Saturday, February 2, 2008
In Boulder in the mid 20th Century Boulder businesses did something that was fashionable in certain parts of the country; I believe concentrated in Western states. They covered up the fronts of their stone buildings with painted corrugated metal, completely obliterating from view the 19th Century stone constructions. My guess is there was a strong impulse to do this as a cover-up in the West. The Western states went through a period in the first two decades of that century of a stark rethinking, and sought to separate their identities from their lawless troubled beginnings. In Boulder by the early 1960s the corrugated covering of the buildings had deteriorated with the downtown district's decline. Businesses had closed, and business names had come off, leaving monotone colored metal smudged and in decay. In the 1970s Boulder began a renewal. The metal coverings were taken off. The sandstone of the buildings was revealed after several decades of being hidden. Boulder introduced a pedestrian walking mall, one of the most charming in the country, in 1976, which passes through the dark brown sandstone... In my hometown there was no such history of corrugated metal, and the sandstone buildings, which were of similar design as Boulder, remained fully in view. The early 1970s, unlike for Boulder, was not good for Potsdam. Urban renewal and a local political scandal involving it led to a block of downtown buildings being torn down entirely. The space where the businesses had been located remained a dirt and gravel parking lot through the 70s and well into the 80s.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment