Reviews for Twin Cities Then and Now

The average rating for Twin Cities Then and Now based on 3 reviews is 3.6666666666667 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-10 00:00:00 Benjamin Zeckhauser This was so interesting, but it made me sad to see how much charm has been lost. I almost always liked the old way better.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-23 00:00:00 Gabriel Levy With its title, this could be so easily purchased as a quaint coffee-table exercise in nostalgia, but it's actually a purposefully illustrated polemic against the follies of postwar 'urban renewal.' Most shocking is the ravaging of downtown St. Paul. I live in Minneapolis and with my friends I'm accustomed to tsk-tsking when we cross some expansive car park for which an entire block of turn-of-the-century downtown buildings had been razed; now I realize that St. Paul has it so much worse. I just started a new job in downtown St. Paul, and I've been amused by what a shithole of urban anomie parts of it seem, a grim series of block-long fortress-like concrete buildings against whose monotonous, storefront-less facades bums stagger and thugs strut. Millet's images remind me that those same sad streets used to be thick with life and commerce. Expanded suburbs, dispersed shopping, deracinated public transport networks, and gutted, uglified city centers--I can't think of an arrangement more inimical to social health. Cities are proverbially impersonal and scary, but their density and diversity, the human closeness and contact they compel, are restorative village virtues. What one must avoid are suburbs, so many of which are nightmare tracts of loneliness boxes, where it's impossible to stroll.

Review # 3 was written on 2007-12-19 00:00:00 Walter Cordova this book compares historical photos (1880-1975) of twin cities architecture and landscape with replications of the same scenes from a present perspective. as the book was published in 1995, i most enjoyed comparing the "now" (1995) photos with what actually stands on the site today. the scenes weren't all particularly interesting, and there were locations (the bohemian flats, elliot park neighborhood) that i would have liked to see included, but it was well worth an evening or two with the magnifying glass--we found 14 coca-cola advertisements, mostly in pictures from the first half of the 20th century.