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Old Posted May 17, 2019, 4:31 PM
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pj3000 pj3000 is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Pittsburgh & Miami
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PopulusRomanus View Post
It is always sad to see an old building go, but it looks like a larger building would do a lot to improve utilization of Perry Square. The old greyhound station looked pretty cool in the pictures, I liked the streamline moderne feel.
Yeah, I agree... I like its 1930s Art Deco/Streamline Moderne style, and it's on the National Register, so I imagine there will be some debate over its planned demolition.





Unfortunately, the area became very seedy (as many areas around bus stations seem to become) in the 70s, and remained so in the 80s, with the building being an ad-hoc homeless shelter/crackhouse, and then serving as a pool hall/bar in the 90s, then a daycare center briefly, and then a series of rather cheesy dance clubs and a tiki bar popular with both the college-age crowd and "country music" crowd since the mid 00s... all the while the building being neglected.












Even though it's Erie's only remaining commercial example of the Art Moderne style, it was totally out of place, in the middle of an 1840s-70s block right on the city's central square, when they demolished the 1870s Park Opera House (one of the largest opera houses in the nation at the time, seating over 1,500) and adjacent building for the bus depot and lot in 1939... so I'm really not too sad to see it go. In many ways, the 1930s were as destructive to the urban environment as the 1960s-70s were.

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