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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I feel like there should be a CGP Grey video about this. He has one about London vs the City of London and the weird US/Canada border.

Someone also tried to tell me Norwood, Ohio is the largest city within a city (an enclave city), but I can't find a source on that anywhere.

View on HN

https://youtu.be/oE93J33SfHY

Really great video by Tom Scott about Baarle Hertog

The YouTube channel WonderWhy has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtLxZiiuaXs) on complex international borders wrt enclaves and exclaves.

Theres also this place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island which is disputed by Canada and Denmark. Apparently the Danes leave a bottle of schnapps for the Canadians and the Canadians leave a bottle of Canadian Club and a note saying welcome to Canada.

Grey did make a brief video about countries within countries in his Bizzare Borders videos [1] which might interest you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vui-qGCfXuA

What's weird about US/Canada? I thought it was pretty straightforward. Was this about the "Angle" on Lake of the Woods?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw

The border is defined as a straight line, but was surveyed as a series of slightly wobbly series of lines. They put up thousands of stone pillars, cut out a strip of trees along the border, and it became official.

IIRC there's also some stuff about a disputed island

There's the exclave Point Roberts, Washington (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0408/feature7/), which falls ever so slightly south of the 49th parallel.

I once visited Port Roberts just to see the border crossing. I drove in from the Canadian side, parked my car, and walked across the border into the U.S. without being challenged. No one asked for my passport. As far as I could tell, no one even noticed that I had crossed the border. But when I tried to walk back into Canada the Canadians gave me a pretty hard time and almost didn't let me back in. It was an interesting experience.

I've visited there too. Drove in both directions, seemed like not a big deal.

I heard that kids there go to school in Blaine, which means 4 international border crossings every day!

I do not know what is considered weird, but here are some interesting things about the US/Canada border:

https://youtu.be/SxhUsPBFPkU?t=1m46s (Geography Now! Canada - btw awesome channel for people who like geography)

Newark is completely surrounded by Fremont (California) and has over 40,000 residents and is over 13 square miles in area, so if it's not the largest, it's at least near the top.

If we discount natural borders like the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica borders only Los Angeles and has twice as many residents.

Los Angeles has very strange borders. West Hollywood and Beverly Hills are independent enclaves, and it has an odd tendril stretching down to Long Beach. I remember being delighted when Google Maps started outlining city borders - I had always wondered exactly what LA's looked like.

Another fun one is San Diego, which does indeed touch Mexico, but to get from downtown to the border and stay within city limits you'll have to get on a boat and stay within a narrow band of water stretching down the bay to San Ysidro.

See:

https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/legacy//plannin...

https://www.maptechnica.com/city-map/San+Diego/CA/0666000

The City of Los Angeles has a really interesting shape:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Angeles,+CA/@34.091182...

Not far from Fremont, Piedmont is completely surrounded by Oakland. 1.6 square miles, 10k residents.

I think he did one about enclaves and exclaves.

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