Downtown Change in Three Middle-sized Cities

Downtown Change in Three Middle-sized Cities PDF Author: Everett Gorsuch Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Book Description


Downtown America

Downtown America PDF Author: Alison Isenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226385094
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
Downtown America was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song—a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of an aged loved one. Downtown America cuts beneath the archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and offers a dynamic new story of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond conventional narratives, Alison Isenberg shows that downtown's trajectory was not dictated by inevitable free market forces or natural life-and-death cycles. Instead, it was the product of human actors—the contested creation of retailers, developers, government leaders, architects, and planners, as well as political activists, consumers, civic clubs, real estate appraisers, even postcard artists. Throughout the twentieth century, conflicts over downtown's mundane conditions—what it should look like and who should walk its streets—pointed to fundamental disagreements over American values. Isenberg reveals how the innovative efforts of these participants infused Main Street with its resonant symbolism, while still accounting for pervasive uncertainty and fears of decline. Readers of this work will find anything but a story of inevitability. Even some of the downtown's darkest moments—the Great Depression's collapse in land values, the rioting and looting of the 1960s, or abandonment and vacancy during the 1970s—illuminate how core cultural values have animated and intertwined with economic investment to reinvent the physical form and social experiences of urban commerce. Downtown America—its empty stores, revitalized marketplaces, and romanticized past—will never look quite the same again. A book that does away with our most clichéd approaches to urban studies, Downtown America will appeal to readers interested in the history of the United States and the mythology surrounding its most cherished institutions. A Choice Oustanding Academic Title. Winner of the 2005 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Winner of the 2005 Lewis Mumford Prize for Best Book in American Planning History. Winner of the 2005 Historic Preservation Book Price from the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation. Named 2005 Honor Book from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

The Changing Spatial Pattern of CBD Office Establishments in Small Wisconsin Cities Between 1954 and 1964

The Changing Spatial Pattern of CBD Office Establishments in Small Wisconsin Cities Between 1954 and 1964 PDF Author: Edward Kerschner Muller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description


Main Street Revisited

Main Street Revisited PDF Author: Richard V. Francaviglia
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587290715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
As an archetype for an entire class of places, Main Street has become one of America's most popular and idealized images. In Main Street Revisited, the first book to place the design of small downtowns in spatial and chronological context, Richard Francaviglia finds the sources of romanticized images of this archetype, including Walt Disney's Main Street USA, in towns as diverse as Marceline, Missouri, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Francaviglia interprets Main Street both as a real place and as an expression of collective assumptions, designs, and myths; his Main Streets are treasure troves of historic patterns. Using many historical and contemporary photographs and maps for his extensive fieldwork and research, he reveals a rich regional pattern of small-town development that serves as the basis for American community design. He underscores the significance of time in the development of Main Street's distinctive personality, focuses on the importance of space in the creation of place, and concentrates on popular images that have enshrined Main Street in the collective American consciousness.

Common Places

Common Places PDF Author: Dell Upton
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820307503
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
Exploring America's material culture, Common Places reveals the history, culture, and social and class relationships that are the backdrop of the everyday structures and environments of ordinary people. Examining America's houses and cityscapes, its rural outbuildings and landscapes from perspectives including cultural geography, decorative arts, architectural history, and folklore, these articles reflect the variety and vibrancy of the growing field of vernacular architecture. In essays that focus on buildings and spaces unique to the U.S. landscape, Clay Lancaster, Edward T. Price, John Michael Vlach, and Warren E. Roberts reconstruct the social and cultural contexts of the modern bungalow, the small-town courthouse square, the shotgun house of the South, and the log buildings of the Midwest. Surveying the buildings of America's settlement, scholars including Henry Glassie, Norman Morrison Isham, Edward A. Chappell, and Theodore H. M. Prudon trace European ethnic influences in the folk structures of Delaware and the houses of Rhode Island, in Virginia's Renish homes, and in the Dutch barn widely repeated in rural America. Ethnic, regional, and class differences have flavored the nation's vernacular architecture. Fraser D. Neiman reveals overt changes in houses and outbuildings indicative of the growing social separation and increasingly rigid relations between seventeenth-century Virginia planters and their servants. Fred B. Kniffen and Fred W. Peterson show how, following the westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the structures of the eastern elite were repeated and often rejected by frontier builders. Moving into the twentieth century, James Borchert tracks the transformation of the alley from an urban home for Washington's blacks in the first half of the century to its new status in the gentrified neighborhoods of the last decade, while Barbara Rubin's discussion of the evolution of the commercial strip counterpoints the goals of city planners and more spontaneous forms of urban expression. The illustrations that accompany each article present the artifacts of America's material past. Photographs of individual buildings, historic maps of the nation's agricultural expanse, and descriptions of the household furnishings of the Victorian middle class, the urban immigrant population, and the rural farmer's homestead complete the volume, rooting vernacular architecture to the American people, their lives, and their everyday creations.

Bulletin Series

Bulletin Series PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Book Description


Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series

Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series PDF Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1400

Book Description
The record of each copyright registration listed in the Catalog includes a description of the work copyrighted and data relating to the copyright claim (the name of the copyright claimant as given in the application for registration, the copyright date, the copyright registration number, etc.).

Housing and Planning References

Housing and Planning References PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 76

Book Description


Bulletin

Bulletin PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 674

Book Description


The Changing Image of the City

The Changing Image of the City PDF Author: Janet Rose Daly Bednarek
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803216921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
The Changing Image of the City describes urban planning and development from the end of World War II to 1973, when major elements of the design of Nebraska's largest city were in place. Janet Daly-Bednarek shows how the appraches to planning shifted during a period that saw Omaha change from a hub of food processing and transportation to a postindustrial center dominated by insurance and by educational, medical, and other services. Finally, she surveys recent developments such as the Central Park Mall and the Old Market area in light of earlier plans and their implementation. In considering the changes that have occurred in Omaha, this book reveals much about the growth of professional urban planning in America. In Omaha, as elsewhere, planners dealt with power brokers, coped with rampant suburbanism and sprawling shopping malls, searched for ways to reverse the inner-city decay, and concerned themselves with historic preservation, beautification, and quality of life.