I understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.
Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren’t attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.
What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.
Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.
I flip flop back and forth, I’m not totally sure if there’s a specific rhyme or reason to my choices, it may just come down to a subjective feeling about which I think sounds better in the sentence.
My wife is a dayta analyst, and she analyzes dahta.