Click here to read the full announcement. 

 

 

Click here to register for this exciting regional preservation and planning conference.

 

SNOOP! behind the scenes of The Veronika, winner of the Storefront Renovation Award at the 2018 Celebration of Preservation.

Tour will be led by Frank Scalish, contractor and developer. This tour will open with an overview of the Birdtown historic district in Lakewood, followed by a tour of the building. Event will conclude with an optional happy hour in the newly occupied storefront cocktail bar LBM.

Located in Lakewood's Birdtown historic district, the Veronika is a small mixed-use building constructed in 1915 by Michael & Veronika Turza. In 2016, Scalish Construction acquired the building and undertook a rehabilitation using the federal historic preservation tax incentives, a first for Lakewood. Scalish reconfigured interior layouts, added energy efficient mechanicals and modern finishes to six apartment units and the first floor restaurant. On the exterior, the glazed brick was water washed, and all of the original windows were repaired. Especially impressive is the change to the exterior storefront. Scalish Construction removed the inappropriate 1970s cladding, infill and pent roof around the entry. Using the physical elements that had been uncovered, Scalish meticulously matched new wood and glass to reinstate the historic configuration. Instead of installing sub-divided storefront glass, the owner chose full-size plate glass windows. The impressive windows with custom wood and glass doors create a light-filled and architecturally appropriate storefront.

Cleveland's upwardly mobile African American middle class sought out living space at the urban periphery starting in the early decades of the twentieth century, in an attempt to escape the overcrowding that fostered an increasingly untenable quality of life at the city's urban core. After World War II, African American-owned construction companies - as well as a handful of white ones - built houses for black buyers on vacant land south of Miles Avenue in southeast Cleveland, and in 1953, the first African American family purchased a house in the "suburbanesque" Lee-Harvard neighborhood.   

 

Building upon the Cleveland Restoration Society's ongoing community history initiative in the area, tour leader Dr. Todd Michney - a Professor at Georgia Tech and author of Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980 - will explain these various areas' significance in terms of city planning and the built environment, the meaning they held for African American residents in terms of prestige, the record of black home- and institution-building, and the observable patterns of interracial encounters and race relations. The tour will conclude with a summary of Cleveland's African American sub-urbanization into the present.

 

The tour of Lee-Harvard is on August 4 at 10:00 a.m. Board at the Lee Road Baptist Church, located at 3970 Lee Rd. in Cleveland. Due to the amount of seats on a bus, space is limited on this tour.  

 

Click here for reservations.  

Cleveland State University Levin College Professors Joanna Ganning (top right) and Rosie Tighe (bottom right) co-authored and published the article "Moving toward a Shared Understanding of the U.S. Shrinking City" online in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. According to the article abstract, "scholarly work on "shrinking" cities grew following the 2010 census, resulting in a diverse body of popular and academic literature. However, this has not produced a widely accepted definition of the "shrinking city."

We analyze definitions used in a sample of papers on U.S. shrinking cities and propose an empirically justified definition that reflects the shrinking cities research agenda and is easily operationalized. We demonstrate that our resulting universe of eighty cities represents the places studied in the literature and provides a starting point for future research. We hope to draw scholars to a shared understanding of this pressing topic." 

Click here to access the journal article.*

 

*Note, Scholarly subscription required.

The annual National Trust for Historic Preservation Conference, PastForward, will take place in San Francisco, from November 13-16, 2018. Registration for the conference opened on July 2. This is the premier educational and networking event for those in the business of saving places, and you won't want to miss this year's conference in San Francisco!

 

Click here to view the full agenda.