In early July, my wife and I drove on Finney Street and saw the city inspector's paint marking on a handsome old 2-story wood Victorian-era house. That means trouble, that the house is scheduled for demolition unless the owner completes required repairs to bring it up to the city's safety or habitability standards. This house had been used as a rental for years or decades and was in ratty condition.
But there was scaffolding around the porch and some timbers had been replaced. We hoped it could be saved. These old houses can endure decades of neglect, but once the roof begins to fail, water causes rot.
Bad news. On Saturday, September 2, 2017, I bicycled along Drummond Street and saw the trucks on Finney Street. A demolition crew was at work smushing the Victorian house and loading the timbers and debris into trucks. Was it not worth deconstructing it to save 100+-year-old joists and flooring? Well, that is how we lose our architectural heritage along with irreplaceable virgin timber wood beams.
The square photographs are from a Hasselblad film camera with the 50mm Zeiss Distagon lens, using Kodak Panatomix-X film. The last picture is from a Nexus 4 telephone (sorry, no room for the Hasselblad on my bicycle).
2 comments:
And those lovely windows!
Same thing happened in Starkville, Mississippi in July or August, 2017. There were TWO Victorian houses demolished to make room for goodness knows what. Mississippi State University demolished some that still stood on its campus a few years ago, to make room for more dorms and apartment buildings.
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