Upcoming Programs

In her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, historian Emily Lieb describes the Baltimore suburb of Rosemont, which in the 1950s was a vibrant Black middle-class neighborhood of rowhouses and small businesses. By the end of the decade, Rosemont was effectively destroyed by plans for an expressway that was planned, but never completed. Lieb’s detailed research and analysis clarifies the blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. Her absorbing story of the interwoven tragedies caused by urban renewal and transportation policy and its lasting effects on racial inequalities in housing, education, jobs, and health describes both a local history and a national problem.

In his new book, The Skyscraper and The White City, historian Gerald Larson documents the pivotal role played by Chicago architect John Wellborn Root in transforming the New York-developed technical systems of the elevator and iron frame construction to his city’s unique context. During the 1880s, Root was the leader of “the Chicago School,” a loosely affiliated group of architects who pursued the development of a modern, American style of architecture. As the architect in charge of the early design of the Chicago 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Root was in the position to set the stage for a modern direction for the profession. Larson presents the first comprehensive study of Root’s ideas for the Fair.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine photographed buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, workshops, and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the precarity of the street’s denizens, such as sex workers and pushcart vendors, as well as its animal, arboreal, and botanical populations. In an unpublished three-volume album that he titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower,” Hine assembled more than three hundred photographs, numerous newspaper clippings, and a typed essay. In 1917, he donated the album to the New-York Historical Society, which is where the historian Nick Yablon rediscovered it.