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The title card of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

George Romero’s Pittsburgh

City of the living dead.
by Victoria Timpanaro via The Metropole on February 20, 2025
Still from Midnight Cowboy of a man with a gun in Times Square.

How the Movies Captured Times Square’s Grimy Golden Age

Times Square’s decline can be dated to the Depression, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the bottom fell out.
by Nathaniel Rich via Current [The Criterion Collection] on July 25, 2024
Abandoned and burned-out buildings in the East Village in 1986.

Edifice Complex

Restoring the term “burnout” to its roots in landlord arson puts the dispossession of poor city dwellers at its center.
by Bench Ansfield via Jewish Currents on January 3, 2023
Still from The Wire (HBO): two detectives, McNulty and Bunk.

20 Years Later, "The Wire" Is Still a Cutting Critique of American Capitalism

The Wire — both stylish and smart, follows unforgettable characters woven into a striking portrait of the depredations of capitalism in one US city.
by Helena Sheehan, Sheamus Sweeney via Jacobin on June 14, 2022
The Detroit Renewable Power waste incinerator

Dire Straits

A new history of Detroit’s struggles for clean air and water argues that municipal debt and austerity have furthered an ongoing environmental catastrophe.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via New York Review of Books on June 2, 2022
American Civil Rights leader Jesse Jackson (center) participating in a rally, January 15, 1975 (Wikipedia Commons)

Black Mayors, Black Politics, and the Gary Convention

The National Black Political Convention of 1972 saw many national giants on the Black political scene.
by Brandon Stokes via Black Perspectives on March 22, 2022
A crowd watches a roller skater dance at block party in the Bronx.

The Stories of the Bronx

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" is a vibrant cultural history that looks beyond pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect.
by Emily Raboteau via New York Review of Books on March 17, 2022
Screen capture of a Black man standing in an urban residential neighborhood, speaking in the documentary "Who Killed the Fourth Ward?"

How “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” Challenged the Nature of Documentary Filmmaking

James Blue’s film investigated the destruction of a Black neighborhood in Houston, but it is also a powerful self-interrogation.
by Richard Brody via The New Yorker on January 21, 2022
People crossing the street under in front of a discount store and under the elevated subway in the Bronx, New York

Boroughed Time

Confronting a long tradition of projecting fantasies onto the South Bronx.
by Sasha Frere-Jones via Bookforum on September 3, 2020
Prison cells

The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration

Everything you knew about mass incarceration is wrong.
by John Clegg, Adaner Usmani via Catalyst on September 1, 2019
View over Baltimore.
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How Politicians Use Fear of Cities Like Baltimore to Stoke White Resentment

President Trump is building on a tactic pioneered by segregationists.
by Kyla Sommers via Made By History on July 29, 2019

Whitey on the Moon

Gil Scott-Heron's searing 1970 commentary on the nation's economic priorities.
by Joseph M. Thompson via Enviro-History on March 16, 2018

Brian Tochterman on the 'Summer of Hell'

What E.B. White, Mickey Spillane, Death Wish, hip-hop, and the “Summer of Hell” have in common.
by Brian Tochterman, Sarah Cleary via UNC Press Blog on July 21, 2017

How Gotham Gave Us Trump

Ever wonder how a lifelong urbanite can resent cities as much as Donald Trump does? First you have to understand ’70s and ’80s New York.
by Michael Kruse via Politico Magazine on June 30, 2017
Donald Trump stands in front of a microphone, holding a graph titled "Illegal Immigration into the US."

Trump’s Anti-Haitian Hate Has Deep American Roots

The former president’s grotesque demagoguery is just the latest in a long line of vicious attacks on residents and immigrants from the island nation.
by Jonathan M. Katz via The New Republic on September 16, 2024
City of Kirkwood map.

Annexation Politics & Manufacturing Blight in a Black St. Louis Suburb

Unveiling the conflict and consequences in Kirkwood's expansion.
by Bridget Laramie Kelly via The Metropole on September 12, 2023
Artists on the roof of 3-5 Coenties Slip, New York, 1958. Photograph: Hans Namuth

Remembering the Slip: The Manhattan Street that Birthed a Generation of Artists

The tiny downtown passage, where artists burned pallets for warmth, was home to Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin.
by Hannah Marriott via The Guardian on August 2, 2023
Nine yearbook photos, including Langston Hughes'.
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Class Production

A collection of high school yearbooks from Cleveland captures the rise, fall, and uncertain future of the American middle class.
by Alex Houston via JSTOR Daily on May 15, 2023
Photograph of glass factory, on glass, with man blowing glass behind it.

Unbreakable: Glass in the Rust Belt

Domestic glass manufacturing in the U.S. remains concentrated in the Rust Belt. But studio glassblowing is adding relevance to a long forgotten material.
by Dora Segall via Belt Magazine on March 29, 2023
The image of the forlorn girl on the outskirts of the Highway to Nowhere was shot by John Van Horn in the fall of 1968

Road to Ruin

In the late 1960s, Baltimore began demolishing Black neighborhoods to make room for an ill-fated expressway. Will the harm from the Highway to Nowhere ever be repaired?
by Ron Cassie via Baltimore Magazine on February 10, 2023
Corner store in Detroit.

Murder At the Corner Store: Immigrant Merchants and Law and Order Politics in Postwar Detroit

With seventeen holdups in the past few months, something had to be done. “We will talk to the mayor and the police commissioner. We need more protection".
by Kenneth Alyass via The Metropole on November 17, 2022
Black and white photo of Ishmael Reed as a child in Willert Park Courts, 1943.

The Buffalo I Knew

The city is at a crossroads. Which path will it take?
by Ishmael Reed via New York Review of Books on July 9, 2022
Black and white photo of Dennis Kucinich speaking, with a Cleveland flag next to him.

When the Mob Tried to Whack Dennis Kucinich

31-year-old Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich took a stand against the sale of his city’s publicly owned electric utility. And he almost paid for it with his life.
by Timothy M. Gill via Jacobin on June 6, 2022
People talking about a neighborhood map, from the cover of Claire Dunning's book "Nonprofit Neighborhoods."

Grantmaking as Governance

A new book examines how the US government funded the growth of — and delegated governance to — the nonprofit sector.
by Benjamin Soskis via Stanford Social Innovation Review on May 26, 2022
Aerial photograph of San Francisco, 1906.

How Private Capital Strangled Our Cities

By following the money, a new history of urban inequality turns our attention away from federal malfeasance and toward capital markets and financial instruments.
by Samuel Zipp via The Nation on January 4, 2022
Protest sign with Daily News front page "Ford to City: Drop Dead"

New York City’s State of Permanent Crisis

How New Yorkers trying to ward off catastrophe paved the road to the privatized city.
by Nick Juravich via The Nation on October 14, 2021
View from the Empire State Building, August 1975.

A Crisis Without Keynes: The 1975 New York City Fiscal Crisis Revisited

An analysis of the factors that contributed to NYC's massive financial crisis in the 1970s, and the austere solutions that perpetuated it.
by Michael Beyea Reagan via The Gotham Center on August 12, 2021
Old cars piled up under a bridge overpass.

New York: The Invention of an Imaginary City

How nostalgic fantasies about the “authentic” New York City obscure the real-world place.
by Yasmin Nair via Current Affairs on June 13, 2021
Rowhouses in Philadelphia burn after officials dropped a bomb on the MOVE house in May 1985.
partner

The Shocking MOVE Bombing Was Part of a Broader Pattern of Anti-Black Racism

How culture fueled the infamous police decision.
by J. T. Roane via Made By History on May 13, 2021
A worker entering the U.S. Steel Clairton Works in Clairton, Pennsylvania.

A Rust Belt City’s New Working Class

Heavy industry once drove Pittsburgh’s economy. Now health care does—but without the same hard-won benefits.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on March 31, 2021
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