Would You Save This Building? (St. Louis, Atlanta: houses, neighborhoods, costs)

[STLCardsBlues1989]

STLtoday - STLtoday - MultiMedia - Lost and endangered buildings in St. Louis (http://www.stltoday.com/mds/entertainment/html/1765 - broken link)

Interesting article. It's a shame so many good buildings have been demolished or are in danger and/or decay.

[aragx6]

Thank you for posting that. The stark beauty of those almost forgotten buildings really touched me. I don't a thing about architecture, but all of those old buildings were extraordinarily beautiful in their own way, and we should be ashamed to know what we've allowed to happen to them.

Can you imagine tearing something down to build another ugly Walgreens?

[bannsmith]

STLCardsBlues, I followed the link, and then was so interested in reading about urban planning in St Louis that I spent all afternoon looking at photo tours of decaying, abandoned or endangered buildings in the city (on builtstlouis.net) and reading blogs and forums by St-Louis based historic preservationists (urbanstl.com, urbanreviewstl.com, etc etc)!

I was particularly surprised to read about plans for Bohemian Hill, where eminent domain is being used to force residents from houses (both new and historic) in favor of constructing an autocentric strip mall. The most recent link I read showed that ten or so houses had already been torn down, but the development plan was stalled. Does anyone know what stages the plans are in? (I'm not a STL resident yet, will be in about 2 weeks, so I'm a bit out of the loop).

Such developments are a shame--St Louis is such an old and architecturally significant city. Certainly with some more tasteful urban planning, developers can bring in businesses without ruining an area's historic flair and while preserving--or trying to foster--pedestrian culture, so important in bringing a sense of community to a neighborhood . The tacky strip mall thing is what completely ruined my native city of Atlanta, creating neverending traffic, ugly parking lots, and sprawl. It's encouraging to see so many good writers on the aforementioned sites working to raise the profile of these old buildings and neighborhoods and rally community support for historic preservation.

Thanks for posting!

[santos]

Shameful, this is/has been done all over America. Most of these buildings are left to decay so by the time some one gets involved enough to preserve it the costs are prohibitive. I remember driving by the pink motel, what a beauty. I also remember volunteering at a homeless shelter somewhere in the inner city. The shelter was in a gigantic old house surrounded by others equally large and everything is disrepair. It was a desolute environment. I had to stop volunteering because I had to drive out of the area at night, alone. One night I was nearly detained by a carful of youths and lucky to escape, fortunately for me their heart wasn't into the chase.