How the Wisconsin Dells Turned Nature Into the Ultimate Indoor Destination

November 11, 2025.Reading time 41 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the third installment in The Metropole’s theme for November: Metropolitan Consumption. All other entries for the theme can be found here. By Matthew King On any given day, in any season or weather, the Wisconsin Dells’ indoor water parks are voracious, consuming over 16 million gallons of water and untold megawatts […]

Constructing the “Fresh Coast”: Water and the Reinvention of the Post-Industrial City

April 23, 2025.Reading time 36 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the seventh post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here. By Michael Carriere On December 3, 2008, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett appeared at a day-long symposium on “concentrated poverty” in America, held at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. Barrett told […]

City Afloat: Rethinking the “Other” Side of Canton, 1757-1949

April 22, 2025.Reading time 32 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the sixth post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here. By Qingyun Lin There is no spectacle in the world more wonderful to a stranger’s eyes than the river population of the Celestial Empire.[1]—Osmond Tiffany (1823-1895) In May 1844, Osmond Tiffany—a […]

Call for Papers: Metropole Theme Months 2025

December 3, 2024.Reading time 6 minutes.

With 2024 just about in the rear view mirror, The Metropole’s editorial staff wanted to let our readers know that we have three theme months planned for the first half of 2025. Check out our calls below and drop us a line at themetropole@urbanhistory.org if you have a pitch for us! The City and Film […]

San Diego’s South Bay Annexation of 1957: Water Insecurity, Territorial Expansion, and the Making of a US-Mexico Border City

February 21, 2024.Reading time 43 minutes.

Editor’s note: In anticipation of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History’s (SACRPH) 2024 conference to be held in San Diego on the campus of the University of California San Diego, The Metropole’s theme for February is San Diego. This is the third of four entries for the month. For more information about […]