Camden Yards, built in 1992 in Downtown Baltimore, is famous for looking like an old-fashioned ballpark. Much of that feel comes from the fact that it incorporated a real historic freight warehouse into the design, and the project also helped save the 19th-century railroad depot as a gateway. Camden Station’s Construction for the B&O Railroad…
When the city demolished Columbus Ohio’s Union Station in 1976, a last-minute legal scramble saved one arch. But that act would help launch Columbus’s entire historic preservation movement. Columbus’s Grand Union Station and Daniel Burnham’s Design Columbus had already gone through two early union stations: the first built in 1850 was called a “crucial step…
Isaac Emerson made his fortune selling a fizzy cure for hangovers and late nights. In 1911, he built the tallest building in Baltimore to advertise it, topped with a giant illuminated bottle that rotated over downtown for twenty-five years. The bottle, once used by ship captains navigating into Baltimore’s harbor, was removed, but the tower…
In October 2025, Digital Realty filed a demolition permit for a century-old office building in uptown Charlotte, promising to preserve its historic facade. By July 2026, that promise was gone, and so was the building. The 1920s Court Arcade Building The Court Arcade was one of Charlotte’s earliest examples of mixed-use development, ground-floor retail with…
In 1898, a 28-year-old James M. Cox bought a struggling Dayton newspaper. By 1920, he was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, running alongside a young Franklin D. Roosevelt. The newspaper building he modeled after a specific bank in Manhattan still stands in Dayton, but is vacant and deteriorating after a botched…
In 1929, most department stores were built for pedestrians strolling downtown streets. Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles was different, as it reflected the growing car-centric character of the city and its outlying districts, with shoppers pulling up in their own vehicles and entering through the back. But the architecture was impressive no matter who it…
Cheez-Its are a popular snack, but most people eating them have no idea where they came from. The answer is a factory at the corner of Cincinnati and Concord Streets in southwest Dayton, Ohio, a site that was once surrounded by a dense working-class neighborhood. The company is long gone today, along with most of…
The 33 towers of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis came down in the 1970s. A small deli across the street watched the whole thing happen, and today, a $1.75 billion federal intelligence campus occupies part of the same land, which officials have said is helping to “right the wrongs” of mid-century urban…
Along the Monongahela River just outside Pittsburgh, two rusted steel furnaces rise 92 feet into the sky, the last of their kind left standing anywhere in the region that was the Steel Making Capital of the World. Nearly everything else around them, from the mills to the workers’ housing that once made this valley the…
In St. Louis, just a few blocks from where the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project once stood before its decline and demolition, another public housing development from the same era is still standing and occupied today. Pruitt-Igoe was, for decades, the most cited failure in American public housing: 33 eleven-story towers imploded on national television after…
Kenyon-Barr was the name city planners gave to a section of Cincinnati’s West End, a dense, mostly Black working-class neighborhood pressed into the flat basin between downtown and the Mill Creek valley. By the mid-20th century it was one of the most densely populated residential areas in the country, a mix of rowhouses, tenements, corner…
Buffalo’s waterfront along the City Ship Canal was once one of the most important grain handling corridors in the world. Grain elevators were invented in Buffalo in the 1840s, and at its peak the city was a massive grain port, receiving wheat from Midwestern farms via the Great Lakes. Cereal and flour companies blossomed, and…