HomeDiagramsDatabaseMapsForum About
     

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > City Discussions


Reply

 
Thread Tools Display Modes
     
     
  #81  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2018, 3:35 PM
Jonesy55 Jonesy55 is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,336
Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023 View Post
The historical center of Dresden was only rebuilt after German re-unification. The communist East German government had just left it empty, or built commie blocks.
The Communist countries did create some awful cheap modernist stuff but they also did restore some old centres very nicely. The Old Town of Warsaw was pretty much completely levelled to the ground in WWII but was then subsequently restored to its previous state.

The city beyond that area though saw a lot of ugly commieblock development.







Reply With Quote
     
     
  #82  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2018, 5:08 PM
MolsonExport's Avatar
MolsonExport MolsonExport is offline
The Vomit Bag.
 
Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: Otisburgh
Posts: 44,722
__________________
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."-President Lyndon B. Johnson Donald Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich man, a weak man's idea of a strong man, and a stupid man's idea of a smart man. Am I an Asseau?
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #83  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2018, 8:08 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 9,787
Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One View Post
It's crazy when you look at old photos of South American cities; holy shit they were gorgeous, almost rivaling Europe in beauty. What happened to all that? I'm sure renewal there must have been very different.
The picture of Rio reminds me of current Buenos Aires. I guess there was more of a preservation effort in Bs As than Brazil. I think North Americans did greater injustices to their cities, though...
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #84  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2018, 8:29 PM
ozone's Avatar
ozone ozone is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Sacramento California
Posts: 2,270
In America racism and greed were the two main underlying causes of the destruction the historic core/neighborhoods. Redevelopment agencies were merely the tool they used.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #85  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2018, 8:34 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 9,787
Here's a good link to show the damage done to the midwest. I think the images of Detroit and St. Louis show the greatest amount of area, and thus the greatest damage: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/

There were at least 200,000 people living in the area captured of Detroit at the time the photo was taken (1951). I would be pleasantly surprised if there are 30,000 people living in that same area today.

For Detroit, the destruction of Black Bottom is probably the most egregious in what would be an encyclopedia of urban planning blunders. Here is Hastings St., pre-construction of I-75:


source: https://wdet.org/posts/2015/10/19/81...for-a-freeway/

That image was taken right about here... https://goo.gl/maps/eM6M9gcCogF2
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #86  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2018, 9:12 PM
Sun Belt Sun Belt is offline
BANNED
 
Join Date: Sep 2017
Location: The Envy of the World
Posts: 4,926

Last edited by Sun Belt; Mar 16, 2018 at 9:24 PM.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #87  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2018, 7:44 AM
LMich's Avatar
LMich LMich is offline
Midwest Moderator - Editor
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Big Mitten
Posts: 31,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
Here's a good link to show the damage done to the midwest. I think the images of Detroit and St. Louis show the greatest amount of area, and thus the greatest damage: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/

There were at least 200,000 people living in the area captured of Detroit at the time the photo was taken (1951). I would be pleasantly surprised if there are 30,000 people living in that same area today.

For Detroit, the destruction of Black Bottom is probably the most egregious in what would be an encyclopedia of urban planning blunders. Here is Hastings St., pre-construction of I-75:


source: https://wdet.org/posts/2015/10/19/81...for-a-freeway/

That image was taken right about here... https://goo.gl/maps/eM6M9gcCogF2
That's Gratiot, isn't it?
__________________
Where the trees are the right height
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #88  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2018, 8:40 AM
Xing's Avatar
Xing Xing is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Posts: 15,857
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
Here's a good link to show the damage done to the midwest. I think the images of Detroit and St. Louis show the greatest amount of area, and thus the greatest damage: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/

There were at least 200,000 people living in the area captured of Detroit at the time the photo was taken (1951). I would be pleasantly surprised if there are 30,000 people living in that same area today.

For Detroit, the destruction of Black Bottom is probably the most egregious in what would be an encyclopedia of urban planning blunders. Here is Hastings St., pre-construction of I-75:


source: https://wdet.org/posts/2015/10/19/81...for-a-freeway/

That image was taken right about here... https://goo.gl/maps/eM6M9gcCogF2
The US went overkill on the interstate creation. Seeing all that was taken to wrap the interstate around Downtown Kansas City is an utter travesty.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #89  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2018, 6:19 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 9,787
Quote:
Originally Posted by LMich View Post
That's Gratiot, isn't it?
Yeah, Gratiot and Hastings St.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #90  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2018, 6:22 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 9,787
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xing View Post
The US went overkill on the interstate creation. Seeing all that was taken to wrap the interstate around Downtown Kansas City is an utter travesty.
Apparently the interstates were not meant to go into cities when it was conceived. This makes sense, as most highway systems in Europe go around the big cities, and the idea was based off of the German autobahn system. But state and local governments in the U.S. wanted the free money from the feds and thus all interstate highways now go through the center of big cities.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #91  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2018, 6:40 PM
mhays mhays is offline
Never Dell
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
Posts: 19,748
It was heavily supported by the sprawl industry, who make a killing in the end. For a period of time it was easy to drive 20 miles out because of the new freeways.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #92  
Old Posted Oct 3, 2018, 3:33 AM
Mr Saturn64's Avatar
Mr Saturn64 Mr Saturn64 is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Nov 2015
Location: Philly
Posts: 1,042
Dammit, Philly!

http://www.westphillylocal.com/2018/...-moving-along/

To be fair, this building has been slowly but surely collapsing for decades. Honestly, I'm impressed it lasted this long. If I recall, a different article said it was at risk in the mid 80s. On a personal note, this was the building that got me interested in Gothic architecture. The first time I saw it, I was on my way to the Phillies game as a kid, and it was one of those days with dark clouds and sunlight. It was a truly unique effect. The crumbling stones glowed in the sunlight, and the spires stuck up into the dark clouds. It was an effect I still remember clearly.

I wish I could've seen it back in the day, but this one was honestly a lost cause. 30 years as a safety hazard+15 years abandoned has one outcome: demolition.
__________________
Go Phillies!⚾ 🦅Fly Eagles Fly!🦅 🏀Trust the Process!🏀 🏒Go Flyers!🏒

Save the SS United States!
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #93  
Old Posted Oct 9, 2018, 12:23 AM
Hindentanic Hindentanic is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Feb 2018
Posts: 77
San Antonio, Texas, has not had as great an opportunity to decimate itself with misguided urban renewal projects in the way that other cities have, but, the city still managed to makes some terrible demolition blunders.

A few that were lost in San Antonio, Texas:





Texas Theatre, (1926-1982)


(Photo from CharmaineZoe's Marvelous Melange on Flickr)


(Photo from UTSA Special Collections)

Once the largest theater in Texas and even billed as the "finest in the South," this in 1926 Spanish Rococo Revival landmark from on San Antonio's bustling Houston St. was demolished during the height of urban stagflation in 1982. Downtown theaters were dilapidating all over the country, and city councils were desperate for any corporate investment that offered the promise of downtown renewal. RepublicBank of Dallas offered to build a corporate office tower, but the theater needed to go. After a protracted legal battle with local preservationists, the city allowed the swift demolition of the theater under the promise that RepublicBank would save the façade:


(Photo by Kevin G. Saunders on GigaPan)


(Photo by Bob Owen for The San Antonio Express-News)


(Photo by Joanne & Tony DiBona Photography)

The contrast of the gaudy theater decoration against the stunningly banal bulk of the office tower perfectly memorializes the architectural travesty. RepublicBank ultimately collapsed during the '80s savings and loan crisis, leaving their boring building. It eventually became the headquarters of SBC, which, having regrown back into today's AT&T, abandoned the tower for sexier corporate digs in Dallas. Downtown areas with interesting histories and urban lifestyle attractions have since become popular again, but we have already shortsightedly lost a key landmark of our downtown urban fabric and replaced it with banality. There had long been hopes of joining the various downtown theaters in San Antonio into a performing arts district, but a key component of that plan, sitting on today's Riverwalk, was long ago sabotaged by a city council futilely hoping to land a big bank.

Ken Erfurth has put together a Flickr album showing the sad destruction of the Texas Theatre: Texas Theatre 1926-1...





Blue Bonnet Hotel (1927-1989)


(Postcard originally published by Hannah-Robinson Color Productions and image hosted on HipPostcard)

One of San Antonio's many historicist revival buildings constructed in the Roaring Twenties, opening in 1929 just in time to meet the Wall Street crash and the resulting Great Depression. By the 1970s and '80s suburban flight had drained downtown, leaving many of these buildings threatened. When the hotel was foreclosed, new owner MBank sought to demolish the building before it could receive a historic protection and leave the site a park until the market could allow for an office tower alongside the nearby Weston Center complex. However, MBank itself also failed as the savings and loan crisis topples banks across the nation, cancelling any lofty plans for the cleared site to become an office tower. It became a parking lot and later a garage.

Local history recounts that the hotel's pioneering recording studio was used in the 1930s for recordings of local and regional singers and musical artists of the country, blues, Hispanic, cowboy, and folk genres of the period. A transmitting aerial allowed for local radio broadcasts.

It looks like any old, prewar downtown building in the U.S., but consider its former urban context and its current status as the site of a parking garage:


(Photo from Lewis F. Fisher, Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage (Trinity University Press, 2016), The Institute of Texan Cultures, and the San Antonio Development Agency)


(Photo by Austin Seymour Masterson and hosted by miaht82 on Flickr)


(Imagery from Google Earth)

The movement now is for downtown residential development, and had we saved this building, not only would we have kept a piece of local history and our historic and photogenic urban fabric, we would also have a potentially choice building to redevelop next to an already successful residential reuse of a historic building. Instead, we have a parking garage desperately trying to be colorful, and lots of brown modern buildings that are ugly as hell and cannot hope match the picturesqueness of the equally brown but far more visually interesting and detailed historic buildings.

We've actually demolished our cityscape, along with its signage and sidewalk canopies, and are only now trying to figure out how to build it back:


(Photo by Zintgraff Studio and hosted on Zintgraff Studio Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections -- Institute of Texan Cultures)

This is so marketable...


(Photo by Mel Koenning for The San Antonio Light and hosted on San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections -- Institute of Texan Cultures)

Unfortunately, half the buildings in the picture above no longer exist.


(Photo from Google Earth)





Katy Depot, Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, (1916-1969)



(Postcard originally by The Fox Company and image from TheAlamoCity.com)


(Photo hosted on ebay.uk)


(Photo from Texas Transportation Museum)


(Photo from Texas Transportation Museum)

San Antonio's south end station serving the regional Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad was a Mission Revival landmark directly modeled after the Spanish colonial Mission Concepción, the city's oldest mission and today a World Heritage site. Locally popular, the railroad's heyday was the diesel era of the 1950s. However, faced with the rapid expansion of the interstate highway network and the development of jet travel, the M-K-T too would struggle through the collapse and consolidation of American railroading companies in the 1970s, and would close this station in 1964.


(Photo from Texas Transportation Museum)

Demolished in 1969, the site of the former Katy Depot, with the railroad yard becoming apartment complexes and the site of the depot main building eventually becoming a La Quinta Inn. Almost all traces of the little depot building have been erased, but remnants of the tracks remain running through middle of the development block following the line of the former terminal station platforms.


(Imagery from Google Earth)

Interesting, San Pedro Creek runs through the middle of the site in a covered trench/tunnel beneath the former rail yard. The creek had long been relegated to an ugly drainage ditch, but it is now slowly being redeveloped as a linear park paralleling the more famous Riverwalk. I do not know what is the planned for the creek project at this block, but it would have been interesting if, had the picturesque depot not been demolished, the preserved building could be integrated as a community landmark into the linear park project. If I really wanted to dream, a reconstruction of the depot would become the southern downtown light rail station, part of a ring of historic Mission Revival style stations that would also include the surviving former eastside Sunset Station and the westside International & Great Northern Depot, both of which are already being targeted as transit centers. From the first old photo we can even see the catenary lines of the old streetcar system, which connected the stations and downtown together in an integrated and comprehensive transit system. Oh well, water under the bridge now--or maybe, more accurately, water under the rail tracks.

This could have been a charming modern transit hub, but, instead we now just have yet another anonymous, nondescript suburban block.


(Photo from Google Earth)


(Poster art by Bern Hill and hosted on Texas Transportation Museum)
Reply With Quote
     
     
End
 
 
Reply

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > City Discussions
Forum Jump


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 3:24 PM.

     
SkyscraperPage.com - Archive - Privacy Statement - Top

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.