The Lost Valley - in 1956 - Ground Zero for an Urban Renewal Disaster in the 1970s

Union Station and freight sheds as they looked from the NBTEL building in 1956.

Stone Church in foreground - the industrial valley as it appeared in 1956 - looking N.E.

The Viaduct free of traffic, Union Station, and old tenements clinging to the bare rock of the North Valley wall. Today a wide "throughway" allows humanity to speed across the city with few reminders of a glorious industrial past, and a dozen neighborhoods torn asunder.

Another shot looking East over the Stone Church. The church remains but the urban-industrial valley was scraped clean by Urban Renewal decades ago. Many of the displayed residents or their children now live as far away as Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, California and Australia.

Everything in this photo is now gone. Even the postwar YMCA building in the foreground. In the far, far distance are the (then) new housing units in the Rifle Range. Even many of those were

torn down in 2008. Another lost valley, another vanished working class neighborhood.