Check out this video tribute to Cleveland’s Randall Park Mall, recently listed on the Huffington Post’s America’s Most Abandoned Places.

I especially dig the Edward DeBartolo intro, where he claims prophetically that downtown will decline and the suburbs will rise. What is the next frontier for Cleveland? Will it continue to be farther out into farmlands? Will a return to the city really take hold in greater Cleveland like it has in more prosperous metros? Who is the Edward DeBartolo (Youngstown) of today? What would he say? Would he even bother …

This post was originally published on panethos.wordpress.com.
Kudos to Carmel. No…I am not talking about Carmel, California, which is indeed a gorgeous town overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In this case I am complimenting  Carmel, Indiana, a large suburb of approximately 80,000 residents located just north of Indianapolis. When I was growing up in Indy (way back when), Carmel was largely nondescript,  with sprawling subdivisions across cornfields. It was best known for powerhouse football and basketball teams and the Carmel movie theater (sadly no longer there). The downtown area at the time was very small …

Thirty years ago, I took a trip with my dad and brother to downtown Cleveland to watch two old buildings get blown up. The event was billed as a momentous milestone, but to me it seemed more like a natural disaster. A tsunami of dust swept towards us and, within seconds, I lost them in the crowd.

Check out the work being done by the folks at the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which they highlighted in this video.
Learn more about their history and their work downtown, which has gotten some recent publicity.
-KG
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Missouri, I know you’ve been walloped by decades of deindustrialization and now the Great Recession. You’re being forced to make some terrible choices when it comes to your state budget. On the chopping block is your historic preservation tax credit. It may seem trite to cry for the potential loss of this program. I mean, shouldn’t you be spending taxpayer money on schools and roads and bridges? Yes, but hold on a second. You need to think this through. Where are your historic structures? In the middle of your cities! For the last 50 years, people have been abandoning your cities for the suburbs. In the meantime, you’ve had to build new roads, install new water and sewer lines, build new schools, and take care of this more spread-out infrastructure. Those buildings in the middle of your cities are worth keeping around. Worth investing in. They’re your history. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore and it’s not going to be cheap to fix them. But it’s worth it. Here’s why:

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of joining a group of Pittsburghers for an Urban Hike in Swissvale, a borough just outside the city with an interesting history.
Some stops along the way included the Trundle Manor, Kopp Glass and some affordable housing for sale from the Mon Valley Initiative.

Also on the journey: The Triangle Bar, home of the famous “Battleship” (giant sub sandwich).
Urban Hike is a group that regularly organizes hikes in the city’s various neighborhoods and surrounding communities, with stops along the way so participants can learn about what …

This multimedia project by student journalist Estelle Tran highlights two former church sites in Pittsburgh that have now been converted into other uses – one a brew pub and the other a concert venue and recording studio.
Places like this are what I love about Pittsburgh!
Any other good converted churches in your community?
-KG
 
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It is a timeless meme: a thing genuine (if not flashy) giving in to the allure of being something “better”, “cool”, or more exactly: something that you’re not. The meme usually ends badly, however—with the resultant flash simply a facade that cannot cover up the authenticity that was traded away.

Enter, then, the history of Cleveland’s Downtown redevelopment. It began with the Erieview urban renewal plan by I. M. Pei.  Demolished was urban fabric for the hope that we’d become more like New York. A master plan was made, a skyscraper was …

It’s that time of year again, guys! That time of year where I have an uncontrolled aneurysm as the result of the stupidity of Cleveland Magazine’s anticipated “Rating the Suburbs” issue.

Every year this plastic-surgeon-supported pamphlet makes a list of the most car-centric, culturally vapid, soulless tract-housing white-people ghettos in Northeast Ohio. Whichever suburb is the whitest, with the most big-box stores, is generally the runaway favorite for top prize.

Case in point is this year’s winner: Richfield Village. Does anyone want to guess what the racial makeup of this community is? Come on, guess! At the last Census, the village of Richfield was 96% white and 2% African American. You’d be hard pressed to find a whiter place in the region.

A reporter from a local radio station recently interviewed me for a story about “urban pioneers.”

I didn’t think much of it, until I started reading this amazing book called Missing Women, Missing News. Turns out, this term is based on some pretty suspect assumptions about cities and the people who inhabit them.

Author David Hugill points out that the term “pioneer” symbolizes a “frontier,” or sharp physical or social divide, between competing constituencies. In the case he explores in his book, the competing constituencies are the wealthy gentrifiers of Vancouver and the poor residents of the city’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood.