A massive urban renewal project beginning in 1969 cleared an area of about 120 acres of Downtown Denver. Only a couple of historic landmarks in that section of lower downtown were spared. One was the Daniels & Fisher Tower, while the other was a single block of Larimer Street. That block was Denver’s original Main…
John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil Co fame built this Cleveland office tower in 1905. A little over a century later, squatters were breaking through its boarded-up windows and stripping metal from its elevator shafts. For over a year, no one wanted Cleveland’s Rockefeller Building, not even at a steep discount. It looked like the…
Stories of urban renewal across the United States often focus on our larger cities and the entire neighborhoods and downtown districts that were razed. But many smaller towns and cities also saw their historic cores radically reshaped during the 1960s and 1970s, and preservation battles in those areas took on a different type of significance…
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…
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 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…
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 May 2025, construction crews broke ground on the redevelopment of Detroit’s Lee Plaza, a 15-story Art Deco tower on West Grand Boulevard that had sat vacant and deteriorating for nearly three decades. The project, led by the Roxbury Group and Ethos Development Partners, carries a $60 million price tag and according to recent news…
On June 22, 1929, a crowd of 2,200 people gathered to watch the first train depart from Buffalo’s grand new train station. Fifty years later, the last train would leave in the early hours of an October morning, and the building would sit largely abandoned for nearly two decades afterward. Then, after having many of…
Pueblo, Colorado is far from the industrial heartland of the United States, but long ago it earned a nickname that connected the two: the Pittsburgh of the West. At the center of that legacy is a steel company once controlled by John D. Rockefeller, and whose labor policies would later be shaped by one of…
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 pleasant ride of about 25 minutes, and allowed my first impression of the city to…
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…