News

August 15, 2018

NEH Funds UAlbany Historian’s Project on Urban Renewal’s Impact on Four New York Cities

UAlbany Associate Professor David Hochfelder’s digital visual history of urban renewal in four New York cities will be realized, thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded on Wednesday.

Picturing Urban Renewal was among the projects awarded by the NEH in its final round of funding for 2018. Hochfelder’s grant comes in the Digital Humanities Advancement category and supports his development of an interactive website that, through historic photographs and drawings, will explore the impact of urban renewal in Albany, Kingston, Newburgh and New York City’s Lower East Side.

“We’re excited to begin work next month,” said Hochfelder, whose current project is an outgrowth of his 98 Acres in Albany, a social history of urban renewal in Albany that employed rich photographic record, public outreach and oral histories, as well as traditional archival research, to document the experiences of residents, business owners, construction workers and others whose lives were affected by the demolition and construction of the Empire State Plaza.

Picturing Urban Renewal will place in space and time historic photographs of major redevelopment projects in the four New York cities. The project makes two key contributions to urban and public history:

• By focusing on the visual record, particularly pre-demolition and construction-era photographs, it will place in the foreground the human experience of redevelopment.
• By comparing the impact of urban renewal on cities of varying sizes and economic fortunes, it will fill an important gap in the scholarly literature, which emphasizes urban centers almost to the exclusion of the small and mid-sized towns and cities.

“A major need for this work arises from the simple fact that nobody actually knows how much land around the country was seized for urban renewal, how many families displaced, how many buildings torn down, etc.,” Hochfelder said. “We think this website will be a resource for other cities still coming to terms with the impact of urban renewal.”