Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
I'd wager that most of the buildings north of Buckingham, along both Barrington and Hollis in that last picture, were repurposable. It's all brick, and to the west it looks like there were a good chunk of Historic Properties-esque warehouses on the far right side of the image. (The more central ones look like no great loss.)
Multiple families living overcrowded in housing in rundown buildings sounds terrible, but bear in mind that huge swathes of, for example, New York's Lower East Side were like that--and most of those old ramshackle tenement buildings still exist, structurally improved and now filled with boutiques and million-dollar lofts.
I'd be less inclined to lamentation about this if we'd replaced these structures with something better than a single large road.
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Yeah, I think there were a lot of really cool brick and stone (and probably some wood) buildings that could probably be repurposed quite nicely if they had survived the redevelopment.
When I'm thinking of those poor housing conditions described, scenes more like these come to mind:
Source
I think it's hard for many of us to imagine living in some of these places, as it is more like something we would expect to find in a third world country these days. The housing standards in this country have improved considerably since those times.
It is a shame that a lot of good stuff was torn down. One thing to keep in mind is that the Feds were offering considerable funding to municipalities for this type of redevelopment at the time, so I imagine that there was a fair amount of pressure to flatten entire areas with some good buildings being incidental losses in order to receive the funding.