More brick-a-brac from readers

Attention: Rockinon

Was reading your "Irreplaceable Buildings. Can't be made today" blog. Actually the title should be "Irreplaceable FACADES" and in the case of the Bowles facade maybe not so irreplaceable since not much of the skin seems to have been saved.

Anonymous


Toshtensen send this comment and I added the art:

In Indianapolis the Indiana Theatre was remodelled into multiple stages for the Indianapolis Repertory Theater and the Circle Theater is being use as a concert hall for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.





On non-performance dates Circle Theatre is available for meetings, seminars, receptions, concerts, or other functions.

Photo credit (left): Jason Young

What happened in Lansing is unfortunate, because the office building destroyed the theater portion of the building and the arcade of shops that was inside the entrance.

The State Theater in Ann Arbor was made into a clothing store, while the Michigan Theater is still operating.



(My add: The Michigan Theatre has a good Internet site complete with a photo tour of the theatre today. It is interesting to note that the Michigan has only a few hundred more seats than London's now demolished Capitol Theatre.

The State Theatre in Ann Arbor was designed by the same architect who designed the Capitol Theatre in London, Ontario, of which only the facade minus the marquee canopy remains.

In 1979 the State was chopped into four separate screening room with two on the main floor and another two sharing the balcony space. Not ten years later, Urban Outfitters took over the main floor of the theatre and gutted it for a clothing store.

According to Wikipedia, the two balcony theatres are still in use. Remnants of the original architecture are still visible throughout the building.

Thoughts from a reader on the saving of historic theatres

To: Rockinon

I am sending you some examples of theaters in Chicago that have been restored (exterior and interiors!). Chicago utilized sponsors to help with the funding to restore the historic character of the theaters. The corporations add their names to the theatre's. This is probably not as viable a funding tactic in today's financial climate.

These are images of the Oriental Theatre, both inside and out..



This is another theatre interior.

Signed,
Anonymous.







My question: Would the City of London been wiser to have spent more time on the Performing Arts Centre proposal, putting their support there rather that in the simple, but effective, save-the-look approach? Remember, it's the city behind the facade. Without the city as a 20-year tenant, the facade restoration would most likely never have been done.

Irreplaceable Buildings. Can't be made today.

 It's a heartwarming story.

"The Capitol Theatre and Bowles building, once thought to be too derelict to restore, have made majestic comebacks on London's Dundas Street, breathing new life into a block of core buildings between Clarence and Richmond streets that badly need a new draw." - The London Free Press

The story is made all the more powerful when one recalls the words of developer Shmuel Farhi: "We purchased the building (Capitol Theatre) solely to provide parking . . . "

Actually, he got his parking. After acquiring the property, Farhi razed the theatre. The auditorium is gone.

Oh well, no loss. What use could a city find for a 1400 seat auditorium? There are some who think it would have made a fine performing arts centre. A 1400 seat PAC needs parking, and the closer the better. Well, PAC got its parking, lots of it, and it couldn't be closer. PAC got the parking it needed, but lost the auditorium. You can't win 'em all.

"Two side-by-side downtown London historic gems that came close to a date with the wrecker's ball have returned to their former glory." - The London Free Press

To be completely honest, the remaining Capitol Building, mostly an ornate foyer, was the victim of "demolition light." The shell was left intact but the interior detailing was removed and donated to renovation projects at the Palace Theatre and the Aeolian Hall.

O.K., we lost the theatre and we lost the foyer but at least we kept the two facades.

" . . . these buildings were originally written off, considered too expensive to restore." - Paul Berton, The London Free Press

Well, the naysayers were proven wrong, right? Well, not completely.

"The Bowles used to have a terracotta front, but 80% of the 400 tiles were damaged. The decision was made to change all of it to stone that was meticulously carved. " - The London Free Press

O.K. The naysayers were right. It was too expensive to restore; they rebuilt it. It is now brand new. It was cheaper.

We lost the theatre, the foyer, and the Bowles Building facade is essentially new. It is a new facing in limestone and not antique terracotta. It could be erected anywhere - downtown, uptown, White Oaks Mall.

As The London Free Press tells us, there is "potential in heritage buildings, not simply because they're old (in fact, in spite of it) but because they are unique and interesting . . . "

And they just don't make buildings like the Capitol and the Bowles anymore. Right? No craftsmen left, dying art, lost skills, and all that... Right? You just have to love these old, unique, irreplaceable buildings. Hey, when they're gone they're gone. Impossible to replace.

Now, about that Capitol Theatre front and the missing marquee . . .
_____________________________________________________
Obviously, the truth is if you want the look of your downtown back, go for it. The skills needed to build old-looking stuff, especially facades, are still around; It is just expensive. Shmuel Farhi will tell you that.

Let's stop all the silly irreplaceable jewels stuff. I've heard of art deco, and art nouveau, and Victorian but I have never heard of jewel. You want it? Design it and build it. Have a style, an approach, and adhere to it.

All the fawning talk over heritage buildings that are often the newest construction on the block is silly. You know, if there is one word I would never use for Shmuel Farhi it is fawning. He's pragmatic. And oddly enough, parking lots and all, the city may be better off because of it.

The Palace and the Aeolian Hall owners may agree as they benefited from his pragmatism.

Layoff Rumours

Yesterday I had my greatest number of hits. (Just goes to show if you've got some news, you've got gold. My Rockinon blogs themselves racked up hundred and hundreds of hits from all over Canada and my other endeavours went easily into the three digits, too.) For a few names and a goodbye to those talented people leaving the paper go to this link.

I assume that many of the Rockinon hits were from people who work for Sun Media / Quebecor and were either facing or fearing layoffs.

I am hearing stuff but few want to be specific. This morning I got this e-mail:

"I've heard you can add at least Simcoe and Brantford to the list too. Sad."

If you can add anything to this story, please drop me an e-mail. I'm not a paper but a blogger. I love anonymous.

And if you see errors, please let me know. I love editors and with the Internet everyone is a potential editor, catching errors and omissions. Someone caught a big one for me yesterday and I thank them. There were, and are, good reasons why newspapers once had so many editors.

If you haven't done so already, read my post "Vulgarians" and hit the link to the interview with Harold Evans that ran in The Globe and Mail.

Cheers,
Rockinon

p.s. Someday I'll talk about retirement and living on less than half the income that I once enjoyed. And I'll even give a few kudos to The London Free Press and to even Sun Media and Quebecor.

London, Ontario, blogger posts Chicago fire picture while blaze still going

The Internet has made the flow of information mind-boggling fast. A report on a high-rise fire Sunday afternoon in Chicago was being filed, complete with art, by a blogger in London, Ontario, shortly after the firefighters had the blaze under control. The blogger's contact in Chicago kept the Londoner up-to-date as the story unfolded.

The story is posted on the Digital Journal.

Vulgarians

I was reading the Toronto Sun Family blog and discovered this link to a Harold Evans interview by John Barber of The Globe and Mail.

Evans was the brilliant editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. What does he think of the present cutbacks throughout the newspaper industry? Let me quote a few lines from the interview:

. . . Mr. Evans is scathing about contemporary papers that “lose their nerve” in response to tough times, especially by cutting editorial content, “the most stupid thing you can do.”

That strategy helped to lead the once-mighty Tribune Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, into bankruptcy last year, part of a wave that has also immersed The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, The Orange County Register in California, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Piecemeal cutting destroys integrity as surely as political interference, according to Mr. Evans. “There's no advertising to support the sports page,” he notes. “You won't dream of dropping the sports section, but they drop the book section. Why? Because they're vulgarians. Seriously. It's so shortsighted.”

Shortsighted? They're downright myopic in their lack of foresight.

And please note that "anonymous sub-editors (called copy editors in North America) merit long passages of lavish praise" in Evans' new book, My Paper Chase. These positions are some of the first to be slashed by today's newspaper owners.

Loss of jobs and lost way of life

“Anybody who reads history has to approach these things with some humility because you can’t know. Nobody knows what the last chapter ever looks like.” - United States Secretary of Defence Robert Gates

It's good advice, with lots of applications. As I write this I'm going to try and keep Gates' words in mind.

The layoff at the local paper hurts and it hurts more than just the affected workers; It hurts the community.

Layoffs are not about the disappearance of jobs but the moving. They may go to China, India, Mexico or, in the case of Sun Media and Quebecor, Barrie, Ottawa or Woodstock. Whether the jobs are moved half a world away or just half a province, the community still suffers.

Both Barrie and Woodstock are the locations of Sun Media Centres of Excellence. Ottawa is home to a Sun Media call centre. I'm not sure if it's another centre but from my contact with the Ottawa service, it isn't a centre of excellence in my book.

If I worked in any of those place, I would not be confident that I would have my job in ten years. Sun Media and Quebecor have shown a willingness to disrupt the lives of the workers in order to save money. The Third World beckons and I would not be surprised to see these companies respond to the sirens' call - a call heard around the country, "Cheap workers. Think China, India, Mexico . . . Barrie."

I call it, "Welcome to the Third World." You may have a good education: a degree in English. You may have a mortgage, a car, a child or two in college. You may have a job at a company bragging about increased profits. And you may be asked to take a paycut if you want to keep you job. If you refuse, thanks to the Internet, many jobs can be located just about anywhere.

Are we in a race to the bottom? Is this the beginning of, "Welcome to the Third World."

Allow me to quote Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, from her recent article in The Huffington Post:

"Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.


 

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance."

Yes, I know that Warren is talking about the States but a lot of what she says applies to varying degrees to Canada.

When Warren writes: "America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety." I believe you can replace America with Canada and the sentence still makes  sense.

As my mother used to say, "Something is rotten in Denmark." And the rot runs deep.

When the experts running the CPP can lose 17 percent of our retirement money and then pay themselves bonuses of a million plus for their good work, something is wildly out of alignment in our economic engine.

One does not have to look far to find examples of grossly overpaid executive royalty. The United States has the finest kingdoms but the fiefdoms in Canada are quite amazing.

Quebecor was once the biggest printer on the world stage. But partially under the guidance of Pierre Karl Peladeau the printing giant became a stuggling, severely financially-crippled concern. Maybe PKP should outsource his own job. I have some of my retirement money in China, some in Singapore, and all those stocks did much better than Quebecor's former printing division. 

[Since last writing about Quebecor World, Chicago-based printer RR Donnelley tendered an unsolicited bid to purchase Quebecor World, the insolvent (Sun Media's term) printer. This bid was rebuffed, but in June of this year (2009) Mark Angelson, a former RR Donnelley CEO was named chairman of the printer reorganized to "satisfy" bankruptcy code requirements. Quebecor World and Quebecor, the owner of Sun Media, are now totally separate companies with a shared past but unlinked future. I thank an alert reader for this clarification.]

I am not going to try and tell the future; As Robert Gates pointed out, this is a fool's game. But I do have doubts about PKP's abilities and the manner in which he runs his companies. It is only a personal opinion, but I don't think PKP's approach is good for London or for Canada. I don't think it is even good for Barrie, Ottawa and Woodstock.