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Originally Posted by Philly Fan
Yeah, but I've THOUGHT a lot of nice things about you.
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Yeah, sure. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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Originally Posted by apetrella802
It's a fact of life that buildings have to earn their keep.(Unless it's something like Independence Hall). Even the PSFS building was endangered for a while until it was repurposed as a hotel. At the time Snellenburgs was demolished CC was in decline and there was little or no possibility of renting the space.
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I understand the Colosseum has long been outmoded for its intended use as a stadium. It should be demolished and replaced with something like 1100 Market. Something more useful.
Seriously, I know you are an advocate for preservation. But I don't buy the supposed free-market laissez-faire mindset in this context.
PSFS, City Hall Annex, Reading Terminal, the Victory Building, Lit Brothers, the Divine Lorraine, and any number of precious buildings (similar to Snellenburg's, Gimbel's, and many others that didn't make it) were this close to being demolished up through the early 90s. Not for any good reason, mind you, except that in that period, they were less valuable than the parking lots that would have replaced them. It's pure luck we got away with as many surviving old buildings as we did. Many - most - American cities fared far worse, as we all know.
That the surviving buildings survived and Snellenburg's didn't was largely arbitrary -
not because the surviving buildings met some objective economic criteria for survival that Snellenburg's failed, but more because of the random vagaries of ownership associated with any given property.
That the survival of large older urban buildings was generally so precarious in the post war era is less a reflection of the actual free market value of the buildings themselves than it is an indictment of a system, veiled beneath the misnomer of "unfettered free markets", that generates massive economic distortions 1) through a property tax system that incentivizes speculation, neglect and underutilization of property, and 2) by channeling trillions of dollars of federal subsidies to highways, suburban sprawl, and reliance on cars and parking lots that simultaneously devalued urban real estate and increased the pressure to create urban parking facilities.
Sure, Snellenburg's failed to earn its keep just like almost every other big old building in Center City failed to earn their keep in the post war era. By that logic, we should have demolished them all and replaced them all with parking lots and low-rise piles of shit like 1100 Market.
Personally, I think a better approach in dealing with any large, irreplaceable old building like Snellenburg's - a building that, at just the wrong, short-sighted moment in history, was viewed as obsolete - would be to mothball it and wait until a new use is discovered for it, unless as there is some
amazingly compelling alternative use for the site (read:
NOT a parking lot or characterless 2-story shoe box).
The short view is to say "it's obsolete now and it always will be". That was the prevalent view in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. That gets you downtown Detroit. The long view, like that of the Romans, is "it maybe obsolete now, but it probably won't be in 10 or 20 years; let's wait and see".