CFP: Slum Clearance 1900-1930 3/11
SLUM CLEARANCE, 1900-1930 Urban History Association (UHA) New York City, NY 26-28 October, 2012 http://uha.udayton.edu/conf.html Deadline: 11 March, 2012 I’m interested creating a panel for the UHA meeting that treats major downtown rebuilding projects (such as City Beautiful civic projects, union stations, and others) that occurred prior to the postwar “urban renewal” era as slum clearance. I’m currently researching the construction of Cleveland’s Union Terminal, which has traditionally been viewed as a project that gave Cleveland national prestige (the Terminal Tower was the second tallest building in the United States when it was built), and made the Van Sweringen brothers nationally-renown urban entrepreneurs. However, The Union Terminal Project also involved the demolition of well over 1,000 buildings and essentially erased one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, the Haymarket, in the name of progress and modernity. I’d be interested in including any paper that examines the rebuilding of central cities during this same time frame, but that pay special attention to the importance of these projects as “slum clearance” efforts that accelerated the process of making downtowns less industrial and low-income residential, and more attractive to white collar professions and service-related businesses. If interested, please submit a one page abstract and brief CV to mccarthy@rmu.edu by March 11, so the panel can be submitted to the UHA before the March 15 deadline. John McCarthy, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History Department of Social Sciences Robert Morris University