The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
The Metropole is pleased to solicit pitches for our upcoming theme month: Selling the City. We welcome submissions focused on efforts to brand and market cities, build infrastructure supporting urban commerce, and drive urban tourism, as well as posts on financialization and real estate as factors shaping cities. Present-day examples that make appeals to the […]
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This is the sixth post in our themed series, Cities at Play. By Desiree Beare On summer evenings along Central Avenue in Albuquerque, the city’s historic stretch of Route 66 becomes something more than a transportation corridor: it becomes a stage. Lowriders glide slowly past neon signs and crowded sidewalks, their chrome catching the desert […]
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This is the fifth post in our themed series, Cities at Play. By Ahmadu Abubakar From Playground to Panopticon: Colonial Youth Welfare and the Shaping of Urban Leisure in Lagos and Nairobi In the late 1940s, colonial authorities in Nairobi began to express growing concern about what they referred to as “the presence and increasing […]
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This is the fourth post in our theme series for May, Cities at Play. By Dan Holland This year’s NFL Draft, held in Pittsburgh from April 23rd-25th, attracted an estimated 800,000 fans over three days, a record reinforcing the importance of sport to cities in the post-industrial era. Sport has long been deeply embedded in […]
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This is the third entry in our May series, Cities at Play. By Dr. Ellery Weil In 2005, the London skyline faced a threat to one of its iconic features, in the form of an eviction notice. The target? The London Eye. The Ferris wheel, which had been constructed in honor of the new millennium, […]
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This is the second post in our May theme month, Cities at Play. By Maggie McNulty On November 30, 2022 at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the Interstate 70 (I-70) Cover Park in Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, Governor Jared Polis stated, “This is really a model of innovative solutions, green infrastructure, state of the art technology […]
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This post is the first entry in our May theme month, Cities at Play. By Alexandra Miller The bullet ripped through Max Kaufman. It was a Thursday morning in August 1919, and the twelve-year-old boy was playing in front of his Brooklyn home in the rapidly developing stretch of Snediker Avenue between Dumont and Livonia […]
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By Grace Gillies In the early second century BC, Rome was rocked by a scandal so intense that the consuls decided to pursue investigations instead of leading their foreign campaigns. These investigations led to severe restrictions to the worship of Bacchus (Greek Dionysos) and even the execution of Roman citizens. The Bacchanalian conspiracy has been […]
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This article includes excerpts from A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch andthe Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli and published by OxfordUniversity Press in the US © Caroli 2/2/26. Used by permission. All rightsreserved. Footnotes have been removed to ease reading. Lectures formed the centerpiece of Mary’s days, and she planned carefully to take […]
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By Dan Holland Pittsburgh’s mid-twentieth century renaissance is often hailed as a transformational makeover for a city desperately trying to escape its smoky past. Male leaders such as Pittsburgh Mayor David Lawrence (1889-1966), who would become Pennsylvania’s 37th governor, Richard King Mellon (1899-1970), the Mellon Bank financier, and Edgar Kaufmann (1885-1955), who directed Kaufmann’s Department […]
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