Why is DC lumped in with Baltimore?

[lukeinva]

Greetings... I just found these boards and have been perusing all the great tips and recommendations. Question tho, DC is a completely separate from Baltimore... why are these two cities lumped together? It's like combining NY and Philly. Doesn't make sense...

[indcgirl]

Another technical issue with the search function: if you type "Baltimore" along with your topic to try to get Baltimore-specific info, it includes both the board title (e.g., on this board "SITE TALK" and the "<<Back to..." link at the bottom in the crawl, so you still get all the DC posts.

[indcgirl]

I'm a DC girl marrying into Baltimore, so I spend a lot of time in both cities and searching for restaurants in both. Because DC posts dominate, it makes it very, very difficult to fish out and isolate the relevant Baltimore posts. Very, very annoying. Ideally, it would be useful to be able to tag the posts with one or the other city.

[jes]

If you seperated DC and Baltimore where would you put Annapolis, Columbia, Laurel, etc.?

[lukeinva]

Columbia and Laurel would be part of Baltimore just as Vienna and Mclean are a part of DC. Annapolis would be separate, of course.

[lmoy]

As a transplant from Bethesda to NYC, I find it strange that while DC and Baltimore are lumped together, Manhattan and "Outer Boroughs" are separate boards. There are times when I wish I could look at a DC board without viewing threads about Baltimore restaurants (of which I know next to nothing); then again, there are times when I wish I could mention a Brooklyn store in a Manhattan thread without being reprimanded. It seems there's just no easy solution...

I think the best thing would be if you could choose a specific category for your post (i.e. "NYC Metro" for something relating to the City as a whole or "NYC Metro >> Brooklyn" for something specific to that borough), but view all posts in the larger category if you so choose (i.e. you would have the option to either look at all posts in "NYC Metro", which would include posts pertaining to all boroughs, or you could narrow your view down to "NYC Metro >> Brooklyn" if you wanted to). The same sort of category breakdowns could exist for DC/Baltimore -- for example "DC/Baltimore >> DC" and "DC/Baltimore >> Baltimore" and "DC/Baltimore >> Northern Virginia" could be some of the categories.

Unfortunately, making this sort of change to the boards would be pretty tough... until then I think we'll just have to cope with sometimes feeling board categories are too specific, or not specific enough.

Thanks for all your work, Chowhound Team!

[ktmoomau]

This will probably get moved to the site talk board, there are many threads on this exact subject discussed in length there if you search.

[HilkaryIC]

Why is vegas lumped with the rest of the southwest? There are things that we shall never understand. Also I agree that you can drive to each city from the other, so it works. Its not like Philly is lumped up with us too.

[takajin]

I rather like that Baltimore and DC are combined from the perspective that I read/learn more about places in Baltimore than I would otherwise. And it is close enough that I would drive up there on some random Saturday for dinner (and people do commute between DC and Baltimore). But, yes, sometimes it can seem rather disjointed as if we should be two separate boards.

And I don't even bother with the midwest boards...but more power to them for sticking it out.

[Dmnkly]

The Midwest feels your pain :-)