Here are some before & after shots of a wonderful old building.
This was taken in the summer before the quake.
This was taken the day after the quake.
The good news is, that they are currently rebuilding the building with an added floor and the familiar acorn clock tower.
Cheers!
Dan
"If you believe everything you read, better not read." - Japanese Proverb
A little better of a story than Geraldo's Al Capone's Vault deal.
BTW- there is a complete underworld of clandestine visitations of ancient classic buildings one can find on the web. One example is the fact that the Packard plant produced its last car in 1956 but the plant still stands along with myriad old Detroit buildings. People go to these abondoned wonders and photograph them. There is a beauty to the derelict buildings that is quite unique.
How great would it be to be able to afford a loft there, though! What an incredible building! I really lose interest in architecture about 1935-1940. Not to sound stodgy, but they just don't make 'em like they used to!Originally Posted by Wild Root
OK, here's my building-time-capsule story! In the Pittsburgh Strip District is an ice cream shop called Klavon's. It opened in 1920 as a drug store/soda fountain, and remained pretty much unchanged until they closed in 1979 when the original Klavon (the pharmacist) died. They just closed the doors and left it for 20 years until one of the grandchildren re-opened the shop. The place is completely original 1920, down to the Coke bottle top stool seats and the wood telephone booths (the light still goes on when you close the door)! The really cool thing is that they do everything they can to preserve the retro feel of the place, right down to the kind of candy they sell. You can get those candy cigarettes, NECOs, those wax pop bottles, etc. Plus the menu is all egg cream sodas, malts, and other traditional ice cream treats. I was talking to the younger Klavon that runs it now, and he is more than happy to show you the back of the shop, which still has all the old wood cabinets for storing all the medicines and drugs, the marble tables, and all the equipment his grandfather used to mix prescriptions.
Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor
A Scoop of History
Right around the corner is Primanti's Brother's, which has been serving sandwich's to the dock workers of the Strip District since 1933. And man, are they good sandwiches! The Strip District is where all of the produce, meat, and other foodstuffs came into Pittsburgh back in the days of small neighborhood grocery stores. The dock workers and delivery men worked all night, so they needed a lunch that they could eat as they worked or drove. The Primanti Brothers started serving sandwiches with the cole slaw and french fries right on the sandwich so they workers could eat them quickly and easily. The place hasn't changed since they opened! If you're ever there, I highly recommend the kolbassi and cheese and an Iron City!
Primanti Brothers
National Geographic article about Primanti Brothers
"Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization."
--G. M. Trevelyan
The rest of the Evansville story, found on sfgate.com, read like this (try not to let your heart ache at the new owner's comment...)
Lucille York Christensen said she and her husband, who will turn the floor into a loft apartment where they'll live, plan to keep some of the woodwork and old features, but not all of them.
"I'm not that interested in old stuff," she said.
Lucille York Christensen, a yoga instructor, will locate an office on the building's ground floor for her alternative healing therapies practice.
I could just bawl.
And yes... Detroit! The Final Frontier! There's a great book out there called American Ruins by Camilo Jos?ɬ© Vergara with beautiful shots of abandoned Detroit. It's hard for me to imagine empty, 20-story office buildings, but that's downtown Detroit!
I wish I had a similar story to all of yours, but I don't. Most places I stumble upon have been fairly well-vandalized. Bummer.
Like a Phoenix, rising from Arizona!
Mojave Jack, I grew up in Pittsburgh. I never went down to the Strip District all that much, except to go to Primanti's. Next time I'm there (my whole family still lives there), I'll have to drag my wife to Klavon's. I've never been there, never even heard about it.
This is an old story, and it's maybe not as exciting as some of the others, but about twenty years ago I was working as a temp in the offices of the Los Angeles Community Development Agency, down in a not very good section of town. After I'd been there for several weeks, I overheard somebody talking about Angel's Flight -- the legendary tiny railway that ran up and down Bunker Hill in downtown L.A. (this was years before the reinstalled it, then removed it again when an accident killed someone). Back then, it was still legendary. So I asked the man who had been talking about it if he happened to know where Angel's Flight - the actual train cars - were. All I knew is that they had been packed up and put in storage somewhere. He got a funny look on his face and said, "You want to know where Angel's Flight is?" I said I did, and he said, "Well, I can't talk to you now, but try to catch me at the end of the day." So I waited until five and looked him up. All he said was, "Follow me." he led me out to a shed-like building behind the office we worked in, which was padlocked. He undid the lock, opened the door, and said, "There she is, kid." And it was Angel's Flight...two beat up, rotting train cars and stacks and stacks of track. I felt like I had been let in on a huge secret.
Then a few years later I read something about the set of Cecil B. DeMille's original "Ten Commandments," shot in 1923. DeMille went to a remote part of Central California called Guadalupe, where there were acres of sand dunes right on Pacific shore, and that stood in for Egypt. He built a huge Egyptian facade representing the palace of the Pharaoh, and a boulevard of sphinxes. Then for reasons known only to C.B., when they were done shooting he buried the entire set in the sand. It was not well known at that time that the set was still up there. So I convinced my wife to take a vacation in that direction and go up and look. A hiked around in the freezing sand (that wind off the ocean can be nasty) until I found what was clearly the rubble of a ruined "city" -- it was DeMille's Egypt. There were still frames of chariots laying around. Today, it has all been cordoned off for official excavation, and you can't go up there anymore. But I still have my chunk of painted plaster from the "temple" that I, uh, borrowed from the site.
M2
CB was contracted to remove the set pieces but due to budget over runs did not have the money to cart it away. They tipped everything down into the sand and buldozed sand ove it. The area with debris is the "Dune that doesn't move" whereas regular dunes move.
DId you guys know that parts of the "Burning of Atlanta" scenes of fire in 'Gone With the Wind' was a filming of the torched "Wall" from the original King Kong. The big wall that seperated the wild dinosaur portion of the island from the village.
Blue Skies!
Yep. "Atlanta" under the torch just about cleared the old RKO backlot.
M2
Is that Phillips?
Oh, these tales make me long to find a treasure!
see this?
A recluse's home in Boston. Piles of trash 6 feet high. Amongst it, 500 boxes of baseball, football & hockey cards dating back to th `40s
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...x.html?cnn=yes
"Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way"
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote