My pick is Des Moines, currently living here. Like, there’s almost nothing worthwhile to see and there are pathetically few skyscrapers. I live in an area where I can get a good picture view of all of the buildings within sight.
And all I can feel is “…there should be more”. The buildings themselves aren’t even that interesting. Des Moines tries to make itself feel big and comparative to other cities, but it just cannot do that.
My other pick is Montpelier in VT, where I have also lived. Everything feels too damn clustered. the neighborhoods are on steep ass hills with awkward traffic markings. There’s almost zero reason to really do anything there and it can easily be missed. Like, you can drive from Barre and through Montpelier before you know you’re on the highway out of Montpelier.
There’s honestly a lot of lame state capitals in the US, Europeans might be surprised. In Europe the national capital of each country is typically the biggest and most cosmopolitan city. This is not the case when it comes to state capitals in the US. Several of the most boring ones (Montpelier, Augusta, Pierre) have already been mentioned, so I’ll just add a few others.
Indubitably Boring
Slightly Less Boring (honorable mentions)
Olympia at least had a good punk/indie/riot-grrrl scene in the 90s, and made its mark on music history that way
Yeah most of the ones in the second list at least had a couple of notable things about them that kept them off the first list. I was hoping people with local experience would chime in if they had reason to dispute my rankings; I’m sure there’s some cool aspects of these cities that I might not be aware of.
Carson City is nearby Lake Tahoe which is pretty awesome. Lansing is actually a decent sized city and has Michigan State University. Topeka is reasonably close to KC, and presumably has some other notable features 😅
Montgomery and Jackson are pretty dire but there’s not really any better cities/options in Alabama or Mississippi, so I gave them an A for effort.
Many US states got their capital chosen because when the territory became a state it happened to be the closest to the centre of population of the state. Jefferson City, MO is a good example of this. The three major population centres at the time were St. Louis, Kansas City and (to a much lesser extent) Joplin. So Jefferson City was right by the centre of population.
Meanwhile, most European capitals (including at the provincial level - think German states or French regions) came to their state by being the capitals and cultural centres of feudal states, which gives them more depth.
I don’t mean any offense to Iowa (this time), but there’s not a huge amount going on there. It exists almost exclusively as an administrative division.