Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

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

Rust Wire was able to spend a few minutes recently chatting with Brian O’Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and, author of the new book “The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century.”
I liked that the book details all of what O’Neill loves about Pittsburgh, but has a very realistic assessment of the city’s problems.
For a more detailed review, read what the Pittsburgh City Paper had to say here.
Rust Wire: “What’s right and what’s wrong about Pittsburgh?”

Brian O’Neill: “I would say that’s what right about it is - as I …

Rust Wire is pleased to share an interview with Greg Ames, the author of Buffalo Lockjaw, a fantastic novel mostly set in Buffalo.
Here’s a passage:
“Turned out that Buffalonians loved talking about Buffalo, especially during happy hour, which lasted from five o’clock to midnight. Many of them felt an immense tenderness for this town. They were proud and protective of Buffalo. They dipped their pizza crusts in puddles of blue cheese and argued about where to find the best chicken wings in the city. They celebrated happy hour most nights and …

The Daily Beast is carrying an article today celebrating the 16th anniversary of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides, a dark, whimsical, coming-of-age story set in suburban Detroit.
Eugenides, a Detroit native, later went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling Middlesex, which also features the Motor City prominently, from the early days of immigrant tenements to red-lining, the race riots, and suburbanization.
The Virgin Suicides offers an exceptional descriptions of Detroit in its heyday; Middlesex an account of the tumultuous series of events that have made it the city it is today.
In …

Rust Wire is excited to share our recent interview with author John Hoerr.
Hoerr spent decades working as a labor journalist, covering labor in the era when unions were much larger and organized labor often made big news. His most well-known work is And the Wolf Finally Came, which is an in-depth, yet easy to read chronicle of the decline of the American steel industry in the 1980s, focusing on the Monongahela Valley. (For all you non-Pittsburgh readers, the Mon Valley is where the Monongahela River flows, through Pittsburgh, and …

An economic slump.
Detroit and the auto industry in crisis.
The country taking a hard look at its dependence on foreign oil.
No, I’m not talking about the current crisis we’re engulfed in. Author David Halberstam described this very situation in his 1986 work The Reckoning.

As promised, here is the second part of our interview with journalist and author Alex Kotlowitz, who is speaking Monday in Cleveland. 

Rust Wire was thrilled to be able to interview Alex Kotlowitz, one of our nation’s best journalists about urban issues and problems. Kotlowitz will be speaking Monday at Cleveland State’s Levin College Forum. Kotlowitz penned the New York Times story “All Boarded Up,’ about foreclosure in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. He also authored “There are no Children Here,” the story of two boys growing up in one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects. Here’s the first part of our conversation: