Open Thread

Brownstones suck!

I love both old and new, if done right. Wait till I actually post pics of my remodel lol. It’s all modern now and I replaced those ugly 50’s pink and black tiles in the bathroom. You’ll ALL go to town on my place lol. I am waiting for a slow day to post those. I think it’ll get about 1,000 hits in the OT that day. There is A LOT to make fun of and funny thing, I wouldn’t even mind.

Yesterday’s Waverly Place thread was a report on a building that had been restored to its original look by a new owner. I don’t know about anyone else who wrote in on that thread, but I was celebrating a successful restoration, which to me was light years above the muddling of the past. I was not making some kind of class, race or ethnic based judgement on the person who muddled up the building. To extrapolate some kind of rant about elitism out of that is, in my opinion, taking the discussion somewhere it had not been. If you care about historic, yes, historic neighborhoods, then seeing this building looking the way it did originally makes me happy. I stand by that, and defend anyone’s right to feel the same way. It is not a class thing, or an elitist money thing. It’s an old building thing, nothing more.

People care about old buildings and historic neighborhoods all over the country, in small towns and big cities, in big ways and small. If you don’t like old building, fine, that doesn’t interest you. But to build a huge building sized chip on your shoulder every time someone restores a building, and accuse people of elitism for wanting to preserve these buildings is absurd. Historic preservation is embraced by people in all income brackets, and by people of every grouping possible, all across the nation. If it was just about mocking the unchic, it would have died years ago.

“It is one thing to say “I appreciate restoring old buildings to their 19th or 20th century glory and love to live in such housing.” It is another thing entirely to say “There is no room for appreciation of old buildings that go modern or newly built modern buildings because they are automatically shit boxes sense they don’t try to copy 19th or 20th century homes.”

Yeah, I’d agree. There’s really room for both.

Snappy I love you but you’ve laughed just as hard at those Mill Basin Monstrosities as the rest of us and clearly those are not builders/owners with a lack of means.