“Buildings lost, forgotten, reimagined and transformed” by Shane Reiner-Roth is a nice short discussion of adaptive reuse and the alternatives. When a building’s original use – its original purpose – is gone, what happens next? It can fall into decay and eventually disappear or it can be reused. As I’ve said before, the best way to preserve a building is to make sure it has a use.
I got to thinking about local examples of the various categories. For “lost,” I’ll go with NYC’s martyr to the preservation cause, Pennsylvania Station, shown above. I passed through Penn Station yesterday and once again I wished it looked like that picture and not like an overcrowded subway station.
For “transformed” I’ll go with the main building at Ellis Island. A museum in a historically significant location may be a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s often a good idea. Something over 100,000,000 people in the US have at least one ancestor come through the immigration station at Ellis Island, which is certainly worthy of a museum.
For “reimagined” I’ll go with North Brother Island, which from one point of view has been abandoned, but actually has gone from a hospital to a bird sanctuary.
And finally, for “forgotten” I’ll go with a building that is now a house museum, but had a period of very different use. The original Old Stone House in Brooklyn (the existing building is a reconstruction), a seventeenth-century farmhouse, was the clubhouse of the Brooklyn baseball team when it was known as the Superbas. It’s obviously not forgotten in the sense that I can provide web links on the topic, but very few people looking at the house realize it’s a reconstruction and even fewer know its baseball history.
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