On March 29, 1926, more than 3,000 people gathered in downtown Miami to celebrate the opening of a new 15-story tower built for the city’s real estate industry. Over the next few decades, the building would house an illegal gambling operation, an office for the American Nazi Party, and eventually nothing at all but squatters,…
In downtown Richmond, a 14-story tower that once anchored one of Virginia’s largest banks is being torn down to make way for a new home for the state’s highest courts. The Pocahontas Building has stood at 900 East Main Street for more than a century, but within the next year, it will only exist as…
My recent work trip to Denver got off to a positive start when I made the fortunate decision of forgoing a rather expensive Uber from the airport to my hotel downtown and instead taking the light rail. It was a short wait and a pleasant ride of 25 or so minutes, and allowed my first…
This week I was listening to a Strong Towns podcast episode with Patrick Kennedy, and while describing an area of Dallas that was surprisingly walkable, he said “all of this was because a former Dallas cowboy read Jane Jacobs and asked, ‘why don’t people live closer to where they work?’” The whole interview was great…
In Boston’s North End, a small hillside cemetery holds more than 10,000 people beneath just two acres of ground, gravestones dating back to the 1660s, standing quietly between rowhouses and a harbor view that’s changed almost beyond recognition since anyone was last buried here. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground’s 1659 Founding The city of Boston bought…
I recently read a great book by David Ulin, former book editor of the Los Angeles Times whose accolades include a California Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, he tackles the city’s unique history and urbanism in a way that really spoke to me, musing on the…
Walk the streets of Boston’s North End today and you are experiencing one of the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhoods in America. Narrow brick streets wind between 4- and 5-story apartment buildings. Church steeples rise above rooflines. Corner shops occupy ground-floor storefronts that have held businesses for a century or more. It is dense, human-scaled, and…
Horace Tabor made his fortune in silver, and in 1881 he decided Denver needed an opera house worthy of it. The Tabor Grand opened that year at 16th and Curtis Streets, and opening night newspapers described it afterward as “perfection.”
On the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, a small two-story Italianate building sits tucked between the wings of a Whole Foods Market. Thousands of shoppers pass by it every week, but few realize they are walking past New York City’s oldest known concrete building, a structure that…
The southeast corner of Fourth and Vine Streets in downtown Cincinnati has held something significant for most of its history.