|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places,
buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth
century to today America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn
has become an internationally recognized brand in recent
decades-celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations
in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J.
Campanella tells the rich history of the rise, fall, and
reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities.
Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar
and long forgotten, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams,
visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He
reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim
to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to
reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban
vitality.
An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places,
buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth
century to today America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn
has become an internationally recognized brand in recent
decades-celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations
in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J.
Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling
the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the
world's most resurgent cities. Spanning centuries and
neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of
places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized,
bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets,
and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through
Brooklyn's history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its
transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region.
We learn about English emigre Deborah Moody, whose town of
Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how
wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park
to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan.
And we witness Brooklyn's emergence as a playland of racetracks and
amusement parks celebrated around the world. Campanella also
describes Brooklyn's outsized failures, from Samuel Friede's bid to
erect the world's tallest building to the long struggle to make
Jamaica Bay the world's largest deepwater seaport, and the
star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects
that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals
how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its
own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken
as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.
In 1871, the city of Chicago was almost entirely destroyed by what
became known as The Great Fire. Thirty-five years later, San
Francisco lay in smoldering ruins after the catastrophic earthquake
of 1906. Or consider the case of the Jerusalem, the greatest site
of physical destruction and renewal in history, which, over three
millennia, has suffered wars, earthquakes, fires, twenty sieges,
eighteen reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one
religious faith to another. Yet this ancient city has regenerated
itself time and again, and still endures.
Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched,
bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always
rise from the ashes to rebuild. Viewing a wide array of urban
disasters in global historical perspective, The Resilient City
traces the aftermath of such cataclysms as: --the British invasion
of Washington in 1814
--the devastation wrought on Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo during
World War II
--the late-20th century earthquakes that shattered Mexico City and
the Chinese city of Tangshan
--Los Angeles after the 1992 riots
--the Oklahoma City bombing
--the destruction of the World Trade Center
Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop
narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban
recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient
City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the
dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.
The American elm, elegant and highly adaptable, was an essential
feature of America's cultural landscape for more than a century,
forming great verdant parasols above--and giving its name
to--streets all across the nation. The elm became a defining
element in the spatial design of America's villages, towns, and
cities, first in New England, and--with the westward transit of
Yankee culture--eventually throughout the United States. This
fascinating and generously illustrated book traces the elm's
transformation from a fast-growing weed into a regional and
national icon, and shows how Elm Street satisfied America's quest
for a pastoral urbanism imagined since the time of Jefferson.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|