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If you could remove the automobiles, large parts of Brooklyn would look straight out of the late nineteenth century. There are large historic districts; Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Fort Greene etc. and quite a few colonial buildings left.
Having said that, parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg and Sunset Park have been loosing alot of their history due to the explosion of the often ugly "Fedders buildings" being built today.
I've been compiling a list of well-preserved cities. It seems that most cities have experienced a lot of urban destruction over the years. Here are some that seem to have escaped it, for the most part (please correct me if I am wrong).
Savannah, GA (was not burned in the Civil War, was protected from 1950s urban renewal by concerned citizens)
Butte, MT (seems to be a mostly intact old west boom town).
Wheeling, WV (seems largely intact, but surviving historic structures are threatened by lack of investment and bad economy, which leads to abandonment, etc.)
York, PA (seems largely intact)
Jackson, MI (very beautiful downtown, seems intact)
Grand Rapids, MI (not sure on this one, but seems more or less historically intact).
Wichita, KS (any thoughts on this one?)
Lincoln, NE
Portland, Maine
Providence, RI
Feel free to add or subtract cities based on your personal knowledge!
Charleston, SC ...seriously.
At least Downtown. I was blown away when I visited.
I found this thread looking up cities where i could visit that had much more 19th cent buildings than my city of Minneapolis. When you see how beautiful MPLS was then, it is enough to make you sick what has happened.
No one has mentioned Baltimore is this mix. It has a pretty good record of restoration and renewel versus clearance. There are many neighborhoods that look pretty similar to 100-200 years ago. The fact that Baltimore has not cleared out some of it's more depressing areas in hopes of a comeback is actually criticized quite often.
Which period of history are you interested in? Amongst the very large cities....Philly still has a large area of 18th century and colonial housing stock in the Society Hill and Queen Village neighborhoods in spite of urban renewal. Also the Georgetown neighborhood in D.C. has quite a bit from that era or at least early 19th century.
I used to live on Queen Street in QV - the 100 block - great rowhome built in the 1790s, it had an addition but I am convinced the insulation was colonial period - my gas bill was insane in the winter
I believe Philadelphia has the most 18th century buildings of any US city. Philadelphia has really really old housing stock. There have been plenty of new, often wrong-headed, building projects, but they've been mainly as pockets within denser neighborhoods. Really what happened in Philadelphia wasn't wholesale demolition, but abandonment. Once people fled to the suburbs in the 70s huge swaths of North and West Philadelphia just became essentially vacant, and so you have today blocks where everything has been torn down simply due to decay. It really is heartbreaking to see that kind of neglect. The highways, when they came through Philly, stuck to industrial corridors. Although it cuts the city off from the water now, where the highway is used to be generally warehouses, so not much residential area was actually torn down. Aesthetically, it still looks bad. But the docks are abandoned for the most part now since the introduction of container ships anyway. Yes, a better approach should have been taken when dealing with this, but then again, the ideas floating around back then for "urban renewal" were essentially unurban.
Don't get me started on the Richard Allen Homes though, now that is a black eye on Philadelphia's urban fabric. It's basically been Philadelphia's proving ground for bad urban renewal ideas. It started I believe in the 1940s or 50s, as with the ideas of every other renewal project of the time. I think its first incarnation was housing blocks in a large green space. Then it was knocked down and rebuilt as suburban tract houses. Basically, whatever idea is in vogue has dictated what was built there. Maybe soon we'll see it turned back to rowhouses, as has happened elsewhere like around the 13th and Bainbridge area. The same level of density isn't achieved because back alleys front on backyards and parking spaces rather than houses, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.
Last edited by Marius Pontmercy; 01-05-2011 at 09:30 PM..
Portland is fairly well-preserved, particularly the Old Port, although much of the city was destroyed by fire in 1866, so you'll find less pre-Victorian architecture than you'd expect in a New England city.
Of the places Ive been it seems the smaller US cities fared the best. Troy NY and Scranton PA seem to be pretty intact ,apparently survived the Urban Renewal era without wholesale removal of neighborhoods.
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