Perhaps "small cities or towns" should be defined... but if you mean by
small city, a population of 15, 000 -25,000, I would point to the city
of my birth Ogdensburg, NY and the city of my current work, Lockport, as
two small cities that lost much of their urban core to urban renewal.
(AKA "urban removal").  Ogdensburg lost much of its urban core and now,
I believe, the old city center is much under-utilized and vacant.  Much
historic architecture was lost in both cases. Many of Lockport's most
historic old stone "canal-town" structures were likewise
lost.Thankfully, Lockport is now becoming sensitive to what it lost and
what it still has  (much important stone architecture, a lot of which
was constructed of rubble stone from the construction of the Erie
Canal); why it should keep and adaptively reuse what remains.  However,
in a curious sense and not without important losses, nevertheless urban
renewal in Lockport also had the positive effect of freeing  Canal
vistas from canyon-like containment, especially in Lower Town
Lockport....a sort of situation similar to what the "Free Niagara"
movement did for the creation of the Niagara Falls Reservation State
Park in the late 1800's.

David L. Dickinson
Niagara County Historian
139 Niagara Street
Lockport, NY  14094-2740

Telephone:  (716) 439-7324
Fax:             (716) 439-7322

Office Hours:  Tuesday through Friday
                        8:30am - 12:30pm and 1:30pm - 4:30pm


>>> [log in to unmask] 12/18/02 10:19AM >>>
I have run across a couple of instances of "urban renewal" projects in
small cities or towns in New York in the 1970s in which old structures
were razed but little or nothing new was built to replace them. Was that
sort of thing common, or were these most likely local eccentricities?
Has anything been written about this?