In 1950, a wrecking crew spent six months tearing down a five-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. Buffalo Central Terminal’s 1929 Opening…
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. Everything else that once stood around them, the mills, the workers’ housing, the rail yards that once made this valley the center of American steelmaking, is gone….
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…
In St. Louis, a few blocks from where the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project once stood before its decline and demolition in the 1970s, another public housing development from the same era is still standing today, functioning much as it was designed to. Pruitt-Igoe was, for decades, the most cited failure in American public housing: 33…
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 one of the biggest grain ports in the world, receiving tons of wheat from Midwestern farms via the Great…
On the west side of Cleveland, tucked between residential streets and Interstate 480, there is an 80-acre wetland that most people who live nearby have never visited; and, under current rules, cannot enter. Birders know it well. They park along West 145th Street facing north and scan the area from behind a chain-link fence. They…
In May 2025, construction crews broke ground on the restoration 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 restoration, led by the Roxbury Group, Ethos Development Partners, and Lighthouse, carries a $60 million price tag and could be completed…
Cheez-Its are a popular snack, but most people eating them have no idea where they came from. The answer is a factory on the corner of Cincinnati and Concord Streets in Dayton, Ohio, once surrounded by a dense working-class neighborhood. It employed generations of workers and still stands today, but the company is long gone,…