Tuesday follow up

We usually publish here on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but there was one short item that I couldn't justify squeezing into yesterday's post but wanted to pass on.

The following photo and caption come from a booklet called the Brainerd History Walk. In a single paragraph, they do more to explain how the suburban experiment has changed our values than anything I could write.

The $50,000 spent in 1910 is equivalent to spending $1.2 million today. There was no asebestos requiring expensive removal -- it wasn't invented yet -- and it is hard to believe that the building itself had fallen into ruin. No, it was just determined that the highest and best use for this property was for storing cars.

A belief that, unfortunately, persists to this day.

Comments

[Mark]

Tragic. We've lost so much good architecture in our cities. In a similar vein, the Infrastructurist had a well-viewed post on long lost train stations.

[Dan Moyes]

Yet we store worthless junk in our garages and let expensive personally owned transportation modules sit outside exposed to the elements and man-made mischief.

[Eli Damon]

Disgusting.

Incidentally, asbestos is a mined mineral that was known in the middle ages. It didn't achieve much popularity back then, probably because the people who tried to work with it didn't produce much in their unnaturally short lives.