For years, a 160-year-old church in St. Louis stood as a reminder of a neighbourhood’s past while steadily becoming one of its most troubled properties. The vacant structure had endured a fire, repeated complaints and two structural condemnations. City records showed 37 service requests connected to the property, as concerns about its condition continued to…

The house was commissioned in the 1920s by Daniel C. Jackling, a self-made copper millionaire whose business transformed the American copper industry. For a house that once embodied California wealth and architectural ambition, the end came not with a grand renovation but with bulldozers. The Jackling House, a sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in the…

Chicago’s founding problem had always been plumbing. The city drew its drinking water from Lake Michigan and emptied sewers into the Chicago River, which flowed straight into Lake Michigan. But every rainstorm flushed the stockyards and slaughterhouses and a million people’s waste out toward the water intakes. This is why the nineteenth-century city was periodically…