Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States
- ISBN-10
- 0520219546
- ISBN-13
- 9780520219540
- Category
- Architecture
- Pages
- 401
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1999-01-01
- Publisher
- Univ of California Press
- Author
- Paul Groth
Description
From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance? Living Downtown, the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge. Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness. This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2023-11-10
- 456 pages
- Ebook
- Univ of California Press
Similar books
-
CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication
By M. Christine Boyer52 Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake , “ Paradise Regained , ” Architecture 80 ( December 1991 ) : 48–51 ; the quotation is on pages 48–49 .
-
Steel Surfaces: A Guide to Alloys, Finishes, Fabrication, and Maintenance in Architecture and Art
By L. William Zahner... Joe, 211 Kelly, William, 12 Kieran Timberlake, 28, 29 killed steels, 22 Kure Beach (North Carolina), weathering evaluated in, 275 M machining, 225–226, ...
-
Creating Healthy Neighborhoods: Evidence-Based Planning and Design Strategies
By Ann Forsyth, Emily Salomon, Laura SmeadBrender, Jean D., Juliana A. Maantay, and Jayajit Chakraborty. 2011. ... Chris Frost, Katharine Ker, Rebecca Steinbach, Ian Roberts, and Reinhard Wentz.
-
The World by Design: The Story of a Global Architecture Firm
By A. Eugene Kohn, Clifford PearsonIn the Army and the Navy, everyone had both line and staff duties. Line duty was your primary mission—say, as a gunnery officer—which you did while being ...
-
Designing for Autism Spectrum Disorders
By Kristi Gaines, Angela Bourne, Michelle Pearson... The Faison School for Autism is a unique and welcoming learning environment that encompasses the needs of its students, staff, and families alike.
-
Manual: The Architecture of Kieran Timberlake
By Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake"A must for practitioners and students alike, Manual brings the process of design and details of architecture to life, revealing the beauty of building derived from composition within a tradition of innovative assembly."--BOOK JACKET.
-
KieranTimberlake - Fullness
By KieranTimberlakeProjects in this book include a house made from prefabricated modules in rural California that minimally disturbed its picturesque site; a major renovation of Philadelphia's Dilworth Park in front of City Hall; Cellophane House (TM), a ...
-
refabricating ARCHITECTURE: How Manufacturing Methodologies are Poised to Transform Building Construction
By Stephen Kieran, James TimberlakeThis thought-provoking book presents a compelling argument for moving architecture from a part-by-part, linear approach to an integrated one that brings together technology, materials, and production methods.
-
Cellophane House: KieranTimberlake
By Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake, KieranTimberlakeThrough a series of questions, the book explores several of KieranTimberlake's ongoing research agendas including speed of on-site assembly, design for disassembly, a holistic approach to the life cycle of materials, and the development of ...
-
Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture
By Stephen Kieran, James TimberlakeThrough the use of state-of-the-art building information modeling, the architects were able to streamline the design-build process. This is a manual for the componentized prefab.