Friday, May 25, 2007

Two of the Basic Food Groups

A little tale about American urban decay and rebirth: in the 1980s, the city authorities and private developers planned and built St. Louis Centre, which at the time was the largest downtown shopping mall in the U.S. It was a big hit at first but then withered. If you are interested in the whole story, take a look at the fascinating but somewhat morbid site deadmalls.com. Some pictures of the structure are here.

The place became nearly vacant. The remaining tenants were mostly bottom-of-the barrel. This picture, taken about two years ago, is a window of a ground floor corner space, which was then occupied by an unappealing fried chicken and fish joint.

The Centre closed in 2006. However, it has been bought by St. Louis premier redeveloper, Pyramid Architects, which is transforming it into ground floor retail with luxury condominiums above. It will add to the resurgence of population downtown.

Tomorrow: Black and White Week Continues - Twain (not Mark)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is an interesting post.

I saw you asked Kansas City about changing picture size. If you can, try making your pictures up to 500 pixels wide. That size should work without distorting anything.

I actually use a ten inch wide picture on all my posts but changed the template to do it.

You can also change the percentages in the template settings to make the whole thing wider.

I hope you get to see the last photos in the robin series.

Have a nice weekend.

Stephane said...

strangetastes, thanks for you recent comments on my blog.

Indeed Luxembourg is a happy and quiet little country but as you noticed I like to give a different vision of things (my vision). I don't feel sad at all, but I like the dark side of things or change them into a dark side ;-)

Thanks fo the music link, I will listen to it at home this week-end(still at work for the moment) and will let you know if I like it.

I like this story, I'll have a closer look at the deadmalls website, I must say I love old deserted buildings.