Why preserve old buildings and neighborhoods?
It’s a question with several answers. To begin with, we preserve them simply because they’re good to look at. Older buildings are a feast for the unhurried eye, a welcome diversion from the glass – and – steel banality that casts a pall over too many communities. Author Judith Waldhorn has called them, “a gift to the street” – a gift of beauty, texture, variety and detail that our communities need badly. Besides that, they work. Countless reuse projects have shown that old buildings can function in ways their original builders never dreamed of. In St. Louis, for example, a grand old railroad station now houses a hotel and a shopping mall, an award-winning transformation that has changed a shabby white elephant into a bustling marketplace that is a major generator of tax revenues. In Columbus, Georgia, a former iron mill has been turned into a convention center. An old high school in Seattle is now highly desirable condominiums, and in Louisville, Kentucky, what was once the county jail
