Archive for the ‘Texts’ Category
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Cleveland: MEDIPLEX CITY
In-Progress
Once the fourth largest city in the United States and a major industrial center, Cleveland has lapsed into decades of sustained decline. The loss of its middle class population and economic base in manufacturing has left the city financially and physically in shambles. Amidst this perfect storm of bad news, one sector of Cleveland’s economy has been growing prodigiously: healthcare. The Cleveland Clinic, the city’s medical namesake, is now its largest employer and a cornerstone of Cleveland’s economy. Throughout …
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Imaginary Apparatus: New York 1966-1973
Spring, 2009
In 1966, under threat of bankruptcy and crumbling urban infrastructure, New York City mayor John Lindsay signed Executive Order 10 – a measure intended to attract the film industry to New York. Major productions such as The Night They Raided Minsky’s and Midnight Cowboy were soon drawn to the city. Simultaneously, the city was drafting a significant amount of innovative urban planning policy. One remarkable aspect common to many of these policies is a tendency to understand the …
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The Desire for the Real in Urban Real Estate
Winter, 2010
New York’s High Line, the highly anticipated park built on an abandoned elevated train line on Manhattan’s West Side, opened to the public on June 9, 2010. The date culminated an eleven-year process of gaining city and public support initiated by a citizen advocacy group, Friends of the High Line. The story of the group’s efforts have been often told: they saved the decaying piece of infrastructure from imminent demolition under the Giuliani Administration, successfully lobbied for …
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Bucktown House
2003
To the northwest of downtown Chicago, sandwiched between the post-industrial landscape of the Chicago River to the east, and largely Hispanic communities to the west, is a neighborhood called “Bucktown”. Originally settled as early as 1833, the most formative onslaught of settlement in community history was the mass immigration of Polish Catholics beginning in the 1870’s, and continuing through the turn of the century. It was during this era that the community experienced its most significant period of development- …