Same thing with everything else in shared American culture. It just kind of fell apart slowly over the past 20 years. 9/11 changed people's general outlook with smartphones making folks turn inward, 2008 ushering in the end of easy money and then finally the 2016 political divide through Covid was the slow motion knockout blow.

The city is a ghost town on a Saturday night now compared to how it was in the 90s. Just to pick something at random for an example look at the concerts they used to have behind the train station. https://youtu.be/MpnwY9EwG78

The First Night that the user I was responding to remembers was great. Fireworks going off over the statehouse, food stalls up and down the river, parties in the hotel ballrooms, weird performance art and smaller music performances throughout the city. Packed restaurants and bars all over. Federal Hill done up with Christmas lights.

Even on a random weekend roudy crowds were corralled by mounted PPD spraying pepper gas just to get people to leave the club areas. You could literally bounce around house parties around every school. Brown, PC, RIC, RISD. Now the college kids have headphones on as they stare at the pavement on the way to go lock themselves in their rooms all night it seems.

I don't mean that as an insult. I feel a deep sadness for the times they have to grow up in. Sucks.