What Happened....

[MikeKardec]

I used to work with a guy who was involved with the incident that may have inspired "The Body." As he told it to me, he and several friends were swimming in an abandoned quarry, and one of them was killed when he dived in and hit an outcropping of rock. His body then sank to the bottom of the quarry and the water was so clear they could see it and do nothing about it. They spent almost the whole night debating what they ought to do.

This all happened one town over from the town where Stephen King would later teach high school, and he had to have heard about it -- it became a local legend.

King is NOTORIOUS for taking personal 'what ifs' and turning them into very inventive ideas to be explored in his fiction. If you are up on current non fiction, psychology, science, etc publishing you can easily tell what he's been reading because he's very fast at taking inspiration. I'm guessing you are correct in you assumption and I find it intriguing that the 'boy at the bottom of the lake' didn't inspire something significantly weirder, it's such a sad but evocative story.

 

[2jakes]

"TOWN MEETING TAKING A BREAK”...... according 2 jake

 

[Harp]

... but I had no choice in law school- esp. my last year. At one point I was holding down six classes- including Conflicts of Law and a Federal Income Taxation class-.

I had a collision with the IRS over a '94 XJS Jaguar convertible tax deduction-and I should have known better.

 

[stephena310]

It was always a style, never a necessity except in freezing cold weather and in that case, function took precedence over style. Wigs were in style at one time, too. Cowboy hats are widely available, you know, but I don't think I could pull off the look. Some of the "grown-ups" wore hats (men and women) when I was little, in the 1950s but hardly everyone. A few that I knew well never wore anything more than a baseball cap, although I remember a photo of one uncle--a baseball cap wearer--wearing a straw (I think) Panama style hat in the early 40s, before I was born. He nearly always wore nothing but the kind of gray or khaki work clothes that working men wore during that period. He also typically wore slip-on Romeo shoes.

However, I do not think it was men paid more attention to hair styles or that they had more highly maintained hair that led to hats going out of style. Older hairstyles were just as highly maintained as they've ever been. But different hairstyles may have been part of the reason. It's a little like asking why men don't wear three-piece suits anymore.

I wore suits and often three piece suits nearly every day of my life at Warner Bros. Music ...LOL !

 

[BlueTrain]

There's a faint bitterness coming out in this thread. I understand, although my hometowns and the little towns around there never managed to become touristy destinations. I think I did mention somewhere already that it's closer to Breezewood, Pennsylvania, now than anything else. Things change for all sorts of reasons, few of which we as ordinary citizens (or other inhabitants) have any control over.

By the time I came along, for instance, the era of the small, independent business was fast coming to an end. Even in my hometown, many of the stores along the main street were either chains or franchises. The supermarket was an A&P and there was also a Kroger. The drug stores were franchises and so were a few other stores. So many things happened, though, that it's difficult to put your finger on just one thing, because you can't. Several things contributed to the changes and gentrification was definitely not one of them, although that happened up here where I live now.

Ultimately the things that makes the biggest difference are economic forces that are invariably beyond our control. Where do the most people work where you live, if you live in a smaller community? Where I grew up, it was the railroad. In a town of roughly 8,000 people, the railroad employed about a thousand men, although hardly all of them lived in town. All of my relatives on my mother's side did, though, and they did in fact live in town. Even if there were still that many men there working there now, the place would still have changed for other reasons. A small store on the main street doesn't cut it anymore. The little franchises and other local stores, locally owned though they may have been, would have closed their doors when the big chains came to town, which they did anyway. Whatever local color anything may have had, which wasn't all that much to begin with, got painted over with the same paint you now see everywhere.

Thinking back, which I do all the time, it is funny how people complained about the traffic and the lack of parking downtown. I suppose it was a legitimate enough complaint but that certainly don't have that problem anymore. It's still not a bad place to live, though, but the "downtown" stretch of about four blocks on the main street is terribly depressing if you remember it when it was THE place in town and a bright and cheerful place. The same could be said for lots of other small towns around the country. Some places that are smaller fared even worse, although they're still there. School kids, if there are any, are bussed somewhere halfway across the county. Populations have dwindled.

Usually, business interests in cities a long ways away made all the decisions that made the biggest differences. In other cases, natural resources that created the boomtown of the past gave out. All the trees get cut down, the soil is exhausted, everything worth digging out of the ground has been mined and shipped somewhere else. Locally, such things are difficult to deal with. Nationally, it's a different story. But I won't go there or I'll get my hand slapped.

 

[BlueTrain]

Here are some more thoughts on the subject now that I've had a break.

Except perhaps for New England fishing villages, a lot of towns and cities in the hinterlands began, or rather, began booming, when some serious industry came to town. It was the railroads where I'm from as I mentioned. But with a lot of places, it was a large factory or several factories. That was the case in many places in New England, the mill towns. Some of the mills moved to other parts of the country, which was pretty much as bad as moving to the other side of the world. Same difference. Cumberland, Maryland, had a tire factory, for instance, but not anymore. So it seems like towns have a boom period when the new industry takes off and they usually lasted a long time, too. There are still a few factories here and there. Old factories never looked all that great, by the way, but lots of men and not a few women earned their living in dirty, smoky, ramshackle old brick buildings and I'm not saying that in a bad way. The work could be dangerous and unhealthy and there was still the fact that just a few men got the lion's share of the wealth that was generated. But people were, I think, mostly happy they had a job.

There are other sides of the story, too. One is that, when a new industry is getting off the ground, like when a new factory opens (and you read about this all the time in the paper, even now), there are never enough local people to fill the demand for factory workers. So, behold, there are new people moving in from other states, typically from the South, or from overseas, by turns from Ireland or Italy or Sweden or Germany and so on. That creates certain local tensions and social issues that take generations to really get over. What was done about it varied and the most that I think was ever done was to establish "settlement houses" to help people become more Americanized. These days, language aside, that's probably not so necessary since American culture is inclusive. Anyone can show up and in ten years we're eating whatever they brought with them and that's only a slight exaggeration.

But there is one thing that always seems so striking to me, although it only becomes apparent (and a fact) in larger towns and cities.

At some point in our history, people with money (naturally) started building some of the most fantastic pieces of architecture in what might otherwise be thought of as grimy industrial towns around the country. Here I'm thinking mainly of places east of the Mississippi. But here and there, all over the place, are office buildings, churches, train stations civic and governmental buildings with real style and in lots of different styles. My hometown didn't have any but there were a couple of private homes that were would make you stop and wonder who built such a place. I don't think things like that happen anymore and maybe I'm making it sound like they were common, which they really weren't.

They haven't all survived and the ones that have may not be serving the same function as they originally did but I'll bet you can all think of places like that you have seen in your travels. I think all the style went out of buildings after the stock market crash in 1929. The grandest building in my home town, aside from private homes, was the county courthouse and it looks like Ft. Knox, in spite of being designed by a man who studied in Paris.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not really in harmony with a lot of the people here when I say that I really don't care all that much about architecture or "style" as such. Whether something has a lot of rococo gingerbread or art-deco whizbangs on it or not doesn't mean a thing to me, if it's honestly built, strong, solid, functional, and will last. If it looks nice, fine, but function, to me is more important than form. I;ve spent the past eleven years working in a building that's beautiful to look at inside and out, but which was built, and renovated, with no consideration for the fact that people would ever actually have to work inside it. I'd take a ventilation fan in the lobby over a whole wall full of embossed curlicues any day of the week.

In the town where I grew up, the town's namesake in the early 19th Century donated a sum to be used to build a Town Hall. The result was a square, blunt, blocky brick thing. When the donor saw what it looked like he spat on the ground, huffed "Looks like a powder-house," and never set foot in the town again. But that building's still functional, as part of a local museum, to this day.

 

[Fading Fast]

While I lean toward a few, I like several different architecture styles. Sometimes I can point to a building and its style and say the form and function seem harmonious and enhance each other - this is when it really works. But that doesn't mean that sometimes one doesn't have to bend a bit to the other.

Pure utilitarian function requires little adornment and most builders will tell you why the cheapest buildings to build look like boxes. And NYC is full of housing projects built to maximize function and minimize cost. But humans enjoy something more, want something more, crave something more. Simple can be beautiful or boring, minimalism can appeal or feel soul sapping, adornments can enhance or overplay their hand.

It's a balance a talented architect can strike, but it isn't driven by pure cost-benefit analysis unless you can price each unit of pleasure a person gets from looking at, say, the Chrysler Building. That's the tough thing - how to weigh something like the intrinsic pleasure people get from seeing a well-designed building?

I agree with Lizzie's "if it's honestly built," comment, but find that is hard to define past the nearly useless I-know-it-when-I-see-it definition. I also agree that function has to be the driver, but I probably give a lot more weight to form as I think it does serve a great purpose over the life of a building even if it can't be easily measured.

The school I went to had a 19th Century farm house for its grammar school and a mid-60s blunt architecture middle school. It's been over thirty years, but the few friends I have from that period fondly remember our farmhouse building - with its creaky floors, banging pipes and rickety stairs - and none of us feel much for the square shaped, linoleum (I think) floor, soul-less middle school building. There's something to that hard-to-measure enjoyment.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, I like it when a place looks nice, grand, etc., etc. More on that in a minute.

I made a point of saying that a lot, if not most, people spent their lives toiling in a relatively shabby building. I put in my time doing that myself. The place had been through three floods, too, which left their respective high-water marks on doors. All it was, was an industrial shell building modified (several times over) to suit us, or rather, them. The floors in places were eaten away by acids spilled or leaked from large vats. There were a grand total of two windows, both in doors. But I worked there nearly fifteen years and mostly liked it. Why? Because it was a place of activity, with people coming and going (various shifts kept the place going all nights). In other words, a lot of people were earning their living there.

Another such place was where my father worked for about eighteen years. One of my aunts worked there and so did my next door neighbor. It was an old-fashioned laundry and it was huge. It was once the second largest employer in town, too, a laundry and dry cleaners! Same story; it was old (the place I described above was only built in 1959), having been built around 1900 and equipped as far as I could tell with the original iron age equipment. When my father started to work there it would have only been about fifty years old. It was also hot all year round as well as noisy, though I know of hotter or nosier places. Mostly women worked there, too, by the way. My father was a driver. But it was first and foremost for the employers the place they earned their living, such as it was. And you were in there with a lot of other people who became part of your life to a greater or lesser extent. The essence of all of those run-down eyesores was life. They gave live to the employers and in turn to the community. I'm not trying to sound too high-minded but all I'm saying is that most people get up in the morning and go do things in places that are less than impressive, to put it mildly. Yes, some people work in factories with shiny floors and clean lunchrooms but not everyone.

Still, I like seeing the more impressive buildings that once were the pride of the community, or at least of whoever's name is over the door. But just like the other businesses on main street, they get bypassed in time, and the tenants move out to the new office park or the passenger stations stop running or the old buildings become dated because they were built when people wanted something different from what they want now--and they weren't worried about the parking. Some are still there, half-empty, more are gone, though. Downtown churches have lost members to new congregations in the suburbs. But life goes on, just somewhere else.

 

[BlueTrain]

There are still a few grand places being built but it's usually not so obvious from the outside and they usually aren't the monuments to one man like they used to be. I don't know about soul, though. Does a dog have a soul? Well, what about a shopping center? I know of a couple of really grand shopping malls, but the grandeur is all on the inside. From outside, they're just piles of big blocks. Again, it's the people that give it life. Some malls die and become like a ghost town. Maybe they had a soul at one time after all, back when there was life there.

Another sort of place that could be said to be grand like some railroad stations once were, is an airport terminal. Some look very grand, even very old ones, like Washington National, but it didn't always look the way it does now. Baltimore-Washington manages not to look at all grand, though it is as functional as any other. Dulles Airport, which I could see from where I sit at one time until someone built something that spoiled the view, has the grandest, almost monumental appearance as you approach the airport of any I have ever seen. It has remained a whole, unmodified by additions or alterations but inside, it becomes thoroughly functional and is as modern as tomorrow, as we used to say. And it bustles!

 

[Fading Fast]

There are still a few grand places being built but it's usually not so obvious from the outside and they usually aren't the monuments to one man like they used to be....

I love that there was a time when people - obviously successful and wealthy people - would build a building as a monument to themselves. NYC is full of them - so many in fact - that a lot of them aren't mentioned on the "famous or historical building of interest" lists tourist get.

I have always loved this over-the-top, but, today, under-appreciated monument to and by Fredrich F. French - a first-half of the 20th Century developer. For decades now, I have looked at this building and been amazed by its incredible detail and design.

I was fortunate enough for several years to work in a nearby office building that had views of it. That's when I better noticed its terraces and incredible Aztec design features.

 

[BlueTrain]

That place is certainly remarkable and decidedly monumental--and what is that style? Babylonian revival?

What I had been thinking of, however, were similar, though usually smaller, places in smaller cities and larger towns where their appearance is all that much more remarkable. In large cities I would think they would be more common, if they haven't been torn down and replaced.

Sometimes there will be something like a large church and sometimes churches can have a grand style of their own even when they aren't all that large. Then the neighborhood changes for any number of reasons and the nice church building remains, looking a little like a White Elephant, in the absence of something better term. Things like that look very sad to me, although the people who still go there might have a different opinion of things.

Although rarely monumental or of any particular architectural distinctiveness, there were a lot of buildings that had names, even if they were rarely referred to that way and may have become obsolete when ownership changed. But there was often a name above the door that led upstairs to either apartments or some hall above the ground floor business. I remember one such place in my hometown that I might have a photograph of, if I can only lay my hands on it and figure out how to post it. I happened to notice it when I was there year before last for my high school reunion. I never noticed it when I was actually living there. The name was "Von Court Apartments," which was painted on the side of the building. It was supposedly either the tallest or second tallest building in town. One of the two theaters in town was in that building, the other directly across the street. It was originally called the "Royal," but it was remodeled and the name became the "LaVon," which sounded rather pretentious. The Von Court family operated two businesses on either side of the theater. I was reminded of that when reading the thread about old painted building signs.

Bob Denver moved to my hometown, by the way, in his later years. Couldn't say why.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I would love to see a building constructed in honor of Bob Denver, but they'd have to tear down the Old Endicott Building to put it up.

 

[Joe50's]

buildings that had names But there was often a name above the door that led upstairs to either apartments or some hall above the ground floor business.
w

makes me think of the hart building in marysville
" Hart Building (1927) marysvilles tallest building incorporated features previously unheard of in Marysville including: a form of air conditioning, steam heat, elevator service, lavatories on every floor and a self contained water supply. Some of the buildings original tenants included six doctors, several attorneys and numerous realtors and insurance offices."- national register 1981
havent the slightest clue what is there nowadays since the main floor is vacant and there is no information on the place

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ I love that details like that - bathroom on every floor - were special enough at the time to highlight. It tells you a little bit about where the country was at for that period. I believe (doing this from memory) that bathrooms on every floor and a sink in each office space (back in a time when washbasins were giving way to sinks) were part of the original promotional material for the Woolworth building when it opened in 1913.

Hopefully, the Hart Building will have a revival at some point.

 

[Paisley]

In home furnishing magazines, a lot of the appeal of the rooms they show is great architecture. Certain decorating styles just don't work in a 60s ranch house.

One thing I love about living in an older city is the architecture (including a nice school across the street from my house). Denver, OTOH, is full of ugly buildings, ugly store fronts, and ugly, cookie-cutter houses. Close to where I lived, they couldn't tear down nice old brick houses fast enough to put up steel and glass box houses. Newer suburbs were nicer, but very homogenous. Once on a trip to Boulder, I said to the friend I was with, "Didn't we just pass that shopping center?" No, they all just looked alike.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We have entire neighborhoods here made up of Sears and Roebuck kit houses from the early 1900s -- those "house in a box" deals that were assembled on site by the purchaser, and that were made fun of by Buster Keaton in "One Week." They all started out identical except for the paint jobs --quick and simple working-class housing built for practicality and not for aesthetics. But the fact that so many have survived suggests that, at least, quality materials were used.

Architecture here, and in many other old Northeastern towns, was affected greatly by the fact that huge fires swept entire blocks clean on a regular basis around the end of the 19th century -- many the old wooden buildings dating back, in some cases, to the 18th century were wiped out in an afternoon. The focus, when rebuilding them wasn't on architecture but on just getting something up and functional. Many towns that went thru this have their "Phoenix Row," made up of very simple two or three-story red-brick buildings with the occasional ornamental parapet or inset granite windowsills to break up the monotony.

The last such fire in my town happened in 1952, wiping out two entire blocks south of Main Street. The only difference between then and what happened in the 19th Century is that the buildings were replaced by cinder block faced with stucco or fake brick, rather than actual brick. More construction out of necessity rather than aesthetics.

Now that the arty crowd has taken over, we're getting modernist stuff. Our newest art museum "pays tribute to the city's industrial past" with a strange-looking saw-tooth-roofed building sheathed in the same kind of corrugated metal siding that was on the 1920s "Fireproof Garage" structure that it replaced. And there's plans in the works for a new five-story "art storage warehouse" to be faced entirely in reflectorized glass, which pays tribute to, I dunno, something that has nothing to do with the town. I await with eager anticipation the replacement of Wasses' Hot Dog Stand with a new Frankfurther Gallery to be designed by Frank Gehry himself.

 

[Fading Fast]

In home furnishing magazines, a lot of the appeal of the rooms they show is great architecture. Certain decorating styles just don't work in a 60s ranch house.

One thing I love about living in an older city is the architecture (including a nice school across the street from my house). Denver, OTOH, is full of ugly buildings, ugly store fronts, and ugly, cookie-cutter houses. Close to where I lived, they couldn't tear down nice old brick houses fast enough to put up steel and glass box houses. Newer suburbs were nicer, but very homogenous. Once on a trip to Boulder, I said to the friend I was with, "Didn't we just pass that shopping center?" No, they all just looked alike.

I chuckle sometimes when the Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware catalogue comes and they showcase their furniture / home furnishings in these incredibly beautiful homes with, as you note, architecture that is both gorgeous and perfectly aligned to the aesthetics of their collections.

I chuckle because (1) those furnishing will only look as good in your house if your house has the same perfectly aligned architecture and (2) the homes they show their furnishing in probably have incredibly more expensive furniture than Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware. Sometimes, their stuff does look a little outclassed by the home itself - like the furniture is trying to punch above its weight class.

For all the fun I make of the Hipsters (not really that much, but some of their preciousness calls out for teasing), one of the good things is their love of old architecture as they have been a driving force in revitalizing neighborhoods all over New York City by bringing back / restoring / repurposing old buildings, houses, apartment buildings, warehouses, etc., with, most of the time, great respect for the original architecture.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Now that the arty crowd has taken over, we're getting modernist stuff. Our newest art museum "pays tribute to the city's industrial past" with a strange-looking saw-tooth-roofed building sheathed in the same kind of corrugated metal siding that was on the 1920s "Fireproof Garage" structure that it replaced. And there's plans in the works for a new five-story "art storage warehouse" to be faced entirely in reflectorized glass, which pays tribute to, I dunno, something that has nothing to do with the town. I await with eager anticipation the replacement of Wasses' Hot Dog Stand with a new Frankfurther Gallery to be designed by Frank Gehry himself.

For the last fifteen years or so, NYC's "leaders" in the arts and architecture fields have been putting up one glass or reflective glass building after another telling us (the unwashed masses) and each other how brilliant, groundbreaking, aesthetically beautiful they all are. Despite claims that the glass is treated to address heat and cold issues, the truth is those buildings are brutal to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter (I worked in one and it was never comfortable - the sun hit our area about 2pm and the temperature soared, for example).

Then, about ten years ago, one high-profile building bucked the trend and was built in a pre-war style which fit in beautifully with the surrounding buildings (all true pre-wars). Since it was successful, there have been others - thankfully. While the ratio is still in favor of the glass buildings, at least some new buildings are being built with a sensitivity to the surrounding areas architecture.

 

[LizzieMaine]

About the first time a seagull piles into the reflective glass, they'll start reconsidering their artistic vision, I suspect. To say nothing of the cost keeping said glass clean of Maine's primary agricultural product, seagull deposits.