According to Preservation Detroit, "The City of Detroit Historic District Commission has received a petition to demolish the State Savings Bank. The petition is subject to a public hearing, which is scheduled for the next Historic District Commission meeting on Wednesday, August 14." — change.org
Samantha Farr, an Urban Planning Graduate Student at University of Michigan, has started a petition to block the plans by Andreas Apostolopoulos, CEO of Triple Properties, to demolish the historic Beaux-Arts-Style State Savings Bank in Detroit, to make room for a parking structure. Triple Properties purchased the building in 2012.
8 Comments
Why the F&*$ is Detroit doing? With acres of empty land, they want to tear this stone beauty down? Didn't we learn anything from the post WWII destruction of our cities?
As an aside, as much as I think tearing down the Folk Art Muesum by the Moma, I'd be curious to see how many architects come out to support this building. My guess is as many as tried to preserve the old Penn Station.
I was googling for sad kittens, but this came up instead.
boy in a well, I don't get it?
Thayer, as a general rule I don't sign online petitions. Did you?
I also have an incredibly bleak outlook on Detroit ever, ever doing the right thing if a private entity can make money on doing the wrong thing. So though I oppose the demolition of this building, it's very hard to feel like it does any good.
omg Thayer.
just enjoy some pictures of the interior of the fucking building and use your delight in them to further your fucking position, as if it needs any help, since the jack ass who bought the place is the most vision-less piece of shit to climb out of the ocean in the last thousand years.
is there an emoticon for exasperation? or should I just take all these sleeping pills with a bottle of wine?
I don't sign on line petitions either. As to wether saving this building will do any good for Detroit, probably not in the short term, but I am thinking in the longer term. As many cities who didn't flatten their building stock after WWII, some are now coming back on the backs of their built inheritance, for it's human scale, it's history, or simply beauty.
I'm from DC, where the recession wasn't so bad, but the neighborhoods that held on to their stock are doing better than the ones that had to be build back from scratch. In Detroit's case, unless one is ready to write it off completely (like some suggested of New Orleans) , keeping the buildings that add to a sense of place will pay off in the future. Why can't the city make these buildings historic? Then again, as the "auto" capital of the world, their love of pedestrians has always been suspect. Remember that Robert Moses wanted to lay a highway clear across Soho, so rather than tear their buidlings down becasue of assenine tax laws, landlords kept them up hoping to be reimbursed by the gov. Now it's one of the most beautiful urban neighborhoods in NYC, America, and the world, in my very humble opinion.
Will this ever happen in Detroit? I don't know, but wantonly tearing down these beauties will only make it harder for any comeback, and from what I've been reading, there are some kids who are making a go of it. Who look beyond the ideological debates many architects enjoy and simply going to a place that feels better than the souless office towers and socially alienating suburbs they know.
Bravo! Well said.
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