&#8220Shovel Ready: Razing Hopes, History, and a Sense of Place: Rethinking Schenectady’s Downtown Strategies&#8221 is now available at the Schenectady Digital History Archive.

A thought-provoking discussion of downtown development in Schenectady in the second half of the twentieth century, &#8220Shovel Ready&#8221 is Christopher Spencer’s master’s thesis in city planning (MIT, 2001) and analyzes the reasoning behind Schenectady’s development plans from the 1924 report of the City Planning Commission to the Downtown Schenectady Master Plan of 1999, which is also available at the Schenectady Digital History Archive.

The Schenectady Digital History Archive is a service of the Schenectady County Public Library and a member of the NYGenWeb, USGenWeb and American History and Genealogy Projects and the American Local History Network, dedicated to making information about Schenectady’s heritage more accessible to researchers around the world.