The impending destruction of the Rosefriend apartment building has finally occurred. I was actually caught by surprise because through a short series of events I happened past the former site at the corner of Jefferson and Broadway to find a pile of rubble.
Here is a discussion about the whys for the situation, and there are some amazing demolition pictures. Also, you can copy and paste this url http://youtube.com/watch?v=M7NrNwGCj9M into a new browser to see a video of the demolition. It's pretty interesting.
As we know, the First Christian Church owned the block. I don't know all the details, but I do know that they wanted a parking lot, and to make revenue off either selling the land or building condos. Seems they get both in that there will indeed be a parking lot and also I think they did sell the land. Several people made good comments in the forum I linked above.
My personal opinion is that the church can do whatever it wants. However, I also acknowledge that religion, and churches in particular, are greedy entities responsible for thousands of terrible things throughout history. Destroying a nifty little building is the least of their concerns. From an architectural standpoint, I'm sure the architect is much happier dead, not knowing that one of his buildings has been destroyed. It would be like watching an art collector burn a painting simply to create room for another to hang in its place.
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This blog is called hex on you because I AM putting a hex on you.
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6 comments:
I agree, the church can do anything it wants with the land it owns, but at the same time what happened to people appreciating art for what it is? Looking at the pictures, Roark would probably have scoffed at the design, but I can still appreciate the building. In fact, downtown Tulsa consists entirely of Art Deco skyscrapers and they are, frankly, very beautiful. But right on the edge of the Northeast side of downtown sits the worst eyesore I've ever born witness to; a building whose face is made entirely of glass panes. I wouldn't mind seeing that building demolished just for its tasteless nature among the rest of its peers.
I had something else to say, but I have since forgotten about it. C'est la vie.
Portland is fast filling up with the glass pane buildings. I don't really mind them so much but I am a sucker for the historical stuff. SO, I find it just sad...
The other thing is that Portlanders don't want to see the city get any taller. There are always complaints about shadows being cast over the park. The building I work in was designed to not cast shadows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Fox_Tower_(Portland,_Oregon)If you take out the hard return and paste the url in you can see a description. But my point is that I suppose these people have never been to NYC. I didn't notice a problem getting light at all and everything there is more than twice as tall as anything here. I will not elaborate as I can see this turning into a next post situation. :)
Well I have to give my city some credit. They make a pretty good effort to keep the buildings downtown in good shape and in good taste (case in point, when Home Depot wanted to open a store in downtown the city stipulated that in order to do so they must design the building in art deco, and today we have the only Home Depot in the world designed that way). The limestone and marble of the buildings is still fairly clean today.
And I see that they had to destroy a theater in order to build your building. That saddens me because I love the theater... Granted, if it was in terrible shape and had shitty shows, then by all means destroy it. Haha.
In other news, we recently dug up a time capsule from 1957 with a Plymouth Belvedere and various other objects that were to be awarded to whom (in 1957) guessed what the population of Tulsa would be in 2007 closest to the real figures; in the event that the person is now deceased it would be awarded to the next of kin. Well, there was a slight problem with that. It seems that in 1957, engineers thought that a large concrete box would be enough to keep the contents in pristine condition. Apparently they didn't realize how much the clay earth in this region swells and contracts with water, heat, and cold. Needless to say, the box had cracked and was full of about 4 feet of water, and the car was completely ruined with the exception of the chrome pieces (which they still polished).
Here's the article from Reuters
Oh, that's really sad about the car!!
Yes, they did tear down the theater to put up my building, but there is a theater IN my building...heh. I didn't live here when that went down.
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