Teasing Lost Buildings at the Mill in August

The Mill is teasing a forthcoming exhibit on buildings lost, especially to demolition. The background image on the promo is the demolition of old City Hall.

via FB

It will be very interesting to see how they discuss themes of loss and regeneration. It will be especially interesting to see how they account for our 20th century autoism, since so many demolitions resulted in parking lots, either by design or more passively in a choice not to rebuild. The economics of maintaining and/or rebuilding are also a great factor. Will the dominant note in the exhibit be nostalgia or will it have a stronger grounding in historical urban processes?

From here the most relevant theme is waste. Demolition without replacement.

The modern facade echoes the older buildings
(CBTwo)

When the YMCA and Court Apartments were demolished in 2019, the new YMCA quickly replaced it, supplemented by the new Veterans housing across the street.

Salemites fully used and enjoyed those buildings over a century-long life. It might have been theoretically possible to restore and reuse the buildings somehow, but as a practical matter the YMCA needed a new, modern facility.

We are sad at the loss of those old buildings, but we remember much from them and toast building lives well lived and used.

And now we enjoy the new building.

Plaque at New Holman Hotel

Similarly, the New Holman Hotel occupies the site of the old Holman Building and then Marion Car Park. It has a little bit of interpretive signage at the corner to remind us of the past life of the corner. The Hotel is a great improvement on the Car Park.

Other recent instances are scraping the Boise Cascade site for redevelopment, scraping the car dealership for the Police Station, and the UGM/Saffron/State Insurance site for in-process redevelopment.

This is regeneration and is the natural order of things in a city.

The void at High and Chemeketa (streetview, 2012)

By contrast, the demolition of old City Hall yielded a surface parking lot, vacant for a half-century now. Though there are plans finally to build new, they haven't broken ground yet.

The 50 year idle period is a great net loss on a key downtown corner, a profligate waste.

In so many cases, it is the waste in failure to regenerate that is the greatest loss, a loss that endures in time after the disruption and rubble of the wrecking itself.

Belluschi Crater in March 2019, and still empty

Belluschi Crater right next door to the old City Hall site is a more recent example. 

Other recent missed opportunities were Howard Hall at the former Blind School and Le Breton Hall at the former Fairview.

Some buildings might be high-style exemplars or have a very special significance from age or association. In these cases regeneration itself does not compensate for the loss. Building a "modern" Bush House museum to replace the old house regarded as obsolete would be catastrophe not regeneration. The Belluschi Bank is an intermediate example, and the old YMCA an example not to fret over and instead to celebrate for regeneration. The balance they found at the State Hospital combines instances of saving and demolishing and seems like a good model and case study. Places like Bush House are special cases, and not the norm.

Jane Jacobs valued "rundown old buildings"

So it will be interesting to see how much the Mill's exhibit leans into nostalgia and how they account for our parking mania and the way it harms urban form. Nearly every parking lot downtown had a lost old building on it! Trading "low-value old buildings" for surface parking was a bad deal, and we need to give attention to that trade and not just focus on the charm of the old, lost buildings.

The UGM/Saffron/State Insurance buildings, the Block 50 project, will be a good case study. Will it regenerate quickly or will it languish and prove to have been better left undemolished, available to incubate new ideas as "low-value old buildings"?

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The waste represented by persistent parking lots is a perennial theme here. The most popular blog post all time is on that theme. There are many, many others.

• "Parking Craters and the Buildings that Preceded Them" (2016) Two have been filled since it was written. In addition to the New Holman Hotel, the Nishioka Building now sits on the site of the Griswold-Murphy Block. More infill, please!
  

Update, August 14th

Salem Reporter had a piece on the exhibit, "Salem’s lost historic buildings star in new Willamette Heritage Center exhibit," and it strongly suggests that the exhibit is structured around actual pieces of rubble, ornament, fixture, and furniture salvaged from demolitions and placed into the Mill's collection.

Holman Building bits (detail, SR)

One salvaged bit is a rosette from the first Holman Building and featured in a 1950 news piece. (You can see the newspaper clip in the lower left. David Duniway is of course central to history, preservation, and the institution itself of the Mill.)

David Duniway and the Holman
July 18th, 1950

So maybe there won't be so very much about the actual processes, like the demand for parking, that lead to demolitions.