Description

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A hard-hitting study of how ambition and greed are leading our cities to disaster.

Before there was a Ground Zero in New York City, Block 37 was a giant hole in the heart of a great American city. In 1990, Chicago's Block 37 (as a key part of a twenty-seven-acre urban renewal project) was razed to the ground. After the expenditure of nearly $250 million of public and private capital, nothing has been built on this once vital and densely-occupied city block. This stubborn vacancy at the center of Chicago's historic downtown eerily presaged the post 9/11 wasteland in Lower Manhattan.

In a new critical introduction, Ross Miller makes the historical and political connections necessary to understand how modern city planning and redevelopment really works. By exploring one American urban block in meticulous detail, Miller clarifies the opaque process that continually breaks and remakes our most vital cities. Here's the Deal is a thrilling true-life story of back room deals and political promises. Told throughout with the scrupulousness of serious scholarship and the excitement of a novel, Here's the Deal is already considered a modern classic of urban literature.

About the Author

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Ross Miller has written architectural and urban criticism for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times among other national publications. He has been a contributing editor of Progressive Architecture and former director of the Chicago Institute of Architecture and Urbanism. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (Chicago, 1990).

Praise For…

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"Longtime Chicagoans are not easily scandalized by reports of corruption, but Here's the Deal leaves me goggle-eyed." —Saul Bellow

"Ross Miller's Here's the Deal is even more of an American apocalypse than his earlier book on the great fire of Chicago. It is nothing less than an authentic vision of the destruction of the paradigm of all America's inner cities." —Harold Bloom

"Smart, wise, funny ... Here's the Dealis a representative urban tragedy against which the best revenge ... is a high-spirited recounting." —Nicholas Lemann