Fun / Travel /

American Towns/Cities


Just visiting, or looking to move? Many forward-thinking towns and cities have their own web pages, and some towns exist only in cyberspace. Among other things, we found out what's happening in Cook, Nebraska, and learned how to avoid street scams in New York City.

The Best

Austin City Limits claims to be the "Home of Everything that's Cool in Austin, Texas." Believe the hype. This is a proud, brash site with loads of information on "the greatest town in Texas." If you shave any gaps in your knowledge of armadillos, for instance, and how those creatures relate to Austin, this site can help. There's thorough information about area colleges, music, entertainment, organizations, government. . .you name it, this site's got it. What other web site has a guide to finding the best tamales in town?

The Paperless Guide to New York City is a great example of how an on-line guide can be as useful as a printed guide. It's a great guide for travelers, with good, detailed information on how to stay safe on the streets and avoid common scams designed to separate you from your money. It's organized into How (basic information), Wow (hotels, restaurants, shopping, and sight-seeing) and Now (current events).

The Rest

Virtual Las Vegas is the best of the on-line guides to the glitz, glamour, and sleaze that is Las Vegas. These pages incorporate information from New Times, Las Vegas's alternative newsweekly. You'll feel like a Vegas insider once you've browsed through here. Whether you want information on the old-fashioned gambler's Vegas or the 90's family Vegas, you'll find it here. There are quick-and-dirty rules to all the casino games and information on where to stay, what to do (besides gamble), and how to get around, and the all-important how much to tip, which locals call "toking." Check this site out before you jet-set into town.

The Washington, D.C. Visitors' Guide is a number of useful Web links for those planning a trip to Washington, D.C. There are links both for visitors and for folks planning on moving to D.C. Sports, entertainment, accommodations, weather, museums, day trips, and pointers to virtual tours are all there. This site is very thorough: It covers all the interesting government sites, museums, and memorials available. Quite admirable considering this is someone's personal home page.

Los Gatos, California, USA has a strong Web presence that's useful for both visitors and locals. You'll need a browser that supports forms to get the most out of this site. There's information from local businesses, events calendars, maps, current weather, and even forms to fill out to report faulty traffic signals. The Chamber of Commerce, Police Department, and Public Library are all represented. This site is an example for other towns of any size to follow.

City.Net is the comprehensive guide to communities around the world. City.Net holds information on government, culture, language, travel, and entertainment for a mind-boggling number of cities and towns. You can scroll through it alphabetically or drill down hierarchically by region. Click to travel to a random destination, and you may end up in Tonga; Motala, Sweden; Summit, Colorado; or one of hundreds of other interesting places.

For a town one square mile in size, Hoboken offers a plethora of activities that are all just a tunnel away from New York City. HobokenX tries to list the hot spots in a magazine-style format. You'll find great features such as an excerpt of a novel recently published by Brooke Stevens, a Hoboken writer, and a testimonial on the advantages of moving to Hoboken.

USA CityLink, touted as the Internet's most comprehensive listing of Web pages featuring U.S. states and cities, is a good backup if you can't find the city you're looking for at City.Net. You'll find touring information (what to see, what to do, where to stay, where to eat, and where to shop) as well as links to other sites.

The U.S. Gazetteer is a searchable gateway to the storehouse of maps at Xerox. Enter a town or city by name, and you'll get the longitude and latitude, population, and zip codes. Click on the location to retrieve more detailed maps from Xerox. This site also hosts a map-based front-end to City.Net and other geographical information tools.

Welcome to Cook, Nebraska USA shows you a small town in southeastern Nebraska, voted Best Small Town in America by the National Association of Towns and Townships. Cook's Web presence isn't spectacular, but it's impressive for a town of its size and contains a wealth of raw data. Kudos for discreet use of images of maps and of Cook's covered bridge.

The City of Los Angeles home page, provided by the Department of Information Services of L.A., is for people wanting no-frills insight into what's going on in L.A. city management.

About Blacksburg will tell you all about a medium-sized town in Virginia, the home of Virginia Tech. Blacksburg claims to provide small-town living combined with big city culture and high-tech industry. This site has data on weather and public transit as well as a large gopher site with information on local businesses, restaurants, hotels, and points of interest.

The Virtual Town City Limits is actually a Web index in disguise. Click to go to Binary Valley, Cinema Paradiso, Matrix Mall, and Madame Sarga's House of Fortune. The metaphor breaks down once you click down far enough: The Virtual Town Times, for example, is actually a collection of links to other news sources elsewhere.

Gastown is a much niftier use of the town metaphor than Downtown Anywhere, although it, too, is an ad for Web space provided by XMission. An interesting little cybervillage.

Chicago PsyberView is supposed to be the Internet guide to art and music in Chicago. In reality, it's an example of garish use of Netscape extensions.

The Home Page for Columbia South Carolina was slow and had little information when we reviewed it.

Downtown Anywhere's Front Street sounds like a city in cyberspace, but it's just an ad to lure businesses onto this Web site.

by Richard Butner

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995