maybe it's a more complicated issue than we think. As for your request of a zone-view picture, take a look at this:



I wanted to hide the UI so you could get a full view of the area, but the game had other ideas, unfortunately. Hopefully this will give you a better understanding of downtown Nyhaven's transportation setup.



To start Nyhaven's time as the cultural capital of the Alliance of Independent Nations, I'm dedicating a whole episode to the city's many ethnic neighborhoods. This isn't the first time I've done this - I first did it seven years ago, at the start of the Nyhaven 2.0 era - but it's only fitting to start the festivities with a celebration of the many cultures that have found a home in Nyhaven. I've already shown you two neighborhoods - Chinatown and Okatown - in previous episodes, but today, we're going on a tour of 13 more.



We begin our tour at Saint Mark's Square, the epicenter of Nyhaven's Mediterranean immigrant communities. Just north of the square is Greektown, with its Orthodox church and... did you hear that? It sounded like thunder. I hope everyone brought their umbrellas, because it looks like it's about to rain.



Sure enough, it's raining as our tour reaches New Cattala. The city's Cattalian population has called this area between the square and the University of Nyhaven home since the first immigrants arrived in the 1870s, after Italy invaded and annexed Cattala. Unemployment was high in Cattala at the time, so the prospects of work in Lower Columbia drew many Cattalians across the ocean.



Of course, times weren't good in mainland Italy either, so many Italians also immigrated to Lower Columbia. Those who came to Nyhaven settled down just a few blocks from New Cattala, closer to the Elochoman Slough. Tensions between the neighboring ethnic groups were high for many decades, and gang violence claimed many lives in both districts in the early 20th century. Fortunately, those tensions have subsided in the ensuing years.



The storm seems to be passing as we reach the Croisian Quarter, or Rive Croisienne as the locals call it. People have been migrating from Sainte-Croix to Lower Columbia since the country's first settlers arrived in the Northwest in the 1560s, but a new wave of Croisian immigrants established this little community on the embankment in the early 1900s.



As we reach Little Soviyya to the north of Hunters Island, the sun is just starting to break through the clouds. One of the three communities of Slavic immigrants near Burgess Square, this neighborhood lies just south of the square and west of the R-3 freeway.



On the other side of the square is New Moscow, with its ornate Russian Orthodox church.



A few blocks north of Yule Avenue, we come to Hiigara Town. The various crises and conflicts that have engulfed the Hiigaran United Confederacy and its member states over the years sent many Hiigarans in search of safer homes. Those who came to Nyhaven settled here, around Lower Columbia's only Kran'et temple.



Crossing onto Hunters Island, we come to Little Tokyo. Like most immigrants from East Asia, the Japanese chose to settle on Hunters Island, specifically, just south of East Center Street. Many of the business executives who work in the neighboring towers come here when they want a little taste of home.



Further south, close to midtown, is Nakamatown, where Nyhaven's Nakamese population is centered.



As we approach the southern tip of Hunters Island, we reach Koreatown. Located close to Cathlamet and the local campus of Royal University, Koreatown has become popular with both students and boaters.



Returning to the mainland across from uptown Nyhaven, we come to Spanish Town. Our tour is almost at its end...



Finally, we visit two neighboring ethnic districts. To the west is New Casablanca, which is home to Nyhaven's largest mosque, as well as most of its Moroccan-born residents. To the east, meanwhile, is Little Ascadylea, on the other side of Hazel Avenue.