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At once a fascinating narrative and a visual delight, Lost Boston brings the city's past to life. This updated edition includes a new section illustrating the latest gains and losses in the struggle to preserve Boston's architectural heritage. 

With an engaging text and more than 350 seldom-seen photographs and prints, Lost Boston offers a chance to see the city as it once was, revealing architectural gems lost long ago. An eminently readable history of the city's physical development, the book also makes an eloquent appeal for its preservation. Jane Holtz Kay traces the evolution of Boston from the barren, swampy peninsula of colonial times to the booming metropolis of today. In the process, she creates a family album for the city, infusing the text with the flavor and energy that makes Boston distinct. Amid the grand landmarks she finds the telling details of city life: the neon signs, bygone amusement parks, storefronts, and windows plastered with images of campaigning politicians-sights common in their time but even more meaningful in their absence today. 

Kay also brings to life the people who created Boston-architects like Charles Bulfinch and H. H. Richardson, landscape architect and master park-maker Frederick Law Olmsted, and such colorful political figures as Mayors John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and James Michael Curley. 

The new epilogue brings Boston's story to the end of the twentieth century, showing elements of the city's architecture that were lost in recent years as well as those that were saved and others threatened as the city continues to evolve.

The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed.

Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city,  a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress.

“Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review