I'm equally confused. I hope it's number three.I'm lost. Are they:
1) preserving the historic building, and adding to it?,
2) demolishing the historic building, and building something fully new that vaguely looks like the old?, or
3) building another Durfee HS elsewhere in the city, leaving the historic building as-is for some other purpose?
Yeah this is pretty grotesque. Almost as bad as the architectural loss itself is that they split downtown Fall River in half with when they build 195 and the two halves still feel disconnected from one another. To make matters worse, the streets around city hall have essentially been converted to a series of multi-lane (most one-way) speedways which add to the feeling of the entire area being a pedestrian nightmare. On top of that, you have the mess of ramps connecting 195 to downtown, 138, and 79 which further isolated the two halves of downtown from the waterfront. They've done some reconfiguring to improve the connectivity, but it's still a pedestrian nightmare. I have a lot of nostalgia for the area, but I don't have a lot of hope that there will ever be a good way to undo what was done here.I was reading about Taunton last night and came across a picture of the old city hall.
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Which was replaced with this
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I had never seen what was there before, what a loss! Another piece of history lost to urban renewal. The amount of great historical buildings lost to time in the US is mindblowing. The old north station also comes to mind. Imagine if we had not bulldozed half of our great buildings in the 50-70s what the country would be like today. I think like Germany we should really consider rebuilding some of these lost treasures. Rebuilding is ok in my eyes vs trying to create something from scratch with an artificial historical facade. Its truely sad how many great buildings were lost to time and many forgotten.