Rust Wire is proud to present The Big Urban Photography Project art show, featuring photographic interpretations of Rust Belt cities as seen through the eyes of their young residents. The show is the result of a multi-year collaborative media project that called on the region’s best documentary and fine arts photographers.
Over two years, we asked for open submissions of photography highlighting the unique blend of despair and hope in a number of cities. Dozens of amateur and professional photographers submitted images of Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago, Grand …

The Buffalo News reports The Travel Channel will feature Buffalo this summer in an hour-long show that has yet to be named.
The show’s host told the paper:
“It kind of awes me that much of the country, like myself, is in the dark as far as what Buffalo means in the evolution of the United States. Buffalo was such a profound part of this nation. If I can do a television show that has any part in teaching that, that’s terrific.”
The series features places that are off-limits …

Editor’s note: Our faithful readers will note we recently featured a short post with a trailer and some information about a new documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which deals with an infamous public housing complex in St. Louis, built in the 1950s and torn down in 1972.

The film’s director, Chad Freidrichs, recently spoke with Rust Wire about this myth and the film it inspired.
Watch the trailer for the movie here. Check out its Flickr page, with great historical photos here. Read more about the complex and its history here.
And …

St. Louis’ notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project is memorialized in a documentary that will premier this weekend at the Oxford, Mississippi Film Festival.
The documentary explores the famous housing project’s celebrated beginnings and spectacular unraveling, set against the background of a city following a similar trajectory.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History – Film Trailer from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.
A few words from the creators:
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing …

These photos were taken by Nate Schneekloth, a Buffalo resident and amateur photographer.

In his own words: Photographs taken while touring the Marine A, Perot and American/Peavy grain elevators along the Buffalo River in Buffalo, New York. My mother is a great fan & champion for preserving & restoring these architectural giants. I was lucky enough to be able to tag along as she brought a few colleagues through the buildings.

I recently read an article about these elevators, written be Ed Glaeser–Harvard economist and Buffalo nemesis.

In the article, Glaeser holds up the elevators a symbol of Buffalo’s once mighty economy …

Take a look at the pieces created by Buffalo artist Dennis Maher using materials salvaged from demolished buildings.

The Baltimore native came to Buffalo eight years ago and finds the city to be a very inspiring place, he said in an interview with Rust Wire.

“There are very few places where I could do the kind of work I’m doing here,” working with debris, Maher said.

When he first came to Buffalo, he worked on a demolition crew to earn extra income.

His interest in demolition has different aspects, he said: the physicality of it, the political aspect of it as a development strategy, and as a process of erasure.

So when I was writing ineptly about Buffalo architecture. Well, this is was what I meant to say:

Thanks to David A. Steele, a buffalo architect (!!) of the Muller+Muller.
Aren’t architects the greatest?
-A.S.
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This nice thing about blogging is that sometimes, people say exactly what you have been thinking, only they say it much more beautifully than you ever could.

So I have to thank Dotage St. Louis for writing this sorrowful and balanced post on demolition–or more specifically one Rust Belt city’s complicated relationship with destruction.

The author, Matt M., starts with a comparison of Baltimore and St. Louis:

I got to thinking: how has Baltimore not torn out more of these rows and created park space or built new housing or just left them fallow, waiting for a time when investment would bring something new?

If you are in Pittsburgh Saturday afternoon, check out Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City, screening at The Carnegie Museum of Art at 3 p.m.
Burnham was “one of America’s most important architects and urban planners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
-KG
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Clevelanders: This sounds like a great film screening to attend- The Olmsted Legacy: a film about Frederick Law Olmsted and America’s great city parks.
Lots of people know Olmsted as the landscape architect of New York’s Central Park, but he designed nearly 100 public parks in his lifetime.
You likely have even been in a park he designed – in any one of Buffalo’s system of parks, Belle Isle Park in Detroit, as well as parks in Chicago, Milwaukee, Dayton and Scranton.
“The parks, he held, were to be vital democratic spaces in …