Rust Wire has previously highlighted Donald Carter, the David Lewis Director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. (Take a look at our prior post on Carter’s efforts to trade the term “Rust Belt” for “Water Belt” and change “Sun Belt” into “Drought Belt.”)
Here’s a piece by Carter from Sunday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette discussing The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, which took place last month with mayors from Springfield, Illinois; Elkhart, Indiana; Canton, Ohio; Charleston and Huntington, West Virginia; Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin.
See if you agree with …

The Pittsburgh City Council voted unanimously yesterday to approve landmark historic status for the Iron City Brewery in the Lawrenceville neighborhood.
Earlier in the month, the city’s Historic Review Commission voted in favor of the designation, as the Post-Gazette reported.
The brewery currently sits vacant. Last year, Iron City Brewing Co. closed this plant and moved all operations to Latrobe.
Planners hope this compound and collection of historic buildings will become the sight of a mixed-use development.
The timing of this designation comes just weeks after a developer announced plans to infill neighboring Doughboy …

You may have already seen this USA Today story on a suburban Atlanta congregation that wants to purchase a closed Buffalo church, take it apart, ship it to Georgia and rebuild it there.
Some groups say it is a great way to preserve an otherwise vacant and unused structure. (The Diocese closed the church in 2008 because of declining enrollment - an issue many of our cities have faced that we’ve written about on this blog before.) You can see the web site for the parish that wants to bring the …

Check out this recent column by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill.

He interviews ‘burgh native Don Carter, who recently retired president of Urban Design Associates and was named director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

For years, Carter tells O’Neill, he has hated the term “Rust Belt.” And he’s trying to get folks to start calling …the “Water Belt.”

In place of “Sun Belt?” Try “Drought Belt.” Cities here, Carter writes, “are low-density, auto-dependent, and survive on ever diminishing supplies of

Let me start by saying I’m a little bit biased because my house is on this street. But I think an impartial observer would agree that Franklin Boulevard is probably the most important historic street on Cleveland’s west side.
See for yourself:

The street runs from W. 25th in Ohio City through the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood and into Cudell. In between there are dozens of beautifully restored Victorian homes. Most range in origin from the mid-1800s to early in the 20th Century.

The most famous of these is probably Franklin Castle (pictured above), …

Reading the Digging Pitt blog recently, I want to second their call to have Pittsburgh (or any other Rust Belt city, for that matter) host a Jane’s Walk - a neighborhood walk in the spirit of urban thinker Jane Jacobs.
A number of other cities have done this and Pittsburgh - or Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, etc. - should all jump on the bandwagon.
Volunteer guides lead tours of various neighborhoods. From Digging Pitt, “Some tours focus on heritage sites, while others explore the nooks and crannies of the city. From great hangouts …

Reading this Wall Street Journal piece about “pranksters” causing “mischief” in Detroit’s abandonded buildings totally pissed me off.
It sounded more like wanton destruction for the sake of destruction to me.
The article details how this group used sledgehammers to break down this wall and push a truck out of a fourth story window in the old Packard plant (a site we’ve previously highlighted on this blog). They even videotaped their caper.
I don’t fault people for wanting to go inside and explore these old structures - I’ve done it myself. But wrecking …

At some point in the Cleveland’s history, it must have been home to some of the finest stonemasons and ironworkers in the world.

Now that working stonemasons and ironworkers–craftsmen–are mainly a thing of the past, their legacy endures and continues to add character, beauty and sometimes even humor to the Cleveland streetscape.

I’ve been meaning to do this blog post since I began this blog early this year but until last week I was lacking a functional camera.

The city of Youngstown is experiencing another arson spree, this time though the crime is personal for many city activists.
A historic mansion in the Wick park neighborhood was burned a few weeks ago, according to the Youngstown Renaissance blog.
Instances of Arson are familiar in the city, however, many city boosters are outraged because there was talk of renovating the particular house and the Wick Park neighborhood is the site of an ongoing revitalization campaign that is seen as crucial to stabilizing downtown and Youngstown State University area.
The fire was part …

I spent a great Sunday afternoon exploring what is surely one of Pittsburgh’s coolest neighborhoods - the South Side Slopes.
I was there as part of the StepTrek, an annual event that celebrates the neighborhood and raises funds for improvements and projects.
For those unfamiliar with the topography, Pittsburgh is a hilly city with numerous sets of steps (which are actual legal streets) -documented in this book.
The annual StepTrek gives participants maps and suggests they walk along one of several courses- seeing Realtor open houses, neighborhood churches, memorials, parks, an art studio, …