History and preservation

When paired with vintage images of the 19th and 20th centuries, Arizona photographers Allen Dutton and Paul Scharbach's modern-day images reveal the changes that have shaped the state's landscape during the past 100-plus years. They searched the state to locate the precise spots from which to rephotograph the scenes captured by their predecessors, endeavoring to achieve the same angles, perspectives, and lighting as in the early photographs.

From Cyburbian jsk1983: Marktown was (is) a planned industrial community located in the city of East Chicago, Indiana approximately 22 miles from Chicago's loop. Clayton Mark, of the Mark Manufacturing Company was a member of the Chicago Commercial Club which commissioned a study to discover why there was such a high turnover of industrial employees. What the study found was that there was a lack of quality, affordable housing for workers and their families. With this in mind Mark commissioned Howard Van Doren Shaw, a prominent Chicago architect to design a town that would meet the needs of his workers. The result was Marktown which was built in 1917.

Early in the 20th century, staggeringly high turnover in industrial jobs provoked studies and surveys. Lack of quality housing in industrial areas emerged as a primary reason for the costly labor force turnover. Industrialist Clayton Mark commissioned famed Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw to create housing that addressed the needs and desires of his steel workers. Shaw designed Marktown (http://www.marktown.org), a complete village. An intact English Garden City sandwiched between giant steel mills and refineries, the 1917 planned community retains all 218 of the original structures. A unique and unexpected place, Marktown’s European-patterned streets are so narrow that cars park on the sidewalk and people walk in the roadway.

From Cyburbian Suburb Repairman: We have five historic districts established in our city. For each of these districts and their surroundings, we have a historic resources survey of structures. We use this document heavily when considering Certificates of Appropriateness, district expansions, etc. There are several vacant properties that are adjacent to existing districts or in reasonable proximity.

Has anyone performed an analysis of vacant properties just outside a district for inclusion in the district? These are properties that my training in planning tells me should be in a district, but I don't have much historic preservation expertise--at least not enough for our city attorney to be totally comfortable without some back-up. If anyone could suggest some resources, articles, etc that discuss considerations for including vacant property in a historic district, I'd love those as well.

From Cyburbian michaelskis: I was wondering if anyone has any examples (text and links) of some phenomenally successful neighborhood redevelopment plans. The neighborhood that I live in is going to start the process of creating goals and objectives for the board and staff. Several people have asked me about the idea up doing a total update for neighborhood redevelopment plan which would be able to provide a better direction than the previous plan. The previous plan talks about some idea and generalizations, but provides very limited direction in the way of goals, objectives, or areas of focus.

From Cyburbian PresPlanGirl: I am sure that I am not alone here with having a preservation board that doesn't always stay on-task with the public hearing protocol. We see a combination of debate on the merits of preservation theory, the merits of an application, and other issues between fellow board members and applicants. We also have a highly educated, highly qualified membership that can lead to an over-involvement in a design and tendency to nitpick or require improvements beyond the minimum necessary to meet the guidelines.

Aside from my selfish desire to not have to sit through long, needlessly drawn out meetings, I am concerned with the legal ramifications if this is ever called out in a court case. How do you train a board to rely solely on the Design Guidelines in making a decision and end the nonsense without just ending up with a hostile board during those long drawn out meetings? Their hearts are in the right place but that won't be enough in the courtroom.

No, today's Site of the Day has nothing to do with big box stores. Decades before ground was broken on Celebration, Walt Disney had plans for a futuristic experimental city he called EPCOT. As built, today's EPCOT is quite different than the "Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow" Disney first had in mind. Waltopia (http://www.waltopia.com) is a site that showcases Disney's original plans for EPCOT, a city "that would incorporate the best ideas of industry, government, and academia worldwide".

From Cyburbian graciela: We are having some issues with one of our more signature areas of town and are researching solutions. There are a number of historic homes occupied by fraternities, sororites and "light professional" uses along the corridor. We are trying to figure a way to protect the character of the area as a whole and work on getting individual property owners to pursue local historic designation.

I have been reading through the archives and trying to find information about special district overlays. I ran across Architectural Conservation Areas during my search and really like the concept. I am wondering if there is a good way to marry the idea of ACAs with SDOs and maybe add some form based code for good measure? Are there some good examples out there that I can share with the leadership here?

From Cyburbian ablarc: Adolf loved architecture. It was his first choice for an occupation. Because they wouldn’t accept him to study architecture, he decided to try his hand at ruling the world. They should have accepted him in architecture school.

After he got started down the road to ruling the world, Adolf could do anything he wanted--including architecture—but now that he was busy preparing to rule the world he just didn’t have the time; preparing to rule the world took all his waking hours. So he got his good buddy, Albert, who had been allowed to study architecture, to do it for him.

Trulia Hindsight (http://hindsight.trulia.com) is an animated map of homes in the United States from the Web 2.0 real estate site Trulia. The animations use the year the properties were built to show the growth of streets, neighborhoods and cities over time.. A slider control lets you see when the majority of development occurred, pause on a specific time frame or focus on only homes built before or after specific years. Very, very cool. There's some other neat tools on Trulia, such as real estate price heat maps.

From Cyburbian TrianglePlanner99: I have recently moved into a small town near the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) in North Carolina.

This town has a terrific historic downtown, with 1 and 2-story storefronts dating from the early part of the 20th century. Many have ground floor level retail tenants, though almost none of the second stories are occupied. Most of these second story spaces were historically home to offices, and can be accessed from doors on the street.

The owners of the buildings, for their part, are happy to collect retail rents and not use this second story space, however. Further, most of these owners are reluctant to invest in this vacant space, though I believe these spaces would make a great candidates for new loft apartments. Which brings me to my question:

From Cyburbian jsk1983: I found this book at the Walden Super-Flea. While Mark Goldman's book mentioned that their was a proposed Music Hall for Humboldt Park I had never before seen any pictures of it. E. B. Green was the architect and this was proposed to be connected to the Science Museum. I've scanned most of the book (minus the list of patrons). Enjoy.

Urban Development Timeline (http://urbantimeline.org) examines the iterative relationship of development within a specific period and across time, sharing urban development lessons learned from the past with the present and into the 21st Century. Timelines displayed include those for United States, South Africa and international experiences.

From Cyburbian rsmith23: Here's a very interesting article on how Cambodia's 400 square mile (1,000 km²) ancient capital city, Angkor Wat, depleted itself of its surrounding resources by becoming too large. As a side note, Phoenix, Arizona, is 500 square miles (1,300 km²).

An Ideal City (http://www.idealcity.org.au) is about the competition to design Australia’s capital, Canberra. It places the winning entry, by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, in the town planning context of the time. All 46 shortlisted designs (with full, high-resolution images; perhaps the highlight of this site) are interpreted by Professor John Reps of Cornell University, who conducted extensive research at the National Archives of Australia, National Capital Authority and the National Library of Australia. The content of this website is based on the 1995 exhibition An Ideal City? The 1912 Competition to Design Canberra.