During the middle of the 20th-century, America’s urban cores were being gutted through fiscal attrition: tax dollars were being sent, for the first time, out and away from cities to subsidize suburban expansion. At the same time, private financial institutions were pulling their funding away from urban home-buyers, business owners and those wishing to refinance […]
Archive | April, 2014
A fence dividing a city’s poorest from richest
By Alyssa Campbell When driving along Montreal’s Boulevard de l’Acadie, you might at first only notice on one side of the road a line of shrubs with suburban houses in the background. However, upon closer inspection, the existence of a six-foot tall chain-link fence separating Montreal’s poorest neighborhood from one of its richest becomes readily apparent. […]
1873 Weeksville and Pool’s infamous Picnic
POOL’S PICNIC Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 27, 1873, page 4 When “Big Six” thundered along the pavements of New York, George Pool was her keeper; now he is, if not the “Boss,” a very popular man among the colored people of Weeksville. During the last eleven years, Pool’s picnics have been the great […]
BANG, WHIR, VROOM! The Arrogance and Vulnerability of Italian Futurism
To be affiliated with the cultural wave that was Futurism in Italy in the early 20th Century was to signify an unabashed optimism and join a call to arms to reshape, rethink, and rebrand everything that was contemporary life – photography, theater, music, art, politics, architecture, even toys. Championed by its tireless leader, Marinetti, from […]
Gentrification in the Plateau, Montreal’s most famous neighborhood
By Alyssa Campbell The Plateau-Mont-Royal is arguably Montreal’s most famous neighborhood. Ranked by many publications as one of North America’s “best neighborhoods,” the Plateau has built a reputation for being a hip area with trendy bars, shopping, restaurants and cafes. Yet four decades ago life in the neighborhood was quite the opposite, on the precipice of […]
STROLLS UPON OLD LINES: Crow Hill and Some of Its Suggestions.
The Bedford Hills - A Region Now Traced by the Eastern Parkway The Genesis of a Name - French’s Stopping Place. [editor note: this article was first published in thee 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Article was retrieved from http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org and transcribed by PlaNYourCity] There was a rhyme in one of the children’s magazines […]
