^^^ Yup, he was referring to the seals. If you actually read the link I posted in detail it says that they determined the seals are still good enough condition to have at least another 5-10 years of service life remaining!
All they really did to these buildings was recoat the steel and restore the damage done to the lobby glass and travertine base over the years. Pretty crazy that even the seals will last 75 years on a system like this!
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Originally Posted by OrdoSeclorum
Heh. This couldn't be further from the truth. Cities were thought to be dirty, crowded and disease infested and people wanted to live in the country but couldn't because there were no cars. And in the 1930's it's easy to find tons of people talking about how the charming 1880's style brick construction was ugly and old looking, the way we think of construction from the 1970s today. Beyond that, there were lots of really low quality buildings that existed in all old cities--squalid shacks without plumbing. Those very low-quality buildings are rarely saved, so there's a selection bias in what we see as standard for the time.
That all being said, I'd love visiting a city that looked like Victorian-era London as presented in a modern movie.
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People don't appreciate just how God awful bas American inner cities were by 1950. My current two flat was essentially a wooden shack that had gas lamps, no plumbing, and was heated by potbelly stoves until 1956. The tool closet under the stairs in my back porch was the latrine where you shat through a hole in the floor into a bucket that was picked up by the honeywagon a few times a week. In 1956 (I know by the newspaper dates found under the flooring) it was upgraded with electric lights, gas space heaters, and real live bathrooms inside.
Even my nice corner building in Little Village which was originally constructed for more middle class residents in the 1890s had one shared bathroom on each floor off the center stairs. The shared baths were removed and replaced by individual baths in the 1979s. Think about that for a second, if you were lucky you shared a bathroom, if you were a poor immigrant factory worker, you shat in a bucket...
Given the standard of living that arose post war, it's no wonder we decided to just raze huge sections of the city flat. It was archaic, almost third world, living by modern standards.
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