JERRY #4

Edward Helfers

Deader Than Downtown

In his 1967 documentary short, Monument to the Dream, director Charles Guggenheim distills into twenty-seven minutes the construction of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, otherwise known as the St. Louis Arch. Planted on a patch of riverfront formerly occupied by condemned warehouses, the arch (which is not really an arch, but rather an inverted catenary curve) was originally commissioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of the Works Progress Administration. Its purpose was three-fold: to create jobs, to revitalize a derelict district, and to commemorate the Lewis and Clark expedition and the thousands of pioneers who followed suit. That it became the most ambitious civil engineering feat of its time was a nice bonus. From the cosine functions describing the arch’s geometry to the fabrication of steel skins in Pittsburgh, Guggenheim foregrounds a metaphor of westward expansion—grit, risk, self-sacrifice—which finds echoes in the perils faced by the “iron men” who built the monument. For three years, these workers welded, hammered, soldered, poured concrete, and smoked cigarettes on one of two 80-ton oil derricks affixed to the legs—all without safety harnesses. One clip depicts two men balancing on either side of a seesawing I-beam, hundreds of feet above the Mississippi; it is a scene no less vertigo-inducing than the iconic Charles C. Ebbets photograph of laborers lunching on the skeleton of a Manhattan skyscraper. Surprisingly, however, the arch was completed without a single fatality, the final wedge bridging its freestanding legs on Oct. 29th, 1965. It was viewed by many as a testament not only to our technological prowess, but also to the stoic, gung-ho fearlessness of our frontier past, sentiments by no means trivial in postwar America.

Fitting, then, that the architect behind this project was himself a trailblazer. Eero Saarinen, whose retrospective exhibit “Shaping the Future” recently toured museums across Scandinavia and North America, earned widespread acclaim for his avant-garde structures, which include GM headquarters, the CBS building, Washington-Dulles, Tanglewood, and roughly half of Yale. He showed early promise as a designer, receiving a home furnishing award for his “Tulip Chair” (later popularized as the brooding perch of one Dr. Spock). It wasn’t long before he graduated to buildings, completing projects like the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois with a combination of machine-like rationalism and grand, sweeping abstraction. Shortly afterwards, Saarinen saw business from a number of corporate clients, including John Deere and Bell Labs. So pervasive was his influence on the American landscape that he made the cover of Time in 1956. The accompanying article celebrates Saarinen as the consummate modern architect, a technocratic wizard who might prove the salvation of an artistically handicapped America. “Last week,” the interviewer writes, “as [Saarinen’s] wife watched with fascination, he casually turned over his breakfast grapefruit, began carving out elliptical parabolic arches which he then carried off to the office to see if they might do as an idea for the office model of TWA’s new terminal at Idlewild,” (3). By the time of his death in 1961, writes Peter Papademetriou, director of the NJIT School of Architecture, Saarinen had come to “personify the brash boldness of American Modernism in its big gestures and unfailing optimism,” (141). He had secured his place, along with Ebenezer Howard and Pierre L’Enfant, as one the primary authors of the American city.

Many, however, have received Saarinen less favorably. As early as 1957, the critic Vincent Scully labeled his work as anti-humanist, “curiously lunar and remote,” (8). Others went on to dismiss Saarinen as a corporate lackey, a high-wire novelty artist whose designs, however provocative, wrought disastrous consequences. Writes Walter McQuade in his essay, “The Exploded Landscape,”

To me it seems he is at the stage where a deviant kind of massiveness and simplicity, which could even be called dumb ugliness, intrigues him—over-simplicity. There is a lot to be said for the architectural qualities of this approach; it can be very moving. But he toys with it, then becomes businesslike. His counter-impulse is to apply perfect taste and razor-sharp deftness in the details, and this fineness slices the throat of the architectural characterization. You can’t write like Theodore Drieser and Thomas Mann at the same time. The result is cold, glib, and clumsy. Saarinen is a man not struggling out of an overcoat, like some of these other architects, but into one. (84)

Here, we see many of the criticisms that would be leveled at Saarinen for the latter half of the 20th century. His architecture is faceless, “cold, glib and clumsy.” His buildings oversimplify. They substitute grandeur for characterization. Moreover, they apply the rhetoric of monument to the realm of business. Saarinen did design churches, theaters, and universities, but some of his more famous buildings were tailored for large corporations, imbued with an aura at once alien and industrial; IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, for example, looks every bit like a flying saucer. Such otherworldly structures, precursors in many respects to modern business parks, effectively rewrote huge swaths of our urban and suburban habitat, shifting demographics, land use, and local culture in unforeseen ways.

In fact, some would even argue that Saarinen and his architectural heirs (notably, Minoru Yamasaki, of World Trade Center fame) helped create the template for the oft-maligned Central Business District (CBD).

In theory, the CBD was a sensible idea, first championed in 1925 by the French polymath Le Corbusier. In his fragmentary manifesto Urbanisme, Le Corbusier lays out with pathological enthusiasm his principles of town planning, along with designs for a modern city with a population of three million, described as “a human operation against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work,” (1). His ideal city, a symmetrical labyrinth of skyscrapers, projects, and set-backs which in many ways resembles an M.C. Esher painting, looks to optimize open space, communication, and transportation.

To achieve this, Le Corbusier divides his city into four “organs”: a reserved zone (woods and fields), garden cities (satellite suburbs), the business center (skyscrapers reserved for business purposes), and the industrial zone (depots and factories) (162-165). Anyone who has spent time in Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Los Angeles, or the Financial District in Manhattan can see how cleanly the latter two zones have been transplanted: dominating most every American downtown is a cluster of skyscrapers and stadiums and government offices and warehouses and other large structures with singular commercial uses. In the absence of geographic constraints, the effect of this blueprint is startling: cities like Phoenix extend as far as the eye can see, with concentric circles of habitation radiating outward from multiple commercial districts, much like a target.

By compartmentalizing work life, the CBD allows those who can afford it to escape the noise and congestion each night for suburbs not so dissimilar from Le Corbusier’s Garden Cities: quartered lawns, gardens and garages, space and safety on the fringe.

Beginning in the late fifties, however, planners began to notice disturbing trends in inner cities across the nation. Cancerous blights cropped up in once thriving areas; rows of residences were abandoned; office buildings were rendered irrelevant by their loftier counterparts. With her 1961 critique of urban infrastructure, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs was among the first to diagnose the unique problems the CBD created for Eastern cities like Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York. Central to Jacobs’ argument is the concept of heterogeneous city spaces. In order for a downtown to flourish, Jacobs claims, there must be a mixture of primary uses, or “anchorages,” that oblige its citizens: offices, factories, schools, dwellings, and, in some cases, places of recreation or entertainment (161). Yet most CBDs ask for the exact opposite, foisting a homogeneity of primary uses. A textbook CBD, according to Jacobs, is a “dud,” because it is “too predominately devoted to work and contain[s] too few people after working hours,” (165). Jacobs argues that this sort of imbalance, exemplified in the heart of many a mid-western city, can have a number of effects. It can raise crime rates, since there are fewer people (onlookers) on the streets after hours. It can facilitate sprawl, raising the environmental cost of commuting. It can facilitate racial and socio-economic segregation, as populations are less likely to interact, and more likely to fall into pockets of uniformity. But perhaps the most surprising effect pertains to the view of CBD as sustainable economic engine: paradoxically, Jacobs argues, the CBD hampers business by delimiting commercial collaboration to discreet centers of public exchange.

This is to say nothing of the psychological effects the CBD imposes. Saarinen and other modernists spoke warmly of the emotional appeal in their architecture, which sought to engender a feeling of grandeur, of sublimity. They wanted their viewers to be transported, moved, to admire each building as one admires a monument. But for all their splendor and majesty, monuments seldom invite interaction. One is not encouraged to touch a monument, to conduct business in or around a monument, to alter or update a monument, but rather to reflect, to dwell, to behold.

This sort of museal sterility deters human participation, ossifying rather than invigorating city centers. Like early Paul Strand photographs, those austere geometries featuring sharply dressed pedestrians dwarfed by steel and concrete, the utilitarian construction of Saarinen overwhelms the individual.

And yet, the CBD had sticking power. Le Corbusier-inspired industrial-business centers have proliferated, both in the United States and abroad, creating dead zones with low quality education and high crime and poverty rates. To improve these areas, mayors, planners, developers, and community organizers have pursued a wide range of strategies, with varying degrees of success. In Pittsburgh, renewal efforts took the form of public-private partnerships beginning in the 1980s, a model that showed promise in the short term, but ultimately failed to reconcile its interests with those of lower and middle class populations associated with a dwindling but nonetheless sizable steel industry. In Atlanta, a fifteen-year investment in parks and public transit, funded largely through fare hikes, has only catalyzed sprawl, leading to cuts in inner city services. In Detroit, local officials even went so far as to raze entire blocks in the late 1970s, leaving behind lots without interested investors; much of this land has long since reverted to wilderness, and is now patrolled not by police, but by packs of feral dogs.

Admirable exceptions do exist (San Francisco, Portland, and Denver have all benefited from successful revitalization projects) but more common is the city with visible imbalances, with wastelands that consume space and resources. There is still no roadmap for urban renewal, for revitalization that uplifts without erasing, that prettifies without evicting.

Half a century after Saarinen’s death, it appears we are still struggling with his influence. How do we reclaim spaces of such massive simplicity? Is it even possible to renovate the modernist giants?

As it turns out, the answers to these questions may be found in the city that bears Saarinen’s clearest footprint. With a downtown population of 350,000 compared to nearly a million in the county, St. Louis would seem an unlikely candidate for substantive revitalization, if only for the scope of its blight. An economic hub a century ago, thanks in part to the stretch of flat, fertile bottomland bridging the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the city has in recent decades garnered a less flattering reputation. Ever since the installation of housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe, a flawed attempt to replace the impoverished Desoto-Carr neighborhood with high-rises, the city frequently finds itself among the top ten poorest cities on U.S. Census Bureau releases, with a median household income hovering between ten and fifteen thousand dollars below the national average. In 2006 and again in 2010, the Morgan Quinto Press listed St. Louis as the most dangerous in America (such reports, it should be noted, fail to account for unique zoning issues). Meanwhile, the county has enjoyed exceedingly low crime rates and high quality public education, attracting new residents and businesses. In his novel The Twenty-Seventh City, the novelist and former St. Louisan Jonathan Franzen provides a useful map of the area:

North of the business district, where the poorest people lived, an early morning breeze carried smells of used liquor and unnatural perspiration out of alleyways where nothing moved. A slamming door was heard for blocks around. In the railyards of the city’s central basin, amid the buzzing of faulty chargers and the sudden ghostly shiverings of Cyclone fences, men with flattops dozed in square-headed towers while rolling stock regrouped below them. Three star hotels and private hospitals with an abject visibility occupied the higher ground. Farther west, the land grew hilly and healthier trees knit the settlements together, but that was not St. Louis anymore, it was suburb. On the south side there were rows upon rows of cubical brick houses where widows and widowers lay in beds and the blinds in the windows, lowered in a different era, would not be raised all day.

But no part of the city was deader than downtown. Here in the heart of St. Louis, in the lee of the whining all-night traffic on four expressways, was a wealth of parking spaces. Here sparrows bickered and pigeons ate. Here City Hall, a hip-roofed copy of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, rose in two-dimensional splendor from a flat, vacant block. The air on Market Street, the central thorough-fare, was wholesome. On either side of it you could hear the birds both singly and in chorus—it was like a meadow. It was like a back yard. (7-8)

Franzen saturates the CBD in a gray, penal hue, and the post-apocalyptic irony of the last two lines amounts to sharp criticism: the city is a meadow, the opposite of what it should be.

Facing such a grim portrait, it is with good reason that many St. Louisans fear their city will suffer (or has already suffered) the same fate as industrial fossils like Detroit and Manchester.

However, there is at least one promising statistic; 2004 found nearly five thousand new residents within city limits. It was the first time that St. Louis registered population growth since 1950. This surge owes itself in part to the efforts of an unlikely community organizer. In 1992, classically trained sculptor Bob Cassilly took interest in a ten-floor, 750,000 square foot Washington Avenue warehouse, once home to the International Shoe Company. With its high ceilings, ample open space, and sturdy steel construction, the building struck Cassilly as the ideal canvas for a concept he had been sitting on for some time: a city within a city, active around the clock, with work space, eateries, lofts, studios, and entertainment venues.

A tall, quixotic man with the half dome haircut of a karate sensei and a distaste for technicality, Cassilly would seem an unlikely candidate for a redevelopment project of this magnitude. While he did have some experience running a restaurant in nearby Lafayette Square, he was better known for his sculptures, which include the Hippos in Manhattan’s Riverside Park and the seventy-foot Giraffe outside the Dallas Zoo (he refuses to call himself an artist, for fear of sounding elitist). Nevertheless, against the advice of friends and former business partners, Cassilly and his wife Gail purchased the property at less than a dollar per square foot. They quickly set about reinventing the massive industrial interior, recruiting a team of nearly fifty artisans, welders, architects, and tinkerers from the local arts scene. Acquaintances from the salvage and construction industries pitched in as well, supplying an inventory of urban dross: scrap metal, sub-par bricks, defunct facades, military cargo ropes, mining anchors, friezes, deconstructed cornices, even the vault from a local bank.

Cassilly welcomed each donation without knowing how the materials would be used, allowing the space to evolve organically. Under this philosophy, printing plates were transformed into tiles, engine heads, into wainscoting; chicken pellet processors became trash cans and stairs, conveyor rollers, balusters for a staircase taken from a disused hospital; buffet bins were repurposed as wallpaper, wort coolers, as giant, climb-able coils. Cassilly also exploited the resources within the warehouse, turning subterranean conference rooms into caves, blending sculpture with concrete floors, and refashioning shoe shafts and ventilation conduits into multistory slides. In October of 1997, after three years of labor, City Museum was opened to the public. By December, roughly one hundred thousand visitors had passed through its doors.

City Museum invites its patrons to touch, wander, climb, and explore among the various installations. Much of the joy in visiting is figuring out what the structures are made of, where they came from, and how exactly to engage with them. On the first floor, for example, perched above a small wooden stage, there is a tangle of tree trunks, tanning barrels, and driftwood, the latter collected from the Mississippi River via jet-ski and lasso. It takes a few moments to realize that this structure, fortified with chicken-wire and metal caging, is meant to be a tree-house. Across the way, a life-sized sculpture of a bowhead whale is disguised by secondhand tile and streamers. Upstairs, a reception desk assembles architectural artifacts from the St. Louis area; the countertop, a slab of marble removed from the First National bank, complements brass work taken the Penrose Police Station, while overhead, engraved terra cotta advertises the Wellston Loop Building, former home of the streetcar headquarters. This sort of creative resurrection spills over into the parking lot; a playground entitled Monstro city allows guests to crawl through rebar coils connecting a copper cupola, former crown of the State Psychiatric Hospital, to a Saber jet the FBI left untended at a nearby airport during the flood of ’93. Every cranny of City Museum reveals a new layer of civic history, told not in a conventional chronology, but rather in fits and starts, through anecdote and detour. One might argue that this relationship with the past, compared to the monasticism exhibited by most museums, solicits more interest from its visitors, more participation, since the uniqueness of each relic is pronounced by unusual configurations. Admiration of odd new forms (gears braiding a column, shingles transmogrified into fish scales) gives way to a consideration of their original function, their original context. Put another way: in the synthesis of overlooked objects, we necessarily entertain their evolution, from construction through renovation, demolition, salvage, and rebirth.

In this sense, City Museum is both a catalogue of urban decay and a celebration of its transformation. But it is also more than a museum, more than a repository for rejected treasures: with housing on half of its ten floors, office space, art studios, performance venues, a vintage clothing store, and a wide range of programming for at-risk youths, the building has reprised its role as community anchor, attracting a crowd ranging from local children to conventioneers. To revisit Jacobs, City Museum, now recognized as one of the world’s great public venues by the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces, achieves a mixture of primary uses, which in turn diversifies and increases the surrounding population. This growth has spurred more growth, as streets become safer, business, more sustainable, and real estate, more desirable.

Cassilly, situated ahead of the redevelopment curve, has already taken advantage of this reversal by investing elsewhere in the neighborhood, establishing a pair of multi-faceted night clubs/banquet facilities and revamping the Old Laclede Gas Building and Riverside Trailhead. And while some have accused Cassilly of harboring a gentrification agenda (the lofts inside of City Museum are marketed exclusively towards a wealthy clientele) these arguments find less traction than they might in Harlem or Boston’s North End: recall that Washington Avenue was once a garment district, commercial in the way that Le Corbusier envisioned. By the time the Cassillys acquired the International Shoe Company, the building no longer served any function, so its conversion did not upgrade an area of poverty, but rather an area of blight.

With Cassilly’s groundwork in place, others were quick to invest in the district. In 1997, mayor and former police chief Clarence Harmon assembled Downtown Now!, a redevelopment force tasked with planning and funding an overhaul of downtown. While this initiative would eventually morph into a community development corporation (CDC), acquiring some of the growing pains experienced by Pittsburgh and comparable renewal efforts across the Midwest, it drew interest from other developers (notably, Dave Jump and the McGowan Brothers) who shared at least two of the goals stipulated by Harmon: to diversify downtown housing options, and to revitalize Washington Avenue. With public and private financing at work, the main strip blossomed. Salons, boutiques, markets, pizza parlors, art galleries, and cafes appeared in once forsaken structures, creating new employment for city residents. Bars, pubs, restaurants, and nightclubs kept the streets busy after hours, which discouraged crime. The upper floors of old warehouses, formerly sooty broken windows, now featured renovated lofts—ranging from luxury penthouses to offerings for families below the median household income—conveniently located near the commercial district.

Yet for all of these upgrades, Downtown Now! relies upon conventional revitalization strategies. Cassilly, on the other hand, appeals to unique and arguably unprecedented rebuilding principles. The City Museum guidebook identifies five of them: Adaptive Re-Use, Recycling as a Way of Life, Composition, Play-to-Learn, and Serendipity (8). The first two are somewhat self-explanatory, referring to the repurposing of old buildings with recycled materials while preserving historic features. Composition, described as “the interplay of form, textures, and movement,” speaks to Cassilly’s aesthetic as a sculptor—that quantity in and of itself can make an artistic statement, (8). (This idea is omnipresent in the museum, best embodied by a partition of some 70,000 Vess soda bottles). Play-to-Learn, on the other hand, invokes a more subconscious relationship with structure: often, functionality (and sometimes safety) has been sacrificed for the sake of the Unsuppressed Child, the feeling of danger and discovery that attends forbidden places—graveyards, rooftops, forests, factories—ideal for trespassing, loitering, and mischief. Unlike the mausoleums of modernism, where space is sacred, City Museum is designed to be illicit, to ignite adrenaline, curiosity, imagination, and memory. Of the many possible uses for its contents, few are prescribed, and visitors must exercise ingenuity to fully participate in its impish conceit, an environment without predictable parameters. Any interest in abstract expressionism, the angular and at times authoritarian geometries Saarinen favored, is balanced here by a sense of improvisation, by a desire to invent new uses along with those preconceived. Perhaps this is why City Museum seems perpetually under construction, its sectors being annexed, scrapped, and repaired to accommodate unforeseen mutations.

The final principle, Serendipity, applies this impromptu spirit to urban planning customs:

City Museum was not built by a master plan, by a committee or by consensus. It was conceived by a sculptor, piecemeal, with the overall form gradually taking shape over time, being added-on or taken-apart as the sculptor saw fit to improve the final composition. It is this sense of serendipity, the pleasant surprise that arises from contrasting new elements with the old, mixing the unexpected with the expected, that makes City Museum a unique experience. (8)

Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Pale Fire refers to a similar phenomenon, “combinational delight,” a poetic hybridity that transforms component parts. Just as words open up new meanings when juxtaposed against each other, a space or building can take on a more complex (and perhaps rewarding) character when neighboring contrast, when permitted to abut the weird, unusual, or foreign. By no means is Cassilly the first to latch onto this idea, yet the application here seems novel. Note that serendipity cannot be forecasted—it is an evolving experiment, born of trial and error. It may be fine and well for an artist to seek out serendipitous combinations, but for a government official tasked with a specific redevelopment project, this principle, in many ways a plan-less plan, may seem a tad slippery.

But it is not without its merits. If nothing else, Cassilly’s definition offers a safety valve of sorts, allowing a building to accrue multiple uses over time, to be “added-on” or “taken-apart” where appropriate. By comparison, the myopic utilitarianism of modernism seems risky; a building may perform its function perfectly, but what happens when that function becomes obsolete? We are saddled with an unwieldy paperweight. Along with fostering architectural longevity, serendipity also highlights the importance of patience and brainstorming when rebuilding. Even if the creator (architect, planner, builder) has a keen artistic eye, his or her ideas must be allowed to germinate, to host alternate compositional possibilities. Anyone who has seen the preliminary sketches of Frank Gerry would be hard pressed to find much geometric logic in them, and yet, far from being disorganized jumbles of glass, concrete, and steel, his final products are often intricate and important civic contributions, making their aesthetic appeals in sinews and swoops, decidedly human terms. They are neither readymade nor preordained. They do not reach fruition in the time it takes to unpeel a grapefruit.

Of course, implicit in these principles is the value of intimate local knowledge. More often than not, successful redevelopment projects, in both CBDs and elsewhere, hinge upon individuals with the unique ability to take the pulse of a community. The revitalization of Red Hook, Brooklyn, for example, owes itself in large part to the efforts of Greg O’Connell, a former police officer who used his experience walking the beat, along with the writings of Jacobs, to inform his real estate acquisitions. Eventually, he managed to enliven an area plagued by prostitution and drugs before moving on to a new project in Mount Morris, N.Y.

As for Cassilly, his roots would appear intractable. In a profile published by the weekly St. Louis newspaper Riverfront Times, he outlines his latest redevelopment obsession, a tumbledown North St. Louis cement plant on the banks of the Mississippi. Cassilly hopes to convert this facility, in many ways a relic of early Modernism, into a two pronged attraction: a water park and an ecologically themed river resource center. Green space near the water’s edge will feature tunnels, sculptures, and waterscapes that evoke the Precambrian era, a period of biological miscellany Cassilly associates with the waning years of the Industrial Revolution, when machines were profligate. Meanwhile, the plant itself will be partially preserved, its smokestacks and concrete cylinders treated in the same way that Europeans treat ruins embedded within their cities, as remnants worthy of admiration and commemoration. On the existing architecture, Cassilly muses:

These are some of the most fantastic things…they’re massive and overbuilt and ambitious, simple, beautiful forms...They talk about historic districts and stuff like that, but one of the main things is, our architecture is basically copying shit from Europe. But our industry, it's kind of like jazz, it's an American, original thing. Why not look at it for what it is? It's impressive. It might be threatening, but you can't help but be impressed by it.

Cassilly does not object to the industrial modernism that has in many cases catalyzed sprawl and the CBD––rather, he finds it beautiful. Like it or not, he suggests, our true architectural inheritance is the refuse of industry, these monumental machines. Just because our structures are huge and threatening does not mean we should run from them, or worse, demolish them; rather, we must embrace them, judging them not as eyesores, but as unfinished, as revisable, as spaces we can tailor towards new and unexpected needs. Any effort to do so must absorb local wisdom and eschew theoretical purity, amending (or extending) what clay we have with patience, creativity, vision, and the wherewithal to prioritize long term civic gains over short-sighted profit, let alone esoteric aesthetic edicts. This may not be easy. But if we project the blighted CBD as a planning failure, abandoning it for exurban office parks with volatile tenants, it will surely fulfill our prophecy. On the other hand, if we view our cities as works in progress, we may be surprised to discover just how much is salvageable.

Postcript:

On Monday, September 26th, shortly after the completion of this essay, Bob Cassilly's body was found at Cementland, in the cab of a bulldozer.  While the investigation is ongoing, it is believed that Cassilly died from head trauma after the machine rolled down an embankment.  While the future of this project remains in question, Cassilly's civic and artistic influence does not.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING:

Franzen, Jonathan. The Twenty-Seventh City. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 1984.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, Vintage: 1961.

Le Corbusier. “The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning.” Transl. from Urbanisme by Frederick Etchells. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press: 1971.

Garner, Dwight. “The Last Townie.” The New York Times. March 18, 2011.

Guggenheim, Charles. Monument to the Dream. Guggenheim Productions, 1967.

Kim, Jae-Woo. "Class, Community, and Social Ownership of Capital: The Case of Urban Politics in Pittsburgh" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Hilton Atlanta and Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, GA, Aug 13, 2010

McQuade, Walter. “The Exploded Landscape.” Cambridge, Perspecta Vol. 7, pp. 83-90: 1961.

Papademetriou, Peter. “Coming of Age: Eero Saarinen and Modern American Architecture.” Cambridge, Perspecta, Vol. 21, pp. 116-143: 1984.

Philpott, Matt and Cassilly, Bob. “A Walk-Through History of City Museum Attractions and Exhibits.” 2004, City Museum.

Scully, Vincent, Jr. “Modern Architecture: Toward a Redefinition of Style.” Cambridge, Perspecta, Vol. 4, pp. 4-11: 1957.

Summers-Sparks, Matthew. “One Part Cement, Two Parts Whimsy, One Odd Park.” The New York Times. August 25th, 2007.

Wilson, D.J. “There He Goes Again.” Riverfront Times. September, 2000. http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2000-09-13/news/there-he-goes-again/full

N/A. “The Maturing Modern.” Time Magazine, July 2nd: 1952