This site initially began as an American Culture Studies class exercise in The American 1890s seminar at Bowling Green State University, Spring 1996 Term. One of the goals of the seminar was to introduce students to the use of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) for scholarly purposes. An introductory HTML assignment to compose an entry for an encyclopedic Chronology of the American 1890s was used as an instructional device to familiarize students with elementary principles of HTML, after which the seminar was broken into working groups or teams and each assigned to a quadrant of central Bowling Green, Ohio to develop the materials that would eventually be unified into the Crystal City site.

We decided our initial focus would be on the architectural heritage of the city, using as many as possible surviving historical buildings as a link between past and present. While the buildings would represent the physical environment of the past, research on the builders, owners, and tenants of these splendid structures would enable us to link the cultural and social history of Bowling Green to the contemporary city.

In the Summer of 1996, some of the initial group of students were joined in a Fieldwork seminar by a new group to build on the work already done by developing a Walking Tour/Photo Album of historic Bowling Green designed to highlight the most outstanding architecture of the city.

Work has only begun on the Crystal City site which will provide occasion for other students over the next several years to build on the work of their predecessors until the site is complete. In the meantime, think of this Crystal City as a growing and changing organic entity giving a new birth to the past in the living present.

Our location in Bowling Green was fortunate, since the majority of commercial and domestic buildings in the central city were constructed during the years between the great fires of 1887 and 1888 and 1910. These years essentially accord with the boom years of the Northwest Ohio gas and oil boom during which many towns in the region, including Bowling Green, became flourishing metropolises only to lapse back into quiet county seats or commercial centers as the boom played out and agriculture emerged as the foundation of the regional economy. During the gas boom of the late 1880s, Bowling Green attracted at least four glass companies and for a time became, along with neighboring Tiffin and Fostoria, a center for glass production. It was both the beauty of the product and the importance of glass to the local economy that inspired Charles S. Van Tassel to anoint Bowling Green The Beautiful Crystal City in his 1895 souvenir publication.

Our own technologically created Crystal City seeks to restore in hyperspace the grand little city of a hundred years ago, a shining beacon in the heart of the Great Black Swamp.