|
|
|
BOOK REVIEWS
| Forgotten Philadelphia: Lost Architecture of the Quaker City. By Thomas H. Keels. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. 309 pp, Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.)
|
|
Pubic awareness of America's often endangered architectural patrimony expanded rapidly after World War II, stimulated in part by the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and ordinances mandating inventories of significant structures at the national, state, and local levels. As Constance M. Greiff points out in Lost America (1971–72), her two-volume coast-to-coast survey of notable demolished buildings, "when the first European settlers set forth on the American continent, they began to destroy as surely as they began to build a new civilization" (1:1). Philadelphians are reminded daily of this unattractive American tendency to sweep aside the past in favor of a transient present. |
1
|
|
Lost America owes a debt to the previous publication of John M. Howells's Lost Examples of Colonial Architecture (1931) and Nathan Silver's Lost New York (1967), but the widespread stir that accompanied the release of Lost America encouraged a spate of compilations of architectural prints, drawings, and photographs that focused on urban areas, ranging from Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago to Bar Harbor, Maine, and Williamsport, Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, several similar books appeared. Many of these consisted of collections of photographs selected from local repositories, such as Robert F. Looney's Old Philadelphia in Early Photographs (1976), based on the remarkable collection of the Free Library, Kenneth Finkel's Nineteenth-Century Photography in Philadelphia (1980), drawn from the Library Company collection, and Irvin R. Glazer's Philadelphia Theaters (1994), based on collections at The Athenæum of Philadelphia. |
. . . |
There are about 634 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
