| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1940–1980. By David Schuyler. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. x, 278 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-271-02207-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-271-02208-6.)

Nearly everything written about urban renewal in the post–World War II period has focused on large cities. In A City Transformed, David Schuyler examines urban renewal in the medium-sized community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Because the book considers a relatively small area, Schuyler has offered readers a richly detailed case study of what went wrong with many urban renewal schemes in the United States during the postwar decades.

Like many cities in the northeastern United States, Lancaster reached its peak population in 1950, at just under sixty-four thousand, and then began to decline as residents left older and more densely patterned urban neighborhoods for surrounding suburbs. During that same period the white population in Lancaster declined from 98 percent of the total to about 70 percent, paralleling the white flight in so many other urban areas. Schuyler blames this increased segregation on a long history of racism in the community and on locally conceived redevelopment plans that made no efforts to dissolve racial barriers or encourage integration. At the same time, "slum clearance" destroyed the community fabric of historically black neighborhoods in the city. When funds were available for the renovation and restoration of older housing, they invariably benefited more prosperous white residents who gentrified certain "blighted" neighborhoods, with the result that the former residents were forced out.

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