Directly in the ship’s path was the Sunshine Skyway Bridge--two ribbons of concrete, steel, and asphalt that crossed fifteen miles of open bay.  Suddenly, a violent weather cell reduced visibility to zero at the precise moment when Lerro attempted to direct the 20,000-ton vessel underneath the bridge. Unable to stop or see where he was going, Lerro drove the ship into a support pier; the main span splintered and collapsed 150 feet into the bay. Seven cars and a Greyhound bus fell over the broken edge and into the churning water below. Thirty-five people died.Skyway tells the entire story of this horrific event, from the circumstances that led up to it through the years-long legal proceedings that followed. Through personal interviews and extensive research, Bill DeYoung pieces together the harrowing moments of the collision, including the first-person accounts of witnesses and survivors. Among those whose lives were changed forever was Wesley MacIntire, the motorist whose truck ricocheted off the hull of the Summit Venture and sank. Although he was the lone survivor, MacIntire, like Lerro, was emotionally scarred and remained haunted by the tragedy for the rest of his life. Similarly, DeYoung details the downward spiral of Lerro’s life, his vilification in the days and weeks that followed the accident, and his obsession with the tragedy well into his painful last years. DeYoung also offers a history of the ill-fated bridge, from its construction in 1954, through the addition of a second parallel span in 1971, to its eventual replacement. He discusses the sinking of a Coast Guard cutter a mere three months before Skyway collapsed and the Department of Transportation’s dire warnings about the bridge’s condition. The result is a vividly detailed portrait of the rise and fall of a Florida landmark.

    An updated and revised guide for the more than 30 million Americans who are living the RV lifestyle and the millions of others who have considered it but have not yet taken the plunge, The Complete Idiot's Guide® to RVing, Second Edition, includes the following: Basic facts about the different types of RVs-camper, van, motor home, bus, or tow rig-and the advantages of each; Advice on buying your RV, from dealer negotiations to acquiring the proper insurance; Driving tips for piloting your RV; Information on how to choose a campground with an eye for water, electricity, propane, wastewater dump, hookups, phone, cable, and campground rules.

    Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle -- "the culture of congestion" -- and its architecture. "Manhattan," he writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

    Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff led New York's dramatic and unexpected economic resurgence after the September 11 terrorist attacks. With Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he developed a remarkably ambitious five-borough economic development plan to not only recover from the attacks but to completely transform New York's economy: New neighborhoods were created. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were generated. The largest municipal affordable housing plan in American history was completed. Ground Zero was rebuilt. And New York adopted a pathbreaking sustainability plan. None of this was straightforward. New York has some of the most entrenched financial and political interests anywhere, and it has a population that is quick to let its public officials know exactly what is on its mind. Doctoroff's plans for a New York Olympic Games and a stadium on the West Side crashed and burned, but phoenix-like he engineered the transformation of the city anyway.Greater than Ever is a bracing adventure--when can-do attitude dove headlong into New York's unique realpolitik of "fuggedaboutit" -- during which the city was changed for the better.

    The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.Whereas many architects are wary of openly discussing the word beauty, this book has at its center the large and naïve question: What is a beautiful building? It is a tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture that aims to change the way we think about our homes, our streets and ourselves.

    From teacups, riding boots, golf balls, and underwater sculpture to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of the Peking Winter Palace, the author ranges over the less-familiar byways of designing excellence.At one time, writes Rasmussen, "the entire community tool part in forming the dwellings and implements they used. The individual was in fruitful contact with these things; the anonymous houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness. Today, in our highly civilized society, the houses which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality. We cannot, however, go back to the old method of personally supervised handicrafts. We must strive to advance by arousing interest in and understanding of the work the architect does. The basis of competent professionalism is a sympathetic and knowledgeable group of amateurs, of non-professional art lovers."

    

    It's all fun so get inspired and tangle something! Learn to color with chalks, watercolors, pencils and pens; add bling with glitter, jewels, and sparkly inks.

    Randy Shaw tells the powerful stories of tenants, politicians, homeowner groups, developers, and activists in over a dozen cities impacted by the national housing crisis. From San Francisco to New York, Seattle to Denver, and Los Angeles to Austin, Generation Priced Out challenges progressive cities to reverse rising economic and racial inequality.Shaw exposes how boomer homeowners restrict millennials' access to housing in big cities, a generational divide that increasingly dominates city politics. Shaw also demonstrates that neighborhood gentrification is not inevitable and presents proven measures for cities to preserve and expand their working- and middle-class populations and achieve more equitable and inclusive outcomes. Generation Priced Out is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of urban America.

    It began as a series of reports from the civic drama of the 2014 elections. But beyond the municipal circus, writer and commentator Shawn Micallef discovered the much bigger story of a city emerging into greatness. He walked and talked with candidates from all over Greater Toronto, and observed how they energized their communities, never shying away from the problems that exist within them -- poverty, violence, racism, and drugs -- but advocating solutions that bring people together. Shawn Micallef introduces us to those fighting for a more inclusive vision of Toronto and reveals the promise and potential for a city that has been suffering through a severe identity crisis but is now on a steep upturn. Toronto, he says, is set fair to be a new urban model for cities all over the world. Micallef reveals Toronto in all its rich variety. It is hard, he says, to grasp the vast size and scope of Toronto until you spend a few hours walking through unfamiliar neighbourhoods. Each reveals another adjacent to it, and then another, and another. The city goes on and on, into unheralded ravines and oblique views of the downtown skyline. Hiding in all that geography is not only great beauty, but a force for change that's been building for decades as people arrived here from every corner of the globe. Frontier City is a revelatory view of the Toronto of today and an inspiring vision of the Toronto of the near future.From the Hardcover edition.

    A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.

    A Richer Heritage will be an essential, thought-provoking guide for professionals as well as administrators, volunteers, and policy makers involved in preservation efforts.An introduction traces the evolution of historic preservation in America, highlighting the principal ideas and events that have shaped and continue to shape the movement. The book also describes the workings--legal, administrative, and fiscal--of the layered federal, state, and local government partnership put in place by Congress in 1966. Individual chapters explore the preservation of designed and vernacular landscapes, the relationship between historic preservation and the larger environmental and land-trust movements, the role of new private and nonprofit players, racial and ethnic interests in historic preservation, and the preservation of our intangible cultural values. A concluding chapter analyzes the present state of the historic preservation movement and suggests future directions for the field in the twenty-first century. Contributors include preservationists, local-government citizen activists, an architect, landscape architects, environmentalists, an archaeologist, a real-estate developer, historians, a Native American tribal leader, an ethnologist, and lawyers.

    By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.

    These transitional spaces are where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice.The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life into cities. The movement engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world's population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. The last human movement of this size and scope, and the changes it will bring to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history: continuous population growth.Arrival City offers a detailed tour of the key places of the "final migration" and explores the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in the developing new world order. From villages in China, India, Bangladesh and Poland to the international cities of the world, Doug Saunders portrays a diverse group of people as they struggle to make the transition, and in telling the story of their journeys — and the history of their often multi-generational families enmeshed in the struggle of transition — gives an often surprising sense of what factors aid in the creation of a stable, productive community.

    As cities across America experience a remarkable renaissance, and more and more young, diverse families choose to live, work, and play in historic neighborhoods, the promise and potential of using our older and historic buildings to revitalize our cities is stronger than ever.   This urban resurgence is a national phenomenon, boosting cities from Cleveland to Buffalo and Portland to Pittsburgh. Experts offer a range of theories on what is driving the return to the city—from the impact of the recent housing crisis to a desire to be socially engaged, live near work, and reduce automobile use. But there’s also more to it. Time and again, when asked why they moved to the city, people talk about the desire to live somewhere distinctive, to be some place rather than no place. Often these distinguishing urban landmarks are exciting neighborhoods—Miami boasts its Art Deco district, New Orleans the French Quarter. Sometimes, as in the case of Baltimore’s historic rowhouses, the most distinguishing feature is the urban fabric itself. While many aspects of this urban resurgence are a cause for celebration, the changes have also brought to the forefront issues of access, affordable housing, inequality, sustainability, and how we should commemorate difficult history. This book speaks directly to all of these issues.   In The Past and Future City, Stephanie Meeks, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, describes in detail, and with unique empirical research, the many ways that saving and restoring historic fabric can help a city create thriving neighborhoods, good jobs, and a vibrant economy. She explains the critical importance of preservation for all our communities, the ways the historic preservation field has evolved to embrace the challenges of the twenty-first century, and the innovative work being done in the preservation space now.   This book is for anyone who cares about cities, places, and saving America’s diverse stories, in a way that will bring us together and help us better understand our past, present, and future.