Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century “gold standard” specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River valley responded to a national movement to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician.
Katherine Ziff’s compelling presentation of America’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed. Incorporating rare photos, letters, maps, and records, Asylum on the Hill is a fascinating glimpse into psychiatric history.
Bottoms Up celebrates Wisconsin’s taverns and the breweries that fueled them. Beginning with inns and saloons, the book explores the rise of taverns and breweries, the effects of temperance and Prohibition, and attitudes about gender, ethnicity, and morality. It traces the development of the megabreweries, dominance of the giants, and the emergence of microbreweries. Contemporary photographs of unusual and distinctive bars and breweries of all eras, historical photos, postcards, advertisements, and breweriana illustrate the story of how Wisconsin came to dominate brewing—and the place that bars and beer hold in our social and cultural history.
Seventy featured taverns and breweries represent diverse architectural styles, from the open-air Tom’s Burned Down Cafe on Madeline Island to the Art Moderne Casino in La Crosse, and from Club 10, a 1930s roadhouse in Stevens Point, to the well-known Wolski’s Tavern in Milwaukee. There are bars in barns and basements and brewpubs in former ice cream factories and railroad depots. Bottoms Up also includes a heady mix of such beer-related topics as ice harvesting, barrel making, bar games, Old-Fashioneds, bar fixtures, and the queen of the bootleggers. Now in paperback for the first time!
The first comprehensive guidebook of these remarkable features of Chicago's urban landscape, Chicago River Bridges chronicles more than 175 bridges spanning 55 locations along the Main Channel, South Branch, and North Branch of the Chicago River. With new full-color photography of the existing bridges by Kevin Keeley and Laura Banick and more than one hundred black and white images of bridges past, the book unearths the rich history of Chicago's downtown bridges from the Michigan Avenue Bridge to the often forgotten bridges that once connected thoroughfares such as Rush, Erie, Taylor, and Polk Streets.
Throughout, McBriarty delivers new research into the bridges' architectural designs, engineering innovations, and their impact on Chicagoans' daily lives. Describing the structure and mechanics of various kinds of moveable bridges (including vertical-lift, Scherer rolling lift, and Strauss heel trunnion mechanisms) in a manner that is accessible and still satisfying to the bridge aficionado, he explains how the dominance of the "Chicago-style" bascule drawbridge influenced the style and mechanics of bridges worldwide. Interspersed throughout are the human dramas that played out on and around the bridges, such as the floods of 1849 and 1992, the cattle crossing collapse of the Rush Street Bridge, or Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci's Michigan Avenue Bridge jump.
A confluence of Chicago history, urban design, and engineering lore, Chicago River Bridges illustrates Chicago's significant contribution to drawbridge innovation and the city's emergence as the drawbridge capital of the world. It is perfect for any reader interested in learning more about the history and function of Chicago's many and varied bridges. The introduction won The Henry N. Barkhausen Award for original research in the field of Great Lakes maritime history sponsored by the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History.
Cinema Houston celebrates a vibrant century of movie theatres and moviegoing in Texas's largest city. Illustrated with more than two hundred historical photographs, newspaper clippings, and advertisements, it traces the history of Houston movie theatres from their early twentieth-century beginnings in vaudeville and nickelodeon houses to the opulent downtown theatres built in the 1920s (the Majestic, Metropolitan, Kirby, and Loew's State). It also captures the excitement of the neighborhood theatres of the 1930s and 1940s, including the Alabama, Tower, and River Oaks; the theatres of the 1950s and early 1960s, including the Windsor and its Cinerama roadshows; and the multicinemas and megaplexes that have come to dominate the movie scene since the late 1960s.
While preserving the glories of Houston's lost movie palaces—only a few of these historic theatres still survive—Cinema Houston also vividly re-creates the moviegoing experience, chronicling midnight movie madness, summer nights at the drive-in, and, of course, all those tasty snacks at the concession stand. Sure to appeal to a wide audience, from movie fans to devotees of Houston's architectural history, Cinema Houston captures the bygone era of the city's movie houses, from the lowbrow to the sublime, the hi-tech sound of 70mm Dolby and THX to the crackle of a drive-in speaker on a cool spring evening.
Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Most towns and cities had at least one opera house during this golden age. Coal mining and railroads brought travelers, money, and change to the region. Many aspects of American life converged in the opera house.
Coal and Culture: Opera Houses in Appalachia is a critical appreciation of the opera house in the coal-mining region of Appalachia from the mid-1860s to the early 1930s. Author William Faricy Condee demonstrates that these were multipurpose facilities that were central to the life of their communities. In the era before radio, movies, television, and malls, these buildings were essential. They housed little, if any, opera, but were used for almost everything else, including traveling theater, concerts, religious events, lectures, commencements, boxing matches, benefits, union meetings, and—if the auditorium had a flat floor—skating and basketball.
The only book on opera houses that stresses their cultural context, Condee’s unique study will interest cultural geographers, scholars of Appalachian studies, and all those who appreciate the gaudy diversity of the American scene.
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the longest occupied and least studied landscapes on earth. While scholarship has been attentive to images of nature made by the region’s explorers and settlers and to landscapes of the colonial era—public parks and game preserves, botanical gardens and urban plans—surprisingly little attention has been paid to spaces created by and for Africans themselves, from the precolonial era to the present.
This book is a contribution to a small but growing effort to address this oversight. Its essays present a range of landscapes: pathways and cairns used by nomadic peoples to navigate through and mark significant places; anthropogenic or managed forests consecrated to ritual purposes of various kinds; tombs or palaces with significant landscape orientations and components; even monumental ceremonial and urban spaces, as at Great Zimbabwe or Djenne. They explore what we know of precolonial and later indigenous designed landscapes, how these landscapes were understood in the colonial era, and how they are being recuperated today for nation building, identity formation, and cultural affirmation. Contributors engage with the most critical issues in preservation today, from the conflicts between cultural heritage and biodiversity protection to the competition between local and international heritage agendas.
Preservation has traditionally focused on saving prominent buildings of historical or architectural significance. Preserving cultural landscapes-the combined fabric of the natural and man-made environments-is a relatively new and often misunderstood idea among preservationists, but it is of increasing importance. The essays collected in this volume-case studies that include the Little Tokyo neighborhood in Los Angeles, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and a rural island in Puget Sound-underscore how this approach can be fruitfully applied. Together, they make clear that a cultural landscape perspective can be an essential underpinning for all historic preservation projects.
Contributors: Susan Calafate Boyle, National Park Service; Susan Buggey, U of Montreal; Michael Caratzas, Landmarks Preservation Commission (NYC); Courtney P. Fint, West Virginia Historic Preservation Office; Heidi Hohmann, Iowa State U; Hillary Jenks, USC; Randall Mason, U Penn; Robert Z. Melnick, U of Oregon; Nora Mitchell, National Park Service; Julie Riesenweber, U of Kentucky; Nancy Rottle, U of Washington; Bonnie Stepenoff, Southeast Missouri State U.
Richard Longstreth is professor of American civilization and director of the graduate program in historic preservation at George Washington University.
Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with—rather than defend against—natural processes.
Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey’s travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures.
An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies.
A remarkable number of Wisconsin towns and cities were home to an opera house in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some were freestanding structures built by local benefactors, industrialists, and capitalists. Others were located within a city hall building and financed by local tax dollars with the support of government officials who believed in the value of the arts for their community
In Encore! The Renaissance of Wisconsin Opera Houses, Brian Leahy Doyle chronicles the histories of ten Wisconsin opera houses and theaters, from their construction to their heydays as live performance spaces and through the periods when many of these stages went dark. But what makes these stories so compelling is that all but one of the featured theaters has been restored to its original splendor. Just as the beginnings of these theaters were often the result of the efforts of local citizens, Doyle discovers that their restoration is due to the commitment of dedicated and passionate people. More than one of these revived theaters has spurred the revitalization of its surrounding downtown business district as well.
Encore! is the second book in the Places along the Way series. Richly illustrated with historic and contemporary photos, the Places along the Way series links Wisconsin's past with its present, exploring the state's history through its architecture.
A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today’s experience.
Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation—the ways that we move through a house—analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings.
This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.
Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2011
Good Brick Award, Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, 2011
Julia Ideson Award, Friends of the Texas Room, 2011
Driven by an almost fanatical desire for whatever is new, "modern," and likely to make money, Houston is constantly in the process of remaking itself. Few structures remain from the nineteenth century, and even much of the twentieth-century built environment has fallen before the wrecking ball of "progress." Indeed, the demolition of older buildings in Houston can be compared to the destruction of cityscapes such as Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo in World War II. But because this wholesale restructuring of Houston's built environment has happened in peacetime, historically minded people have only recently sounded an alarm over what is being lost and the toll this destruction is taking on Houstonians' sense of place.
Houston Lost and Unbuilt presents an extensive catalogue of twentieth-century public and commercial buildings that have been lost forever, as well as an intriguing selection of buildings that never made it off the drawing board. The lost buildings (or lost interiors of buildings) span a wide range, from civic gathering places such as the Houston Municipal Auditorium and the Astrodome to commercial enterprises such as the Foley Brothers, Sears Roebuck, and Sakowitz department stores to "Theatre Row" downtown to neighborhoods such as Fourth Ward/Freedmen's Town. Steven Strom's introductions and photo captions describe each significant building's contribution to the civic life of Houston. The "unbuilt" section of the book includes numerous previously unpublished architectural renderings of proposed projects such as a multi-building city center, monorail, and people mover system, all which reflect Houston's fascination with the future and optimism that technology will solve all of the city's problems.
The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed.
Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city, a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress.
“Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review
This richly illustrated volume tells the story of thehome that has served as Ohio’s executive residence since 1957, and of the nine governors and their families who have lived in the house. Our First Family’s Home offers the first complete history of the residence and garden that represent Ohio to visiting dignitaries and the citizens of the state alike. Once in a state of decline, the house has been lovingly restored and improved by itsresidents. Development of the Ohio Heritage Garden has increased the educational potential of the house and has sparked an interest in the preservation of native plant species. Looking toward the future, the Residence is also taking the lead in promoting environmental issues such as solar powerand green energy.
Photographs by award-winning environmental photographer Ian Adams and botanical art by Dianne McElwain showcase the beauty of the home’s architecture and the myriad of native plants that grace the three acres on which the Residence stands. Dianne McElwain is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists in New York. Her botanical paintings have won numerous awards and are found in prestigious collections throughout the United States.
Essays highlight the Jacobethan Revival architecture and the history of the home. The remaining pieces cover the garden and include an intimate tour of the Heritage Garden, which was inspired by Ohio’s diverse landscape. Finally, former Governor Ted Strickland and First Lady Frances Strickland discuss the increasing focus on green energy at the Governor’s Residence and First Lady Emerita Hope Taft explains how native plants can help sustain the environment.
From large cities to rural communities, gay men have long been impassioned pioneers as keepers of culture: rescuing and restoring decrepit buildings, revitalizing blighted neighborhoods, saving artifacts and documents of historical significance. A Passion to Preserve explores this authentic and complex dimension of gay men’s lives by profiling early and contemporary preservationists from throughout the United States, highlighting contributions to the larger culture that gays are exceptionally inclined to make.
After the Holocaust, the empty, silent spaces of bombed-out synagogues, cemeteries, and Jewish districts were all that was left in many German and Polish cities with prewar histories rich in the sights and sounds of Jewish life. What happened to this scarred landscape after the war, and how have Germans, Poles, and Jews encountered these ruins over the past sixty years?
In the postwar period, city officials swept away many sites, despite protests from Jewish leaders. But in the late 1970s church groups, local residents, political dissidents, and tourists demanded the preservation of the few ruins still standing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, this desire to preserve and restore has grown stronger. In one of the most striking and little-studied shifts in postwar European history, the traces of a long-neglected Jewish past have gradually been recovered, thanks to the rise of heritage tourism, nostalgia for ruins, international discussions about the Holocaust, and a pervasive longing for cosmopolitanism in a globalizing world.
Examining this transformation from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Michael Meng finds no divided memory along West–East lines, but rather a shared memory of tensions and paradoxes that crosses borders throughout Central Europe. His narrative reveals the changing dynamics of the local and the transnational, as Germans, Poles, Americans, and Israelis confront a built environment that is inevitably altered with the passage of time. Shattered Spaces exemplifies urban history at its best, uncovering a surprising and moving postwar story of broad contemporary interest.
On the occasion of the Capitol’s centennial in 2017, this book tells the remarkable story of the building—in all its incarnations—and the people who made history beneath its dome. The book covers the creation of the territorial capitol in 1837, the construction of the second capitol in the 1860s (and the fire that almost completely destroyed it in 1904), the eleven-year construction project that completed the third capitol in 1917, and the extensive conservation project of the 1990s that restored the building to its grandeur. Supporting the framework of this architectural history are colorful stories about the people who shaped Wisconsin from within the Capitol—attorneys, senators, and governors (from Henry Dodge to Scott Walker), as well as protesters, reformers, secretaries, tour guides, custodians, and even Old Abe, the Capitol’s resident eagle. Combining historical photographs with modern, full-color architectural photos, The Wisconsin Capitol provides fascinating details about the building, while also emphasizing the importance of the Capitol in Wisconsin’s storied history.
“Lighthouses are a reflection of the human spirit and a mirror to our past.”—from the Introduction
No symbol is more synonymous with Wisconsin’s rich maritime traditions than the lighthouse. These historic beacons conjure myriad notions of a bygone era: romance, loneliness, and dependability; dedicated keepers manning the lights; eerie tales of haunted structures and ghosts of past keepers; mariners of yesteryear anxiously hoping to make safe haven around rocky shorelines. If these sentinels could talk, imagine the tales they would tell of ferocious Great Lakes storms taking their toll on vessels and people alike.
In this fully updated edition of Wisconsin Lighthouses, Ken and Barb Wardius tell those tales, taking readers on an intimate tour of lighthouses on Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Winnebago. Both delightful storytellers and accomplished photographers, the couple complement their engaging text with more than 100 stunning color photographs, along with dozens of archival photos, maps, documents, and artifacts. Detailed “how to get there” directions, up-to-the-minute status reports on each light, and sidebars on everything from lighthouse vocabulary to the often lonely lives of lightkeepers make this the definitive book on Wisconsin’s lighthouses.
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