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 a massive grain port, receiving wheat from Midwestern farms via the Great Lakes. Cereal and flour companies blossomed, and…
In May 2025, construction crews broke ground on the redevelopment 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 project, led by the Roxbury Group and Ethos Development Partners, carries a $60 million price tag and according to recent news…
On the west side of Cleveland, tucked between residential streets and Interstate 480, there is an 80-acre wetland that people who live nearby have never visited, as there is no public access. Birders know it well, however. They park along West 145th Street facing north and scan the area from behind a chain-link fence. They…
On the morning of July 7, 2026, two steel support columns on the 21st floor of a Midtown Manhattan office tower began to buckle. Several floors sagged. Bricks fell to the sidewalk. The fire department evacuated the building and nine others around it, closed traffic on East 42nd Street, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in…
In 1950, a wrecking crew spent six months tearing down a 5-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. Then, after having many of…
Pueblo, Colorado is far from the industrial heartland of the United States, but long ago it earned a nickname that connected the two: the Pittsburgh of the West. At the center of that legacy is a steel company once controlled by John D. Rockefeller, and whose labor policies would later be shaped by one of…
A medium-sized lake in South-Central Michigan near the Indiana border might not appear to have a compelling urban story. My own foray into the history of Klinger Lake in Sturgis, Michigan began simply because my family has been renting a house there for a lake vacation the past few summers. Specifically, it was a Klinger…
On March 29, 1926, more than 3,000 people gathered in downtown Miami to celebrate the opening of a new 15-story tower built for the city’s real estate industry. Over the next few decades, the building would house an illegal gambling operation, an office for the American Nazi Party, and eventually nothing at all but squatters,…
In downtown Richmond, a 14-story tower built in 1923 that once anchored one of Virginia’s largest banks is being torn down to make way for a new courts building. The Pocahontas Building has stood at 900 East Main Street for more than a century, but as of August 2026, its demolition is in progress despite…
My recent work trip to Denver got off to a positive start when I made the fortunate decision of forgoing a rather expensive Uber from the airport to my hotel downtown and instead taking the light rail. It was a pleasant ride of about 25 minutes, and allowed my first impression of the city to…
This week I was listening to a Strong Towns podcast episode with Patrick Kennedy, and while describing an area of Dallas that was surprisingly walkable, he said “all of this was because a former Dallas cowboy read Jane Jacobs and asked, ‘why don’t people live closer to where they work?’” The whole interview was great…