More mansions about to bite the dust

When I was a teenager living in Oklahoma, the oldest mansions in our area were built around 1910.  (Oklahoma didn't have any buildings like that until after the Land Rush settlers had made a little money.)

When our family took a vacation eastward my senior year, I saw the riverfront mansions in St. Louis and I was hooked.  I just loved old houses, especially Victorian ones.  One of the essays I wrote for my college entrance packet was how I was going to become an expert on Victorian architecture and planned to write a book about it.  (Didn't happen.)

Anyway, as you probably all know,  I still love to put creatively shaped houses on most of my quilts.  I just really like to look at houses.

I taught quilting in Saginaw, Michigan a few years ago, and while there, one of the quilt guild ladies very generously presented me with an expensive hardbound picture book of all the great mansions that had been built in Bay City, Michigan during the boom of the lumber business there in the mid-to late 1800's.

As I looked at all the gorgeous, huge homes, over and over I saw above the photo/drawing:  "Razed 1928" "Razed 1945", etc.  I was amazed how much treasure had been invested in these beautiful homes, which were inhabited for about 40 to 50 years each before they were demolished.

Today I saw this slide show on CNBC, ten mansions which are probably going to be demolished sometime in the future.  You can see that they are/were beautiful, too, once.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/42362346/?slide=1

A couple of years ago I really enjoyed reading the book  "Rubble- Unearthing the history of Demolition" by Jeff Byles.  But it was painful reading the story of the demolition of Pennsylvania Station in 1963, to make way for Madison Square Garden.  With no regard for the beautiful statues or marble and granite decorations, the whole structure was bulldozed and dumped.  Adam read it too, and that book really hurt both of our feelings.

It is amazing to think of the millions of structures that have come and gone in the history of the world.




(Change of topic)

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/this-is-what-happens-when-establishment-control-of-the-media-cracks-for-a-moment  Here is a video of what happened on CNN when the two female news anchors interviewed a CIA official about the war in Libya.  If I was a body language expert, I think I could learn a lot from the defensive ways the two women started waving their arms or folding their arms as they got into an argument with the man.