Kenyon-Barr was the name city planners gave to a section of Cincinnati’s West End, a dense, mostly Black working-class neighborhood pressed into the flat basin between downtown and the Mill Creek valley. By the mid-20th century it was one of the most densely populated residential areas in the country, a mix of rowhouses, tenements, corner…
In St. Louis, a few blocks from where the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project once stood before its decline and demolition in the 1970s, another public housing development from the same era is still standing today, functioning much as it was designed to. Pruitt-Igoe was, for decades, the most cited failure in American public housing: 33…
On Cass Avenue in north St. Louis, directly across the street from what was once the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a small one-story brick building stood for decades after the towers came down. It had been a family deli, then an anti-poverty station, then an abandoned commercial building without a roof on a block that time…
Buffalo’s waterfront along the City Ship Canal was once one of the most important grain handling corridors in the world. Grain elevators were invented in Buffalo in the 1840s, and at its peak the city was one of the biggest grain ports in the world, receiving tons of wheat from Midwestern farms via the Great…
On the west side of Cleveland, tucked between residential streets and Interstate 480, there is an 80-acre wetland that most people who live nearby have never visited; and, under current rules, cannot enter. Birders know it well. They park along West 145th Street facing north and scan the area from behind a chain-link fence. They…
In May 2025, construction crews broke ground on the restoration of Detroit’s Lee Plaza, a 15-story Art Deco tower on West Grand Boulevard that had sat vacant and deteriorating for nearly three decades. The restoration, led by the Roxbury Group, Ethos Development Partners, and Lighthouse, carries a $60 million price tag and a completion date…
Cheez-Its are a popular snack, but most people eating them have no idea where they came from. The answer is a factory on the corner of Cincinnati and Concord Streets in Dayton, Ohio, once surrounded by a dense working-class neighborhood. It employed generations of workers and still stands today, but the company is long gone,…