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…
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 the west side of Cleveland, tucked between residential streets and Interstate 480, there is an 80-acre wetland that people who live nearby have never visited, as there is no public access. Birders know it well, however. They park along West 145th Street facing north and scan the area from behind a chain-link fence. They…
On the morning of July 7, 2026, two steel support columns on the 21st floor of a Midtown Manhattan office tower began to buckle. Several floors sagged. Bricks fell to the sidewalk. The fire department evacuated the building and nine others around it, closed traffic on East 42nd Street, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in…
In 1950, a wrecking crew spent six months tearing down a 5-story office building in Buffalo, New York. The demolition took so long that the Buffalo Evening News remarked the building “was built to stand forever.” It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first major commercial commission, and today, all that remains of it is a single…
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…
A medium-sized lake in South-Central Michigan near the Indiana border might not appear to have a compelling urban story. My own foray into the history of Klinger Lake in Sturgis, Michigan began simply because my family has been renting a house there for a lake vacation the past few summers. Specifically, it was a Klinger…