Great American Cities Past and Present - Hardcover

Since serving with the U.S. Army, Rick Sapp has been a journalist, author and editor of such magazines as Bowhunting World and Archery Business. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Brian Solomon is an accomplished photographer and author with more than 30 titles to his name, including Railway Masterpieces and North American Railroad Bridges.

Over 250 large format images guide the reader across America through time to view how technological advances, population growth, economic challenges, and the forces of nature have dramatically altered major American cities in just 100 years. Photos taken from 1860 to 2009 reveal the stunning transformation of cities from Anchorage to Atlanta, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and beyond. This virtual tour is educational, enlightening, and certain to spark your imagination, making you wonder how these same forces will shape our world in the next 100 years. (C. A. Boylan Shutterbug 2010-11-01)

For things built primarily of metal and stone, city skylines are dramatically changeable things, as this book proves. Writer Sapp and photographer Solomon juxtapose historic and recent images of 59 U.S. and six Canadian cities to show how these places have evolved over the course of the last century. The book's introduction touches some of the myriad things that can affect how a city's skyline changes, from natural disasters...to manmade... Most cities are dealt with in two or three pages. Oklahoma City is represented by photographs from the 1880s, the 1950s and 2000, while Tulsa is shown in early 20th-century panoramas alongside an image from 2010. New York City, of course, gets the most attention, as its evolution is at once the most dramatic and the most concentrated -- so much happening within such a proscribed space. And here, as with some of the other entries, Sapp and Solomon try to replicate the angles of historic photographs with their modern images, showing just how much or
how little some things have changed. (James D. Watts Jr. Tulsa World 2010-12-19)

From Philadelphia to San Jose, Detroit to Toronto, every page offers a visual history of the way they were and what has risen or been restored from the ashes of bygone eras. The authors have chosen their subjects very well. (Shelf Life)