60 Years of Urban Change: Northeast | Hacker News Reader

60 Years of Urban Change: Northeast

iqc.ou.edu

47 pointsgbarnes11 comments

Boston losing it's West End for towers in the park is one of the worst crimes of mid-20th century urban planning (renewal).

The automobile destroyed American cities... and mostly for the benefit of people who never even lived in the city but rather just commuted into or through it.

Ouch ouch ouch. It hurts just looking at these.

Besides the obvious complaint of freeways cutting willy-nilly through established cities, literally demolishing everything in its path, even the buildings suffered.

The gross misuse of outdoor space might be the second-greatest crime in American urban planning (after freeway culture). So many tight-knit neighborhoods and communities - tight streets full of activity and business - replaced with megalithic buildings surrounded by "plazas" and "parks" that fit neither description and are massive black holes devoid of human activity.

That Pittsburgh picture hurts the most. Roads lined with buildings replaced with vast concrete emptiness.

Rochester too - there is more parking lot and roadway west of the river than there are buildings! Disgusting.

And that Providence picture - if I didn't know better I'd think the after picture is after a war given how much has been absolutely leveled into flat ground.

Agh I can't look at this.

The Providence one is interesting, because the 2013 photo shows a substantial improvement---when I-195 was laid out, it made a crazy-ass loop through downtown (and bisecting some historic neighbourhoods) before heading east. About ten years ago they finally said, "this is dumb," and started planning for it to join I-95 further south. In the 2013 photo here, you can see the scars from where 195 used to be---it's still recovering.

If the "after" photo of Providence were from, say, 2003, the change would be even more dramatic.

The automobile might prove to be the most detrimental invention of all time.

It's really bad - the underlying pattern of change is tearing down a bunch of buildings an running big highways through the cities.

You can also see huge blocks of land that used to be dedicated to railways, sidings and rail yards, mostly gone and replaced with large buildings.

Not to mention the tens of thousands of people evicted from high density buildings and ramping up suburban sprawl. Will that highway, after deducting maintenance and environmental damage, ever hope to recoup the costs in city services from handling low density housing?

Wow. Pittsburgh, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Providence are intense.

See also - Midwest: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/ - Southeast: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/18/60yrssoutheast/ - Oklahoma + Texas: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/09/60years/

That's pretty sad, seeing Detroit turn from a bustling city to abandoned fields and parking lots

Rochester is brutal. I go there every couple of months for work reasons and it's not hard to see how it was once a thriving city but it has been totally destroyed by highways.

I've seen these images before since architecture and urban planning are a hobby of mine and I always find the Buffalo before/after shots horrifying by how many pre-war buildings were turned into asphalt for cars.

There's a TV special that will be available on the Albany PBS affiliate (WMHT) called the "Neighborhood that Disappeared" talking about the destruction wreaked on Albany.

They also had more plans for destroying the city that fell through when the unlimited Federal dollars ran out. See: http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2011/03/08/the-highway-that...

When you think about how small Albany is, the sheer scale of highways is ridiculous.

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