The Architecture of Urban Unrest
27th November 2014
Steve Sailer connects the dots.
The Medici Palace in Florence was built in the 1440s with heavy stone on the street level and delicate windows on the top floor, both to express the upward-yearning spirit of the Renaissance and to keep the urban mob from dismantling the place when they got uppity, as they were known to do.
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One of the best of the retro stadiums was Jacobs Field in Cleveland, which opened a couple of years later and sold out 455 games in a row. A friend told me an interesting rumor. He’d been talking to Mr. Jacobs, owner of the Cleveland Indians, and they got on the topic of why the White Sox new ballpark was so uninviting and closed-off. Mr. Jacobs told him that the owners of the White Sox had some kind of arrangement with the city of Chicago to use the ballpark as a giant holding pen for rioters, much in the traditional manner of a South American soccer stadium.