The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Kevin McGruder Lance Freeman, A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). At the beginning of Langston Hughes’ Black Misery, a small volume featuring brief observations of black life accompanied by illustrations, a young black boy looks out at the reader with a melancholy gaze while […]
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By James Longhurst In 1979, a plainclothes police officer assaulted a uniformed parking agent in broad daylight on the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan. The New York Times summarized the fight between the policeman and the female parking enforcement agent, declaring that “the two were screaming at the top of their lungs. There […]
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By Richard Harris Richard Wade. 1964. Slavery in the Cities. The South, 1820-1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Lisa Tolbert. 2017. Henry, a slave, v. State of Tennessee. The public and private space of slaves in a small town. In Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds., Slavery in the City. Architecture and Landscapes of Urban […]
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By Genevieve Carpio When I hear the term “urban transit,” it conjures a flurry of images. My brain instantly turns to public forms of transportation. This includes your buses, metro lines, transit stops, maybe even bicycle share programs. If I sit on the term a bit longer, I start to think of abstract planners making […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. Recent Books Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain By Kevin Siena, Yale University Press, 2019 After the plague of 1666, it was the poor, allegedly weak and easily contaminated who were blamed for the epidemics that followed. […]
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By Sarah A. Seo Is a mobile home more like an automobile or a house? This was the key question that the justices of the US Supreme Court had to determine in California v. Carney, a 1985 case about the warrantless search of a mobile home parked in a lot in downtown San Diego. An […]
Read MoreLizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019) Reviewed by Bob Carey Lizabeth Cohen has given us a big, tasty book about urban renewal and the career—successes and failures—of urban planner Ed Logue. Logue had, for many, the […]
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By Jordan Patty Mass Transit After World War II In an era when labor expected generous wages and benefits, how could an urban bus company expect to operate at a profit, regularly raise pay, and pay franchise fees to municipalities when fewer people were riding the bus year after year? This was a question faced […]
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By Evan Friss The bicycle first appeared in American cities 201 years ago. Americans first began worrying about how bicycles would ruin their cities 201 years ago. In the intervening years, those fears have shifted but never disappeared. What’s so scary about these relatively simple, two-wheeled devices? What’s so scary about the people riding them? […]
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By Philip Mark Plotch New York City’s subway system, once the best in the world, is now frequently unreliable, uncomfortable, and overcrowded (at least when the city is not experiencing a pandemic). One of the reasons for its sorry state is a series of uninformed and self-serving elected officials who have fostered false expectations about […]
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