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Post by pooka on Nov 23, 2021 4:34:02 GMT -5
Sunday they demolished the tallest building in town. What used to be called the Old National Bank Building. Lately they just called it the 420 Main St, building. I always remember them saying it was nineteen stories, but the news is saying eighteen. The top floor had a private supper club called The Petroleum Club, where local well to do businessmen rubbed elbows. It was a big deal fifty years ago when it was built. Otherwise, most other buildings were no taller than eight or ten stories at most & were built back in the 30s & before. It was the tallest thing between Louisville, Ky & St. Louis, MO, Nashville, TN & Indianapolis IN. A few years later Citizen Bank built a building a few stories shorter, but no one else thought it worth investing in sky scrapers anymore. Downtown was really on the decline. Retail & restaurants were moving to other areas further out in the newer shopping areas where you didn't have to feed a meter or park in a pay lot. After five, it was a ghost town down there mostly. Years later when the casino boat & it's hotel moved in, it helped move interest back down there, & it's had lots of renewal since. They said it would cost more to rehab this building than it would to knock it down & start over. The new development is a lower mixed use complex of residential, retail & office space.
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Post by nana on Nov 23, 2021 18:02:31 GMT -5
That building looked out of place with the surrounding area. Glens Falls has a building almost identical to that one, that sticks out like a sore thumb just as much. Hopefully whatever they end up building will be more in tune with the neighborhood!
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Post by pooka on Nov 24, 2021 2:21:01 GMT -5
It was the style in 1971 when it was built. It was sleek & modern, with strong vertical lines to emphasize it's height. The Wold Trade Center Twin Towers had a similar look. Three years before, we built a new Civic Center to replace our 1888 courthouse & the old 1890s jail. It had similar modern styling. I suppose it wouldn't have looked so bad if it was surrounded by similar modern looking things, but as you said, it stuck out like a sore thumb, especially because it was so much taller than everything else. The other tall bank building also clashes with everything around it too, but what are you going to do. The replacements are a four & six story brick pair & a small park more in keeping with their surroundings. It's suppose to have underground parking. I think that'll be a first for us.
Back then, they wanted to knock down everything old & remake it all ala George Jetson. A lot of the buildings on main street put modern skins on their fronts to hide their 19th century origins. They've since peeled those skins off & embraced their true vintage styling. We've come to accept our old with the new. It's our heritage. Like it or not. Back in 1968 when our Civic Center was built, they were going to tear down the ornate old courthouse. But when they got the demolition estimate, it was so shockingly high, they hesitated for a while. It gave preservationists enough time to organize & save it from the wrecking ball. Now it's the crown jewel of our historic old buildings, rivaled only by the old 1869 Post Office Customs House. Just this last year, they've started a drive to restore the courthouse bell tower. Much of the rest of the building has been redone, but the tower is in dire need. The clock mechanism had been maintained by volunteers, but even it stopped working a while back. Apparently they've got it working again, because you can hear it strike seven right after the tower falls in the video of the demolition. The tower & clock faces are literally falling apart. A chunk of the limestone exterior recently fell off. Some of the clock face glass is broken & falling out or held in by duct tape. The wooden & iron frame are rotting & rusting away. Even the two & a half ton bell is being damaged from not being rotated a little every few years, & the one hundred pound striker's mechanism is damaged allowing the hammer to rest on the bell, where is should pull back a bit.
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Post by pooka on Dec 2, 2021 4:31:35 GMT -5
I just found this YouTube video of the demolition & a bit before. Some footage is taken by remote controlled copters. It's done by the same people who made a video of the big snow storm we had last year. I posted about it at the time.The aerial views give you a way better perspective. Right at the end, you hear the two & a half ton 1890 bell in the old courthouse chime seven.
Our downtown is not all that big. There's so much available farmland to expand on, there was not much pressure to build up the downtown. During my childhood, the downtown was in a slow decline. By the time this tallest building went up, the city was struggling to get businesses to revitalize Main Street & the surrounding area. Retail & restaurants had fled the area in favor of the strip shopping on the east side adjoining the first shopping mall in Indiana, & the north side.
At Christmas, Santa was in the 1925 Sears & Roebucks window downtown. Sears opened this, their first free standing retail store in October 5, 1925. In the late 60s, when the mall opened, he moved his chair to a stage over the center fountain in the mall. Then we got a competing Santa in a fiberglass igloo up in North Park Shopping Center. He would arrive via a helicopter at the beginning of December. Sadly in 1967 his helicopter clipped a major overhead electric power line & crashed within twenty feet of a crowd of one to two thousand in a waiting crowd, killing the pilot & the Santa stand-in, a local tool & die maker. Tell me that wasn't a scaring event for those poor kids.
But for a few turns in history, my town could have become an even bigger industrial town like Detroit, but it never came to be. We still had lots of factories, but not on the scale to rival really big towns elsewhere. Dodge trucks were born here as Graham Brothers trucks, which became sold as such at Dodge dealers. Dodge didn't make trucks at the time. The brothers sold out in 1925, but continued to run the division. They soon parted ways with Dodge, & formed Graham-Paige, later becoming Kaiser Motors. But it all moved to Detroit. Well I again rattle on far too long, But this is a cool video of the demolition.
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