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These may not be accurate; improvements may have been made. After all, a light rail system traverses the street.
Not being sarcastic; that often helps. It gentrifies the area, and the disorder and abandonment decrease.
I don’t know why I ended up here; perhaps it was the peculiar nature of the abandonment, which is different than small towns. It's messier, and bigger. Grand ruins are more disheartening than small ones.
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We have it all, right here. What do I mean? Look, and count ‘em up. |
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You have the brick sidewalks - that’ll bring back the shoppers! You have the Logan’s-Run-era planters. Trees! That’ll bring them back. There’s a post-war rehab metal facade. Curb cuts. It’s all there, the history of downtowns after 1949. |
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Everyone was kinda down in the dumps when they started building this one, but we all cheered up and had a great time doing the second floor! |
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Ah, there’s the Main Street desertion pron we’ve come to know and love. |
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Angle parking: always welcome. |
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Completely intact, if that stone at the bottom is original. Keep this in mind; this is what they looked like before the row of windows above the main display windows were boarded up for signage. |
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That median, though. I approve of trees on the median, but again, the design is pure Logan's Run-era sadness. |
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Wow: |
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It was not a Masonic Temple at the time of this shot; a church occupied the space. In an article about the church’s relocation, some interesting details:
. . . the building has an inordinate number of bank vaults. Compton said he has a letter from the early 1900s from J.B. Watkins, a Lawrence banker who operated just down the street. Watkins provided the loan for the Masonic Temple building but required that the building be constructed in a way that it could house a bank, if the temple venture happened to fail.
Compton said he wouldn’t rule out a bank or retail uses for the building, pointing to examples of how downtown buildings could be retrofitted for new uses.
“The temple venture.” |
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Tidy postwar structure; that’s all. |
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Wouldn’t surprise me if it started life as a bank. |
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“Who’d you hire to design your new church? I hear you’re starting construction next week.” |
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“Don’t know his name, but I hope he doesn’t have a crippling neurosis about the size of his penis, and overcompensates in his work.” |
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“Who’d you hire?” |
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“Harold Harkenson. Nice fellow. Used to be a diabetes-supply salesman.” |
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Ah! There’s a large addition to the downtown streetscape, he said, straining to find something nice to say. |
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Thin windows, blank inverted corners, wider on the second floor than the first - every design mistake of its day. |
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You know it’s the old-time department store, and the old building probably still lurks behind that metal facade: |
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What it looked like before can be found here. |
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Hmm. Aztecky-Deco-Moderne something something |
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At least we know what the building once held. |
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Another empty spot. No one could see the retail for the trees! |
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Ah, off-the-shelf Sullivanesque ornament, we meet again |
I wondered why I snapped this, and then I got it. There’s one detail that belongs to the last two or three decades of the previous century. Can you see it? |
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Hint: it hurt if you rubbed up against it wearing shorts. |
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I’m almost too bored to check, so let me just throw out my suspicions: hotel, built in two phases. |
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OH OKAY I’LL RESEARCH
Good thing I didn’t say “it’s senior housing now,” because for once it’s not.
The Eldridge House Hotel (often referred to as the Eldridge Hotel or simply the Eldridge) is a historic building located on Massachusetts Street, in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. The building is named after Shalor Eldridge, a prominent anti-slavery individual who erected the building in the mid-1800s. The building, as its contemporary name suggests, is currently used as a hotel.
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Don’t know what it is today, but it would make a nice city hall. |
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By their slanting planters shall ye know them. |
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