John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil Co fame built this Cleveland office tower in 1905. A little over a century later, squatters were breaking through its boarded-up windows and stripping metal from its elevator shafts. For over a year, no one wanted Cleveland’s Rockefeller Building, not even at a steep discount. It looked like the…
Architectural Digest once called Crosley Tower at the University of Cincinnati one of the ugliest university buildings in America. But generations of Cincinnati students loved it anyway, building replicas and forming a fan club in its honor. A record-setting feat of concrete construction, Crosley Tower is currently being demolished piece by piece. Crosley Tower’s Origins…
Stories of urban renewal across the United States often focus on our larger cities and the entire neighborhoods and downtown districts that were razed. But many smaller towns and cities also saw their historic cores radically reshaped during the 1960s and 1970s, and preservation battles in those areas took on a different type of significance…
Camden Yards, built in 1992 in Downtown Baltimore, is famous for looking like an old-fashioned ballpark. Much of that feel comes from the fact that it incorporated a real historic freight warehouse into the design, and the project also helped save the 19th-century railroad depot as a gateway. Camden Station’s Construction for the B&O Railroad…
When the city demolished Columbus Ohio’s Union Station in 1976, a last-minute legal scramble saved one arch. But that act would help launch Columbus’s entire historic preservation movement. Columbus’s Grand Union Station and Daniel Burnham’s Design Columbus had already gone through two early union stations: the first built in 1850 was called a “crucial step…
Isaac Emerson made his fortune selling a fizzy cure for hangovers and late nights. In 1911, he built the tallest building in Baltimore to advertise it, topped with a giant illuminated bottle that rotated over downtown for twenty-five years. The bottle, once used by ship captains navigating into Baltimore’s harbor, was removed, but the tower…
In October 2025, Digital Realty filed a demolition permit for a century-old office building in uptown Charlotte, promising to preserve its historic facade. By July 2026, that promise was gone, and so was the building. The 1920s Court Arcade Building The Court Arcade was one of Charlotte’s earliest examples of mixed-use development, ground-floor retail with…
In 1898, a 28-year-old James M. Cox bought a struggling Dayton newspaper. By 1920, he was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, running alongside a young Franklin D. Roosevelt. The newspaper building he modeled after a specific bank in Manhattan still stands in Dayton, but is vacant and deteriorating after a botched…
In 1929, most department stores were built for pedestrians strolling downtown streets. Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles was different, as it reflected the growing car-centric character of the city and its outlying districts, with shoppers pulling up in their own vehicles and entering through the back. But the architecture was impressive no matter who it…
Cheez-Its are a popular snack, but most people eating them have no idea where they came from. The answer is a factory at the corner of Cincinnati and Concord Streets in southwest Dayton, Ohio, a site that was once surrounded by a dense working-class neighborhood. The company is long gone today, along with most of…
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…