The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Katie Uva In an essay first published in The New York Times in 2001, Colson Whitehead wrote, “You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it.” I started building my private New York at the top of a hill, one of the several that gave my neighborhood, Forest […]
Read More
Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Reviewed by Vita Baselice When I proposed to organize a symposium on the topic of race and architecture, I received some resistance. One colleague asked […]
Read More
Our second entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Willa Granger, who transports us to 1970s Texas to show how older Texans were stretching to their financial and economic limits to retain their mobility and independence. In the third week of September 1970, the Nixon Administration, in tandem with state […]
Read More
Yanni, Carla. Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Reviewed by Jim Wunsch After leaving for college, students may discover that the campus, if not exactly like those depicted in Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, is in certain respects like a city neighborhood. If […]
Read More
By Thai Jones Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna. Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Union Square today displays an extraordinary mania for subdivision. Its ten acres have been hardscaped by fencing and concrete into a multitude of distinct levels and impermeable zones. On the surface, these choices appear […]
Read More
By Steven Tischler Goldberger, Paul. Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Paul Goldberger deftly analyzes changing relationships between professional baseball and urban environments from the mid-19th century to the present day in Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. Goldberger uses ballparks as a lens through which to observe and […]
Read More
The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. Goodwin, David. Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street. New York: Empire State Publishing, 2017. By David Goodwin Jersey City, New […]
Read MoreThe Washington, DC Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians will be hosting a two-day symposium on the topic of Race, Ethnicity, and Architecture in the Nation’s Capital, April 18-19, 2020 at the Catholic University School of Architecture and Planning. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr. Amber Wiley of Rutgers University, a […]
Read More
By Kuukuwa Manful It is commonly thought that Accra, like many other African cities, has an architectural “identity crisis”[1] because “if you look at the city, there’s nothing that tells you where we were, where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.”[2] This view, echoed in both academic and popular discourse, is held […]
Read More
Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin By Tyler Carrington. Oxford University Press, 2019 An inquiry into the sometimes risky ways of finding love in the big city. The 1914 murder of […]
Read More