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 the city’s growing prosperity. The Tabor Grand opened that year at 16th and Curtis Streets, and opening night newspapers described it as “perfection.” More than $800,000 went into the building, an enormous sum for the time…
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 featured something significant for most of its history. In 1859, Samuel Pike built one of the country’s most ambitious opera houses there, but it burned down in 1866. He rebuilt it, even grander than before, but it burned again. As of the early…
By the 1880s, Denver’s 17th Street had established itself as the financial center of the region, earning it the nickname of the Wall Street of the Rockies. Major banking institutions, brokerage firms, and law firms lined the corridor, and the multi-story commercial buildings that housed them gave the street a dense, canyon-like character that was…
For one of the first articles here on Lost Urban Vistas, I wanted to talk about a photo I took here in Dayton, Ohio, and how it relates to my goals for this site. The building at the center of the photo is America’s Packard Museum, located at the southern edge of downtown Dayton, Ohio….
For the past several years, I’ve been running Dayton Vistas, a website and social media project dedicated to the history, architecture, and urban redevelopment stories of Dayton, Ohio. That started as a way to share my research from my book Lost Dayton, Ohio, but it grew into a deeper look into the city and its…