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

Donald Vogel, Slum Clearance c.1940, Drypoint.