The Sidewalk Ballet Field Guide

The Sidewalk Ballet Field Guide is a growing collection of people, organizations, projects, books, ideas and ongoing conversations about cities and the people who shape them. It grows out of the podcast, but extends well beyond it—connecting the people doing the work, the places where it’s happening, and the ideas, experiments and resources worth carrying forward. Think of it as part reference library, part trail of breadcrumbs: a way to follow the conversation wherever it leads.

Explore by type, browse alphabetically or by date, or search for something specific. Follow the tags to discover connections—or explore the map to see where the people, projects and ideas in the Field Guide take us.

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Metropolis

What I loved about Metropolis is that it doesn’t offer simple answers or romanticize the past. Instead, it offers something more useful: perspective. It reminds us that cities have always been unfinished—shaped by conflict, compromise, bold ideas, and the people stubborn enough to keep making them better.

For anyone drawn to the beauty and complexity of urban life, this book is an endlessly rewarding companion.

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Tampa Soul Walk

Tampa Soulwalk is a public art and cultural heritage trail celebrating the stories, people, and places that have shaped Tampa’s Black communities. Connecting murals, historic sites, landmarks, and public spaces across several neighborhoods, the project invites residents and visitors to experience Tampa’s history through art, storytelling, and place.

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Season of the Witch

Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot is a sweeping history of San Francisco from the turbulent 1960s through the early 1980s, tracing the city’s transformation from a center of counterculture and idealism into a place shaken by violence, political upheaval, and profound social change.

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Susan Stryker

Stryker is the author of Transgender History, a widely used introduction to the political and cultural history of transgender communities in the United States, and co-director, with Victor Silverman, of the Emmy Award-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. The film helped recover the history of a 1966 uprising by transgender women and queer people at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin—one of the earliest documented acts of collective queer resistance to police harassment in the United States.

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Tenderloin Museum

The Tenderloin Museum celebrates the rich history of one of San Francisco's most misunderstood neighborhoods. The 31 blocks of the Tenderloin district are the beating heart of the city peopled by immigrants and iconoclasts, artists and activists, sinners and saints. Visit the Tenderloin Museum today and encounter a kaleidoscopic American city in all its grit and glory.

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Feliks Banel

Feliks Banel has been meddling in local history in the Pacific Northwest since he was a teenager. Over the years, he’s held a variety of volunteer and paid positions with museums, heritage organizations, government agencies and media outlets.

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Cascade of History

Cascade of History is the only live radio program devoted to Pacific Northwest history, featuring interviews with interesting people doing cool things with and for history, historic preservation, museums, parks, shipwrecks, lost treasures, old highways, and other special places and things around the “Old Oregon Country” – Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.

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