Urban renewal in the Sixties and Seventies was pretty much a disaster for
most cities. Niagara Falls my hometown, had at least two major arteries of
shops, department stores, theaters and so forth. The devastation wrecked
upon that city makes one want to weep at the loss of not only the built
environment, but the community of people who lived their lives in that
world, sadly now lost. The causes are so various and numerous that not any
one can be blamed for the barren city that the "Falls" has become, but
certainly a series of really poor politicians with no vision and often with
less ethics,as mayors and councilpeople for several decades; the "vision" of
Sixties urban renewal promoters who saw a convention center and other
assorted big box buildings when the small, human scale built environment was
working well; that old standby of American life, racism and its concomitant
"white flight" to the suburbs and certainly other factors were all a part of
the problem. The issue now is whether cities like Niagara Falls can be
brought back from the brink. Certainly gambling casinos will not do the
trick and I don't think any one person or group of people can solve the
problems. It will require decades of work by whole communities to bring
these "renewed" cities back to a semblance of their former selves.

Jim Corsaro



----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Monje" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2002 10:19 AM
Subject: Small-town urban renewal


> 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?
>