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?