Quote:
Originally Posted by tworivers
I'd love to see it radically repurposed but do you guys think that Portland really has the money or developer culture to pull something like that off? In my billionaire dreams I'd simply hand it off to Allied Works and see what they come up with. Of course, Grandma and Gramps over at the Historic Landmarks Commission would probably need new diapers if that happened.
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Facade retention isn't very common in Portland, but elsewhere it's a very common process. For example in Glasgow, where I lived for two years, almost every 19th Century facade you see
along this street has modern office accommodation behind it. This causes no small amount of unhappiness with preservationists, who are sad to see the original interiors disappear, but the likely alternative is the wholesale demolition of the building (see the parallels here?). Glasgow, for what it's worth, is a city that 30 years ago was thought about much the same way we think of Detroit today. Its economy has recovered to an incredible degree since then, but there is still a large amount of vacant land in the central city.