What is your neighborhood's history?

[hauntedheadnc]

As mentioned in this thread, my boyfriend and I have been looking for a new place to live ever since we found out that our apartment complex planned to jack the rent way up past the level of comfort and amenities they offer. This search has led us on a tour of the city's various neighborhoods and has allowed us to marvel at some of the most grotesque home improvements ever devised by the mind of man.

I'm pleased to report though that we did actually find a very nice place worth every penny. It's a nice condo that offers everything we want and then some, but it's in a part of town I never imagined myself living in.

The neighborhood is called Royal Pines, and is an unassuming middle class area on the far south side of town, adjacent to but not actually inside the city limits of Asheville. This area of town has always been to me a place to pass through and the only noteworthy thing about it is that it is home to a dumpy old building that happens to house Asheville's best Thai restaurant -- where you may sample the best tom yum I have ever had anywhere, and that includes Vancouver and Seattle, which know a thing or two about Asian cuisine.

Anyway, even though I'd never thought there was anything at all interesting about Royal Pines, I'd always been a little curious about the name and once I learned we were going to be living there I looked into it. And as it turns out, this boring little part of town has a very, very interesting history.

I learned most of it through a 1920's-era real estate brochure that someone had scanned and posted online. I learned, for example, that this part of Buncombe County used to be nothing more than a series of enormous estates built by wealthy Charlestonian merchants, professionals, and plantation owners who wanted a nice, cool escape from those malarial Low Country South Carolina summers. In the 1920's one of these estates was purchased by a developer who then built Royal Pines.

Before we get into that, though, I do need to point out that the house that lay at the heart of that old estate is still standing. It was built in 1847 and is now a bed and breakfast inn. According to the inn's website, the house itself has quite the history. It was used as a hospital for both Confederate and Union soldiers during the Civil War, although Union soldiers were treated in secret in the basement. There is also some evidence that the house was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad, but no one has been able to prove it definitively. Also, the house has a twin standing several miles south in the town of Fletcher.

Now, back to Royal Pines itself. There are two sections to it. The section between Hendersonville and Sweeten Creek roads is the original Royal Pines, while the section on the other side of Sweeten Creek Road is the Mount Royal section. Royal Pines was planned as a solidly middle class area, while Mount Royal, with its slopes and views, was planned for the rich. Only a handful of houses were built -- including some very impressive ones in the Mount Royal section -- before the stock market crash of 1929, and then nobody did much of anything in Royal Pines until the housing boom took off after World War II. This is why you find a few obviously older houses mixed in with a great many from the 1950's, and then a few oh-so-modern houses from the 1960's, plus dreck from the 70's and 80's.

The real estate brochure that was selling the Roaring Twenties dream of Royal Pines boasted of sidewalks, "great white ways" of tasteful street lighting, and a park with a pool and a casino.

The park is still there, sans pool or casino, and today boasts a large playground. Some of the sidewalks are still there, but it appears that most were never built, and by the time people started moving back into Royal Pines, walking had gone out of fashion. None of the street lights are there, although a couple of the ornate cast iron posts, now very rusty, they were attached to still remain behind the Thai restaurant. To one, a nearby apartment building has attached a host of DirecTV dishes -- we always do our best to honor our past here in Asheville.

And remember how I mentioned that before any of this was built, the area was nothing but estate after estate? The ruins of one stand just a couple of miles from my new home. A little digging online uncovered that those ruins are the remains of Rock Hall, which was built in 1847 (apparently a banner year for estate building in southern Buncombe County) for Joshua John Ward, a South Carolina politican who also happened to be the largest slaveowner in America at the time. The house was later the home of Thomas Weston, for whom the road on which it stands is named, who was an English inventor known for inventing disc brakes, among other things. The house burned down in 1912 and has stood as a ruin ever since. The landowner occasionally goes over and digs and has uncovered sash weights, irons, and bricks that still bear the palm prints of the slave children who fired them. A single step from the house's grand marble staircase was salvaged and is now used as a bench in the ruined mansion's front yard.

All in all, that's not bad for what I had thought was just another bunch of houses on the south side of town.

How about your neighborhood? Let's here the where and when and why, and all that.

[Chicago103]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Ridge,_Chicago

I live in the Garfield Ridge community area of Chicago, it is on the southwest side and includes Midway Airport. The specific area where I live is your typical edge of the city bungalow belt area, it is still a pretty walk able area in spite of most of the housing being built between 1945-1963. In spite of the built environment being pretty ordinary and moderately urban it is actually one of the most historically important areas in all of Chicagoland, in fact you could say Chicago's conception happened less than a mile from where I live. The portage where French explorers Marquette and Joliet came through in 1673 is less than a mile north of where I live, it is a low continental divide that separated the watersheds of Lake Michigan from that of the Des Plaines River which emptied into the Illinois River and eventually the Mississippi River. There once was a quasi-lake named Mud Lake that would cross these two watersheds during high water but it wasn't until the Illinois and Michigan Canal was dug in the 1830's that there was a permanent water route and this is why Chicago boomed into what it is today. I live on the top of a very small ridge that was along the southern shore of Mud Lake which is now long gone, in fact my property is where the ground starts sloping downward on my block. Also across the street from me the country house of John Wentworth used to stand, one of the most significant 19th century mayors of Chicago. Knowing all this really sparked my interest in Chicago history and I almost feel like I am living on some kind of sacred (in the Chicago sense) ground.

My father and my paternal grandparents moved into my house in 1963 when it was built. They moved here from Bridgeport where the family lived for about 60 years prior to that. It was sorta a suburbanization (half-assed thank God!) within the city, they got caught up in the post-war housing boom and moved out of an old Bridgeport two flat and into the single family bungalow I now live in. Many of the old timers on my block actually have Bridgeport roots to the point that my grandmother often nicknamed this area "New Bridgeport", in fact from being in a neighborhood historical association I learned that Archer Avenue was a major route of intra-city migration within Chicago, people from older inner city neighborhoods moved further out along Archer Avenue in waves during the early 20th Century, 1920's and post-WWII, at first due to the expansion of a streetcar line and later a bus route and increased automobile usage on Archer Avenue.

[jodelli]

Ford City, later more commonly known as East Windsor, founded in the nineteen double oughts:





I live here.
More specifically across the street from this park:



The above picture (taken in February so you can actually see past the vegetation) is typical of the area; multi unit buildings next to old estates,

next to power houses old and new,




next to vacant land that used to have an auto plant on it and land that still does have an auto plant on it,



next to a run down commercial district and some multi zoned residential,





and Jesus:




All of these pics were taken within a mile of my home as measured by Google's distance calculator.

[Steely Dan]

as of this past weekend, i now officially reside in chicago's west loop neighborhood, which is a subset of the near west side community area (chicago has macro and micro levels of neighborhoods).

Near West Side:

The Near West Side Community Area 28, 2 miles W of the Loop. is bounded by the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad to the north, the Pennsylvania Railroad to the west, the South Branch of the Chicago River to the east, and 16th Street at its southern edge. Between the 1840s and the early 1860s, the district was easily accessible from the Lake Street business district. At a convenient distance from the business center, the wealthy residents of Union Park sought to make the West Side an elite refuge from the daily commotion of the growing city. They created Jefferson Park (1850) and Union Park (1854) as small, safe public resorts.

By the 1870s a small middle class had gradually replaced the wealthy families around Union Park. But as early as the city's incorporation in 1837, the area already contained the seeds of what would come: residential areas divided along ethnic, economic, and racial lines. The first African American settlement in Chicago emerged around Lake and Kinzie streets in the 1830s. After 1837, Irish immigrants settled in wooden cottages west of the river. The Irish were soon followed by German, Czechs and Bohemians, and French immigrants. The section south of Harrison, bounded by Halsted on the west and 12th Street (later Roosevelt Road) on the south, would remain a port of entry for poor European immigrants. After the fire of 1871, over 200,000 people took refuge on the Near West Side, creating overcrowded conditions. Toward the end of the century, Jews from Russia and Poland, along with Italians, replaced the Irish and Germans, with the Italians settling between Polk and Taylor Streets, and the Jews southward to 16th Street. The center of the Jewish business community, the Maxwell Street Market, or “Jew town,” came to life at the intersection of Halsted and Maxwell. A Greek settlement known as the “Delta” developed between Harrison, Halsted, Polk, and Blue Island.

Wholesale trade businesses and manufacturers located on the north along an east-west axis in the 1870s and the 1880s. Lined with three and four-story buildings, many of which housed several business establishments, the area provided a dense center of employment opportunity.

In the middle of this rapidly changing area in 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House, one of the few institutions inclined to combine a policy of Americanization with celebration of the neighborhood's ethnic diversity. African Americans were less welcome, relegated instead to the less comprehensive institutions that catered only to blacks.

Most institution building on the Near West Side emerged out of the efforts of individual ethnic groups to reconstruct cultural worlds left behind in Europe. The struggles among ethnic groups over urban space materialized in the construction and relocation of religious and educational institutions, along with the succession of saloons and small businesses. These tensions, sometimes marked by violence, along with economic mobility, led to an ongoing process of neighborhood succession, as older groups were replaced by newcomers. Those who left sold institutions to groups who stayed behind, or to the newcomers. The home of Sacred Heart Academy (1860), for example, became the site of the Chicago Hebrew Institute (1903).

African Americans and Mexicans moved into the Near West Side in larger numbers during the 1930s and 1940s. Approximately 26,000 African Americans lived there by 1940, with the number increasing to more than 68,000 by 1960, in part due to the “Great Migration” of black southerners. On the West Side as a whole the African American community grew rapidly during the 1940s and 1950s, as residential opportunities remained largely limited to ghettoes on the South and West Sides. Rivalry between the two districts developed as a significant aspect of local African American neighborhood culture.

The second half of the twentieth century brought major alterations to the Near West Side. The Chicago Circle expressway interchange wiped out a significant section of “Greek town.” The construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), resulted in the demolition of most of the Hull House complex, as well as the historic Italian neighborhood. Neither urban renewal nor the construction of public housing, both of which began before 1950 and continued into the 1960s, could alleviate the poverty that had resulted from continued migration in the face of a declining economic base on the West Side. The riots after Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968 left a physical devastation on the West Side as a whole that reinforced existing images of the area as crime-ridden and bereft of hope.

University expansion toward the end of twentieth century once again reshaped the Near West Side, almost completely destroying the historical Maxwell Street Market and contributing to the gentrification that followed patterns established by other neighborhoods bordering the Loop. With the increase in real-estate values around UIC, and the construction of the new United Center, parts of the Near West Side became increasingly attractive to middle-class and upper-middle-class Chicagoans interested in living near the downtown.

source: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohisto...pages/878.html




source: http://www.us.am.joneslanglasalle.co...l1b_larger.jpg

[Xelebes]

Lynnwood, Edmonton

My grandparents moved into Lynnwood when it was part of Jasper Place, a hamlet separate from Edmonton, back in 1958. When they moved in, there were only three houses on the street. It got amalgamated into Edmonton in the mid-late 60s.

At the time my grandparents moved in, there were no schools. The only amenity inside the neighbourhood was a drive-in theatre. That drive-in theatre shuttered up in the 60s and was replaced by a fourteen-storey residential development with three towers. The community directly north was developed in the 1930s and thus provided the amenities like the grocery store, bakery, barber shop. The grocery store moved in the early 1960s to the nearby Meadowlark Mall and was replaced with a McDonalds.

The first school built was Lynnwood Elementary. My mom went to that school. The second school is a catholic board school and I can never remember the name of the school. It is in a rather tucked location, despite its field directly abuts the main artery that traverses the community. Lynnwood Elementary School was built in 1960. The catholic school was built some time later.

The community to the north built a junior high school and it opened in 1966. It is known as the "bomb shelter" by the kids who went to that school. Almost completely bereft of windows. Fun factoid: when my mom went to the school, the football star Johnny Bright was the school principal.

No church was ever built in the community.

[Larry King]

Ben Franklin helped open America's first hospital at the end of my block

[MolsonExport]

my neighborhood was a cornfield until 2005.

[Copes]

My neighborhood is currently under construction.

Obviously I live somewhere that is built. I've been in a primarily student neighborhood around my University for the past three years, but will be moving out of my rundown shack on Friday. After that, I'll be moving into the basement apartment of a home in a subdivision I really don't like for a few months, while I wait for construction of my end-game location, a brand new luxury apartment building, in a new neighborhood that is just now taking shape.

The area is known as Pleasantville, and acted as a U.S. and Canadian military base since the second World War. The property was acquired by the Canada Lands Company in 2006, and development began very recently on phase 1, which includes my building.

The neighborhood is only about a five minute car ride (10 - 20 minute walk?) to the heart of the city, and lies on a lake that is a very prominent feature in St. John's. Only minutes away is the Quidi Vidi Village, home to the Quidi Vidi Brewery, making the best beer in town.

Pleasantville CLC Website: http://www.clc.ca/properties/pleasantville
Pleasantville Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasan...d_and_Labrador
CLC Pleasantville Presentation: http://www.clc.ca/sites/default/file...ouse_nov08.pdf
Pleasantville Site Plan: http://www.clc.ca/sites/default/files/site_plan_1.pdf


Quidi Vidi Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidi_Vidi (Page Image shows Pleasantville in the background)

I personally can't wait to get out of my basement apartment and into my new neighborhood. I already consider myself a resident.

[tdawg]

What a great idea for a thread!
My neighborhood is Astoria, Queens. Here's a little history:

Astoria History

In the recently published Queens Tribune's "The Queens Story", reporter Liz Goff tells us in her wonderfully written and presented "Settling Queens" that "Dutch explorer/trader Adriaen Block became the first white man to view Astoria in 1614, when he became the first person to navigate Hell's Gate, through the East River and into the Long Island sound". Thus starts the history of that portion of Queens we now know as Astoria.

Astoria is the neighborhood in northwestern Queens (pop. approx. 225,000), constituting the part of Long Island City north of Broadway, east of the East River, west of roughly 51st Street and south of the Long Island Sound. There may be as many geographic descriptions of Astoria as there are residents. It was developed from 1839 by Stephen A. Halsey, a fur merchant who petitioned the state legislature to name it for the prominent fur trader John Jacob Astor, in an unsuccessful effort to have Astor become a financial patron of the area. During the 1840s and 1850s it grew slowly inland from the ferry landing at the foot of Astoria Boulevard (where an early settlement was known as Hallett's Cove). Wealthy New Yorkers built mansions on 12th and 14th streets and on 27th Avenue. The German United Cabinet Workers brought four farms in 1869 between 35th and 50th streets and developed a German town. In the following year Schuetzen Park was laid out at Broadway and Steinway Street (this remained a landmark for half a century) and a large trace on both sides of Steinway Street from Astoria Boulevard to the East River was bought by the piano maker William Steinway, who set up factories along the shore and a village to their south. On May 4, 1870, Astoria, Hunter's Point, Steinway and Ravenswood consolidated to form Long Island City. Treacherous reefs in Hell's Gate were dynamited in 1876 and 1885 at the behest of the federal government. Thousands of houses were built during the 1890s and the early twentieth century. The shore of the East River became a park in 1913, and the first rapid transit line, the Astoria elevated, opened on 31st Street on February 1, 1917. Many six family apartment buildings and housing projects were added during the 1920s and 1930s.

Motion picture studios were opened in 1920 by the Famous Players - Lasky Corporation at 35th Avenue between 34th and 37th streets in Astoria, just across the East River from the company's headquarters in Manhattan. Between 1921 and the time the company became known as Paramount in 1927, about one quarter of its films were made there (the rest were made in Hollywood). Adapted for the production of motion pictures with sound by Western Electric in 1929, the facility was renamed Eastern Studios, Inc. The proximity of the studio to Broadway was of benefit to Paramount, which produced such films there as the musical Heads Up (1930), by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The production of feature films diminished during the mid 1930s and virtually ceased by 1937, though the studio continued to be used for short subjects, "second unit" work for films made in Hollywood, and Paramount News. In 1942, the U.S. Army took control of the studio, which it renamed the Signal Corps Photographic Center, and began producing and editing wartime films (A World at War, 1943; Autobiography of a Jeep, 1943); the army continued to use the studio to produce educational and training films until the 1960s. In 1975, the studio reopened for the production of commercial feature films: among the many films made there in the following years were Sidney Lumet's The Wiz (1977), Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), and Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987). In 1988, the studio became the site of the Museum of the Moving Image, while continuing its commercial operations. One of the buildings in the area now houses the Museum of the Moving Image.

The Independent subway extended service along Steinway Street and Broadway on August 19, 1933, and new connections to Manhattan and the Bronx were provided by the Triborough Bridge, which opened on July 11, 1936.

After the Second World War Astoria was largely Italian. Greek residents rapidly increased in number after 1965: one third of all Greeks who moved to New York City in the 1980s settled in the neighborhood, and by the mid 1990s they accounted for slightly less than half its population. St. Demetrious, one of the eleven Greek Orthodox churches in the area, is probably the largest Orthodox church outside Greece. Greek immigrants who settled in the neighborhood received aid from the Hellenic Americans Neighborhood Action Committee, a locally based social services agency. Other ethnic groups also established communities in the area, including Colombians, Chinese, Guyanese, and Koreans, and to a lesser extent Ecuadorians, Romanians, Indians, Filipinos, and Dominicans.

Today, Astoria is one of the most vibrant, mixed, colorful and interesting of the many neighborhoods which comprise New York City. As befitting such an energetic community, it continues to grow and develop and has yet to reach its full potential. The 21st Century will be an exciting time in Astoria. Stay tuned!

A few pictures of this large neighborhood:

Astoria pool, largest public pool in NYC and setting for the 1936 US Olympic diving trials.


The neighborhood is heavily Greek, as if you couldn't tell by some of the architecture.


Bohemian Hall Beer Garden is the oldest continuously operating beer garden in NYC (photo by Lauren Shia).


The Hell Gate Bridge over Astoria Park was the inspiration for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This website (where the photo is taken from) has a really fantastic photo tour of this park, which I live on the edge of and am in every day http://www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/b...a/astoriapark/.


The architecture is really varied but this is typical of the houses in my part of the neighborhood on Ditmars Boulevard (photo by Swinefeld from this forum).


Here is a link to a fantastic tour Swinefeld did of the neighborhood.
forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=177833[/URL]

[cabasse]

east lake, atlanta. home of the east lake golf course, site of the PGA tour championship, and the former east lake meadows housing project. my mother grew up in a house bordering east lake (atlanta) and kirkwood, (decatur) in the late 40s.


http://www.thelondongolfer.co.uk/blog2.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Lake_(Atlanta)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Lake_Golf_Club
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tour_Championship
http://www.eastlakefoundation.org/vi...=346&page=8805

[Cirrus]

Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

The streets were planned according to the 1791 L'Enfant Plan for Washington, and most of the buildings were built in the post-Civil War period from 1865 through the end of the 19th Century. The circle itself was built in 1871.

The neighborhood has always been popular and expensive. When it was first built it was home to many of the city's best 19th Century mansions. In the 20th Century the super-wealthy decamped and many of the mansions became embassies for foreign countries, or expensive offices.

Many of the more middle class rowhouses have been converted to apartments and group houses, although some are still single-family.

Dupont Circle neighborhood highlighted in the L'Enfant Plan:


Contemporary neighborhood map:


Aerial image from Bing Maps:

[pdxtex]

i live in nw portland, which i would describe as the oldest, largest and most dense urban neighborhood in portland. wikipedia cites a population density of about 3,300 people per sq. km. this may be higher on the downtown side of the neighborhood which has tons of 3 story walk up apartments and many high rise apartments also. its the nw terminus for the portland streetcar also. the northern end of the neighborhood is mostly older single family homes, lots of bungalows and craftsmans, and some more stately homes too. geographically, its an interesting mix as the neighborhood butts right up to the portland west hills. those neighborhoods are as hilly and twisty and you can get in this country. nw in general is a fairly well to do area but is predominantly a renters neighborhood, about 80% are apartment buildings....lots of trees and bottle cart bums too. ill edit this more, i need lunch!

[Jonboy1983]

I live in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, which at one point was called Mill Town due to the vast presence of paper mills and other manufacturing to supplement the farming industry in the hinterlands surrounding Philadelphia.

Downingtown's mills have long since closed down, and we're actually trying to establish a full-fledged central business district. Right now, all we have is just a smattering of retail and commercial activity with a car dealer occupying the geographic center of the borough. We want to have more of a mix of ground-level office and retail use and upper levels of residential units.

As for the "neighborhood" of Downingtown, well, I live in an apartment complex that was built in 1976, and my in-laws were actually among the very first residents to move in after their wedding in August of that year...

[glowrock]

I'm in the South Side Slopes neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Essentially, it's a neighborhood, well, in the slopes above the South Side Flats, where many steel mills and glass-making manufacturers used to be located. My view is directly out towards a redevelopment along E. Carson St. called Southside Works, which was formerly the Jones & Laughlin (J&L) Steel Company's largest steel mill. The bridge over the Monongahela (Mon) River adjacent to Southside Works is called the Hot Metal Bridge, aptly named as it used to have rails upon which cauldrons of molten steel would cross the river from the furnace/smelter on the opposite side of the Mon to the processing facilities on my side of the river.

I'll seek out some old-timey photos shortly... Needless to say, my area is nearly all old mill worker housing, so it's basically from around 1890-1920s or so, with many of the demolished homes making way for newer, yet still similar in size and shape, housing (such as the half-duplex I live in). And basically, I live on a converted goat path!

Aaron (Glowrock)

[novaCJ]

I currently live in a suburban subdivision built in the eighties, adjacent to a larger and nicer suburban subdivision which predates it by two decades. Within walking distance is Northern Virginia Community College, which I am currently attending, and a small strip of useless chains, often occupied by at least one police car.

The area in which I grew up is slightly more interesting. It was, during Colonial and post-revolution times a working plantation, called "Bush Hill" for the road leading up to the old house, unfortunately a victim of arson several decades ago, was lined with bushes. On the other side of Franconia Road, then Fairfax Road, was a plantation called "Rose Hill", named for a similar reason. The land of Bush Hill was subdivided amongst the various descendants of the original owners, until a it was built on in suburban-subdivision style in the fifties and sixties. Within the subdivision, there is a street called "Old Rolling Road", where massive hogs heads (large barrels) of tobacco were rolled down to the main road. My childhood home was located on what was once the land the slaves occupied, and we would often find pieces of thick, old glass from the period, which were probably brought to the surface during construction of the homes.

[Austinlee]

I live in a small street-grid neighborhood on a hilltop and it's called "Byersdale" for a large metal works called the A.M. Byers mill that still stands a few hundred meters from the hillside neighborhood. It was built in 1942-1944. Most eligibile men were off at WWII so the houses in my neighborhood were fitted out and finished by teenage shop classes. That's why we have a lot of cracks in the mortar of our brick houses... ah well, what are you gonna do.

The neighborhood was within walking distance of the mill that gave it it's namesake.
Also right in my neighborhood was set up one of the first military encampments of the revolutionary war from the 1740s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logstown

My area doesn't look like much in person, basically industrial decay-style but it has a pinch of history.

[Illithid Dude]

I live on the boarder of Los Angeles and Santa Monica, which is an area called Brentwood. Technically, I live in Santa Monica, but the next block over is L.A., and I've always sort of considered Brentwood to bleed over between the two. I live off a street called San Vicente. Brentwood was originally a street car suburb, and San Vicente was where the streetcar went down.



This is a picture of San Vicente in the 20s. This is upper San Vicente, closer to L.A., and where I live is lower down on San Vicente, about two miles, maybe a little less, to the beach. Lower San Vicente is primarily single family residential, except for directly next to the beach which is apartments, and upper San Vicente is a mixture of commercial and apartments.

Eventually, the street car closed down, and the median was turned into a sort of park. Because of this, San Vicente is a particularly beautiful street, especially for L.A.



This is upper San Vicente. You can see the grassy tree-lined median where the streetcar used to be. From about 1950 on, San Vicente has been built up, though in recent years, the building has stagnated. I would say this is mostly due to NIMBYism from the surrounding, wealthy neighbors.

And here is Brentwood/San Vicente now.



Lower San Vicente



Upper San Vicente.



One of the nice things about Brentwood/San Vicente is that it is very walkable. There are these little commercial clusters everywhere, which I hypothesize were built around streetcar stops. Because of these, there are lots of restaurants and stores within five minutes walking distance of me, despite me living in a SFR neighborhood. My friends, neighbors, and I are always walking over to get ice cream (seriously, if you are in L.A. go to Sweet Rose Creamery), food, (Farmshop, a little restaurant near me, was just voted the best restaurant of L.A., even though it is a little restaurant that isn't very well known in L.A. except to nearby residents), and general shopping and errands(there are clothing stores, toy stores, barbershops, even a 24 hour convenience store). The best part is? The majority of these stores are independent, or very small chains (i.e. two stores), which I suppose lives up to the Jane Jacobs ideal (without the density part).

Just some general pictures of the neighborhood nowadays.





And, I guess that's a very short history of my neighborhood.

[Centropolis]

cool stuff Illithid. strange to see those trees in the old photograph, admittedly i know little about the L.A. basin but they look a little strange there if they were naturally there considering the climate.

[MayDay]

I live in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, located about 1 mile due south of downtown. The first residents were here around 1830ish, but the area wasn't incorporated into the city until 1867. At one time, a college that went by the name of Cleveland University was located here - because of that, the main streets in the northern section of the neighborhood are College, Professor, Literary, and University.

Around the early 1900s, the neighborhood experienced tremendous growth and development due to its location - conveniently on a modest plateau/ridge west of the steel mills (aka close to work, but not downwind from the smoke/soot that was a byproduct) that brought thousands upon thousands to Cleveland during the period from 1880-1920ish. One of the end results of this was that each ethnic group brought their religions with them - there are approximately 30 historic churches within one square mile in the neighborhood. The area was also somewhat socio-economically integrated - large Victorian homes lined the main streets while workers cottages filled the side streets within.

The later part of the century wasn't as kind - when the interstate highways were built, the neighborhood was dissected into four sections. The racial tensions of the 1960s (not as much in Tremont but in inner-city Cleveland), placement of large-scale public housing and disinvestment afterward led to high crime rates. For quite some time, you wouldn't come into the area without packing heat. Even so, the area's built environment endured and caught the attention of filmmakers - the most well known are 'The Deer Hunter' filmed in 1978 which features Lemko Hall (at one time a Slavic social hall, now condos) and St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral. Five years later, a modest home in the southeastern section was used during the filming of the holiday classic, 'A Christmas Story' - it was in disrepair, but then bought by an entrepreneur in 2004 who restored it and re-opened as a tourist attraction, with the iconic 'Leg Lamp' in the window just like in the movie. (A personal aside - I love the movie, the family portrayed is so much like mine when I was Ralphie's age, and I live two blocks from the house. Love. It.

Anyway, in the 1980s, artists and gays discovered (or rediscovered) areas like the Warehouse District (downtown) or Ohio City and Tremont (inner-city neighborhoods) and set up shop, restored homes, etc. and gentrification started. Of course, in Cleveland that happens at a much slower pace, so in the 1990s, new construction projects began to pop up here and there and that's how it's continued until now. In an area where most of the original homes were wood-frame construction built around 1890, most of the newer construction is replacing something that had seen a good run. Even so, the area still retains a great mix of new arrival yuppies, lifelong old-schoolers who prefer calling it 'The South Side', artists trying to make their break, and every flavor in between.

Enough blathering, here are some pics:

Lincoln Park, center of the neighborhood:


A study in contrasts for the neighborhood:


The main commercial corner - Professor and Literary; this is where Iron Chef Michael Symon really established his career:


The main commerical corridor (Professor Street) during the Taste of Tremont which draws around 25,000 visitors:


View from the northeastern area during less pleasant weather - note Pats in the Flats in the lower corner, it doesn't get much more authentic than this place:


Interior of St. John Cantius church - did I mention they still offer services in Polish?


The interior of St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral:


Yeah, I could probably spend the rest of my life posting detailed shots of the neighborhood but I'll leave it at that for now.

[Buckeye Native 001]

Sometime in the early to mid 1980s, someone thought it'd be a good idea to construct townhouses and apartment buildings for college kids near the airport because they probably figured most college kids are too drunk to be bothered by Cesnas and CRJ's buzzing overhead, hence the creation of the Lake Mary Road neighborhood in southwestern Flagstaff.