A Century Downtown

A Century Downtown

Author: Matt Kapp

Publisher: powerHouse Books

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781576879443

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Showcasing an unprecedented array of photographs, paintings, renderings, drawings, and other images culled from dozens of archives and individual collections worldwide, A Century Downtown ensures that no one will ever forget the vast and varied history of this famous part of New York City. Catchphrases like "urban renewal" have a nice ring to them, but none measure up to the tectonic, often brutal metamorphoses that have remade Lower Manhattan over the last century. Downtown's defining cataclysmic event is undeniably 9/11. Yet we often forget that the original World Trade Center grew out of the wholesale demolition of an entire neighborhood, home to more than 300 electronics businesses employing some 30,000 workers. We forget that the first "worst terrorist attack in American history"-the Wall Street bombing of 1920-claimed 38 lives and triggered a tsunami of anti-immigrant sentiment that swept Warren G. Harding into the White House. We forget that Washington Street was once home to the biggest Arab-American community in the country, known as Little Syria, eventually displaced by the transportation appetite of a burgeoning suburbia. A Century Downtown raises these and other pivotal events-some mere footnotes to the city's official history-into sharp relief. It's a remarkable visual journey guided by a fascinating historical narrative that sheds new light on the evolution of Lower Manhattan over the past hundred years.


The Heart of the City

The Heart of the City

Author: Alexander Garvin

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1610919491

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Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles. In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.


Downtown

Downtown

Author: Robert M. Fogelson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0300098278

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Annotation Downtown is the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. Urban historian Robert Fogelson gives a riveting account of how downtown--and the way Americans thought about it--changed between 1880 and 1950. Recreating battles over subways and skyscrapers, the introduction of elevated highways and parking bans, and other controversies, this book provides a new and often starling perspective on downtown's rise and fall.


Downtown America

Downtown America

Author: Alison Isenberg

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0226385094

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Downtown America was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song—a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of an aged loved one. Downtown America cuts beneath the archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and offers a dynamic new story of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond conventional narratives, Alison Isenberg shows that downtown's trajectory was not dictated by inevitable free market forces or natural life-and-death cycles. Instead, it was the product of human actors—the contested creation of retailers, developers, government leaders, architects, and planners, as well as political activists, consumers, civic clubs, real estate appraisers, even postcard artists. Throughout the twentieth century, conflicts over downtown's mundane conditions—what it should look like and who should walk its streets—pointed to fundamental disagreements over American values. Isenberg reveals how the innovative efforts of these participants infused Main Street with its resonant symbolism, while still accounting for pervasive uncertainty and fears of decline. Readers of this work will find anything but a story of inevitability. Even some of the downtown's darkest moments—the Great Depression's collapse in land values, the rioting and looting of the 1960s, or abandonment and vacancy during the 1970s—illuminate how core cultural values have animated and intertwined with economic investment to reinvent the physical form and social experiences of urban commerce. Downtown America—its empty stores, revitalized marketplaces, and romanticized past—will never look quite the same again. A book that does away with our most clichéd approaches to urban studies, Downtown America will appeal to readers interested in the history of the United States and the mythology surrounding its most cherished institutions. A Choice Oustanding Academic Title. Winner of the 2005 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Winner of the 2005 Lewis Mumford Prize for Best Book in American Planning History. Winner of the 2005 Historic Preservation Book Price from the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation. Named 2005 Honor Book from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.


Living Downtown

Living Downtown

Author: Paul E. Groth

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780520068766

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From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance? Living Downtown, the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge. Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness. This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.


Downtown Roanoke

Downtown Roanoke

Author: Nelson Harris

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2004-04-21

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1439612625

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Downtown Roanoke celebrates the vibrant history of a community that lies at the heart of the scenic Roanoke Valley. From the saloons and livery stables of the late 19th century to the flagship department stores that attracted hundreds of shoppers in the late 1950s, Roanoke has experienced dramatic change. Over 200 archival images have been compiled to produce a stunning collage of the downtown area over the past century. Included are the American Theater, the Rialto, the Jefferson, and the time-altered streetscapes of Jefferson, Campbell, Kirk, and Church. This collection highlights the storied past of Roanoke through hotels, hospitals, churches, merchants, and special events, including the American Legion parades, the Diamond Jubilee, and the march of the VMI and VPI cadets at Thanksgiving en route to Victory Stadium. Downtown Roanoke is a tribute to the heritage of Southwestern Virginia's leading urban center. Today it remains a metropolitan district alive with culture and commerce, having re-emerged from the challenges of shopping malls and suburbia. The photographs in this collection, many published for the first time, provide a nostalgic look at the progress of Roanoke's historic downtown corridor.


Urban Design Downtown

Urban Design Downtown

Author: Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998-10-19

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0520209303

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This book's case studies of individual West Coast downtown projects capture the essence of late 20th-century urbanism with its multitude of social dilemmas and contradictions. The authors explore both the poetics of design and the politics and economics of development decisions. 98 photos. 26 line illustrations. 23 maps.


Downtown Naperville

Downtown Naperville

Author: Joni Hirsch Blackman

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738560625

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Downtown Naperville is a place unlike many others because of its long, wonderful history and contemporary success. More than just a central business district, downtown Naperville is a beloved asset to many residents and gives Illinois' fourth-largest city a small-town feel. What began in the mid-1800s as a service center for an agrarian community 30 miles from Chicago has become a shopping and social hot spot of Chicago's western suburbs and a potent draw for new residents. Many of the same buildings settlers built remain, but downtown Naperville has changed in many ways-local businesses have come and gone, and the area was once threatened by indoor mall development. The community's dedication to building the Riverwalk in 1981 sparked a resurgence of Naperville's quaint and celebrated downtown. On the eve of the new millennium, Naperville threw a huge celebration on the streets of downtown to welcome the 21st century, but the party could have been a farewell to the downtown of old as well. A new era began at about that time, as many longtime local service businesses began leaving downtown while national retail chains and restaurants moved in. Through photographs of each stage of downtown Naperville's vibrant history, see the area change from 1831 through the 20th century to today.


Dream City

Dream City

Author: Conrad Kickert

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0262351226

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Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit. Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris. In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city, and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own offspring—the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled—and modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation. Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players, from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many other American cities have seen a similar decline—and many others may see a similar revitalization.