Vincent_G

Thanks for this set of pictures, a good overview of downtown Syracuse. Besides the Syracuse Savings Bank Building depicted in the postcard above, Joseph Silsbee also designed the White Memorial Building, which is the red-brick building shown in the last photo of the set, as well as the Amos Block, the building shown further up with a Waldorf Commissary sign on one of its wings. The Amos Block is a late example of a double-ender, canal-era buildings that had plain fronts facing the canal and more ornate sides facing the street. By the time the Amos Block was built in 1870, the canals were losing their importance but still had a few decades of life left in them. Luckily, despite great losses in the urban renewal years, there are still many canal-related buildings standing in downtown Syracuse.

Downtown Elgin looks much healthier than it did when I last saw it in the 1980s. Its riverside location gives it some topographic relief, which is nice to come across in the flatlands of northeastern Illinois.

Even though I am late to this discussion, I feel I should comment. I just found out today about Bob dying. It didn't surprise me to come across this news, but it still hit me with a jolt. I knew Bob Pence from my years living in Fort Wayne. For most of my seven years there, I lived in West Central, which was his neighborhood and one of the best neighborhoods anywhere. Bob was the kind of person who was always present when I was talking with him, and I always appreciated his including me in his various photo documentation projects. I'm sad that I'll never see him again and am glad to have known him. His death is certainly a loss for the UO World, which reminds me that once, while chatting with Bob at one of the annual Gay Lesbian Dinner Dances in Fort Wayne, I asked him for some photography advice. One thing he told was that a good thing to keep in mind when taking pictures is what you want the pictures to accomplish. Because he knew I was living in Cleveland, he suggested I consider the work of MayDay as something to aspire to.

I think the plan for the Cleveland Rocks wall is one of the most inane proposals I have ever heard about. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a great asset to the region and everyone loves a good concert, but we are no more a city of people jumping around at rock concerts than any other city. I think the wall, as proposed, would be an embarrassment.

That two-toned building on the corner is really something.

Beautiful. Thanks.

I am also a fan of brutalist architecture but agree that something is off about the Newark City Hall. It's too symmetrical and the top is too flat. One of my favorites is the main library in Niagara Falls: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aneurysm9/2402579762/#.

Wow. Newark could really be something with a little love and attention.

I think the land that was cleared for Albany's Empire State Plaza was on the edge of downtown rather than in a place where large downtown buildings would have been displaced. Still, I know that thousands of residents were displaced and that more than 1,000 buildings were removed for the project, which was originally known as the South Mall. As I recall, part of the impetus for the project was to reestablish downtown Albany as the center of state government. Downtown's central role had been eroded by the development of an office park known as the State Campus. If I am not mistaken, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller stated that the South Mall would give Albany the grandeur of a European capital. Instead it gave it more of a Brasilia flair. The story of Empire State Plaza is horrifying in some ways, and, while I don't at all deny what was lost to bring it about, I can't help myself in finding it striking or even beautiful at this point in time. Despite the imposition of the plaza, Albany is not one of the cities whose entire downtown was wiped out in the urban renewal area. Albany is very old by upstate NY and American standards. Its city charter dates to 1686.

I have always liked those two art deco towers in Battle Creek. Luckily they're not in Springfield.

Those two cities--Benton Harbor and St. Joseph--taken together constitute one of the strangest places I've been to. Downtown Benton Harbor at first glance appears to be substantially abandoned, but, over the past several years, I've noticed that at least a few buildings, including one of the big ones, have been rehabbed, and last summer I noticed that Whirlpool is building a large complex west of downtown which it is calling its Downtown Benton Harbor Campus. It's not really in what I think most people would call downtown, though, and it is as close to being in St. Joseph as you can be while still being in Benton Harbor. Downtown St. Joseph, which is in hiking distance of downtown Benton Harbor, is enviably prosperous by comparison to not only Benton Harbor but to almost any other city of comparable size. The role of the Mary's City of David community (http://www.maryscityofdavid.org/) in the history of these peculiar twin cities adds to the mystery.

Thanks! Beautiful.

I think this is a great post, and it brings to light the dismal condition of many of the great old buildings in Cleveland and East Cleveland. I also think it's silly to say that Cleveland and East Cleveland are two different places. Yes, they may be separate municipalities, but there's no greenbelt or moat between them. I think chronicling the gradual disappearance of some of our great neighborhoods, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of the completely artificial borders of the City of Cleveland is important.

I agree with you about the streetscape enhancements that accompanied the opening of the surface portion of Buffalo's light rail line in the mid-1980s. Even by the standards of back then, I thought it all looked very cheap. It has the look of the festival-marketplace era. Now, though, there is a plan to reopen Main St. to car traffic on a block-by-block basis, so that cars and trains will travel in the same pathways. I have mixed feelings about the mixed traffic, but I'm hopeful that the opportunity will be taken to seriously reconsider the decorations. Overall, I am a longtime, ardent fan of the Buffalo subway.

I have been fascinated by Scranton and Wilkes-Barre for as long as I can remember. That region has lost more than a few hundred thousand people since the 1930s and yet it looks great. I think the lack of prosperity during the urban renewal era saved the cities from the worst ravages of those times, and the natural setting is just phenomenal.

Before I saw your pictures, I had no image of Bowling Green whatsoever in my head. It looks like an interesting town. That courthouse is a knockout. Thanks.

Lakewood is in the top tier when it comes to public transit access to downtown Cleveland, even if it isn't as rail-oriented as other parts of town. The 26 bus, which runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (366 this year), runs right through the middle of town, west to east. Also, both Buffalo and Pittsburgh have suburbs that are more densely populated than Lakewood, but they are much smaller.

Here is an interesting NYT article about Rochester: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/nyregion/despite-long-slide-by-kodak-rochester-avoids-decay.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

Wow! That is amazing. Also, thanks for the summary of Toledo's historical eras.

C-Dawg, you are so right in that Rochester is not a lake town in the traditional sense of the concept. Even though its city limits touch Lake Ontario, it is really more of a river town than a lake town! It is not a rectangular city hugging the shore like so many of the Great Lakes cities are, and you are right that its port is incidental. Like its sister city Syracuse (which is 40 miles off Lake Ontario), though, it is a lake town in that it was swept up by the economic power unleashed by the Erie Canal, which transferred much economic momentum from the river cities to the lake cities. Toledo is also an outlier among the Great Lakes cities--wouldn't you agree?--in that its grand waterfront is along the Maumee and not Lake Erie. I continue to disagree with you, however, about Rochester's economy. I think it is astonishingly robust considering the fall of Kodak, and, despite the loss of more than 50,000 jobs at that one company, Rochester is simply not in a position where it has to look to nontraditional industries, such as tourism, to survive economically.

I partly agree but mostly disagree with C-Dawg's assessment of Rochester. It doesn't remind me of Toledo much at all, though of course the two cities have experienced similar challenges over the last several decades, and both have become more dependent on their education and health-care industries. A difference is that Rochester's two universities and main hospital are all private institutions. The city of Rochester itself is much smaller geographically than the city of Toledo--less than half the size--so it is hard to compare the two entities directly. At the metropolitan level, Rochester has not grown dramatically in recent decades but it has also not lost population, and Monroe County (NY), the core of the metropolitan area, recorded its highest population ever in census 2010. I don't know how Toledo compares in this regard, though I know that Lucas County has lost population over the past few decades. It is hard to measure Toledo as a metropolitan community, I think, because its official MSA does not include Monroe County (MI), as arguably it should. The weather in Rochester is not that much different from the cities along Lake Erie in Ohio. It gets more snow, true, but, if you love winter, as many people do, that is not a drawback. It is also certainly true that the countryside around Rochester is beautiful, and this is no less true in winter than in summer. The drumlin field between Rochester and Syracuse, of which Chimney Bluffs (mentioned by C-Dawg) is one small part, is among the largest in the world. I also don't think that Rochester itself is any more car dependent than most other places. True, it has areas of vast suburban sprawl, as do all of Ohio's cities, but, notably, Rochester's transit system carries as many passengers in a given year as much-larger Columbus's and several times as many as Toledo's. Whether the city of Rochester's decline is permanent is hard to know.

This tells a little about the Powers Building and its cladding: http://rocwiki.org/Powers_Building

It's no secret that Kodak is struggling, and Rochester has taken the brunt of its decline, but it's important to note that Rochester is not solely dependent on Kodak. Metropolitan Rochester has adjusted to the loss of over 50,000 Kodak jobs since 1980 remarkably well. I am not an expert on its economy and haven't lived there since my college days at RIT, but I find its economic stability to be nothing short of amazing. I believe that many people are now working in smaller companies that have their roots in Kodak and other companies, such as Xerox, with large local presences. This article from the Rochester Business Journal is interesting: http://www.rbj.net/print_article.asp?aID=188999.

Rochester is an interesting city. Its downtown, which is noosed off from the rest of the city by the Inner Loop expressway, really seems to have struggled in recent years, and I think the recent demolition of the Victor Gruen-designed Midtown Plaza was sad, though I am glad the Midtown Tower, shown in ink's photos in its current skeletal state, was spared. It's also possible that the rebuilt street network in the former Midtown footprint will be good for downtown in the long run. Rochester has more than its share of great streets and phenomenal neighborhoods and is unique among the larger upstate cities in that you would never be likely to pass through it on an Interstate highway on the way to someplace else. You have to make a point of going there if you're driving by on I-90, which skirts Rochester's sprawling southern suburbs. What I find most amazing about present-day metropolitan Rochester is that it is holding its own economically, despite the massive downsizing of Eastman Kodak over the past 30 years. I think that Kodak employed as many as 60,000 in Rochester around 1980 and heard recently that it is down to around 7,000.

Downtown White Plains appears prosperous but visually unappealing.