Monday, September 9, 2013

The Look of Lorain is Changing

Soon this sight will be a thing of the past
On Sunday, I took a break between mowing my front and back yards to grab a few shots around Lorain, "drive-by" style (meaning I was too lazy to get out of the car and just pointed my camera out the car window).

There's plenty going on in Lorain – buildings going up, buildings coming down – that will alter many of the long-familiar city landscapes.

First stop for me was FirstEnergy Corp's power plant at 200 Oberlin Avenue. As reported in the Morning Journal this week (here), the process of dismantling the transformers at the intersection of Oberlin Avenue and E. Erie has begun.

Soon the sight above will be a thing of the past, along with the huge power plant building that was torn down. (Somewhere, Reddy Kilowatt is not smiling.)

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Looking east from Leavitt at the construction site of the new Family Dollar store
That's W. 21st Street (Route 611) on the left.
Next I drove over to the construction site (above) of the new Family Dollar at 2325 W. 21st Street. It's at the intersection of W. 21st and Leavitt Road (southeast corner), where the former gas station that housed a fish cleaning business used to be.

One of the properties acquired for the construction of the store was that of the old Dick's Drive-in (which I wrote about here.)

The only drawback of the new Family Dollar is that it replaces the old one – located in the old Westgate Shopping Center nearby.

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Lastly, I swung by Masson School to see how the demolition was progressing (funny how the Morning Journal hasn't even mentioned it yet). The building has been in the process of being gutted for weeks.

So far, just a small part of the former junior high portion has been demolished (below).

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In the Morning Journal on Sept. 3, there was another article about the possibility of the Broadway Building being demolished (which you can read here if you missed it).

It will be interesting to see how they do it, if it does indeed happen. With the building extending down to the river level, what kind of a hole will be left if the building and the underground parking garage are demolished?
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3 comments:

  1. -Alan D HopewellSeptember 9, 2013 at 10:07 AM

    I'm gonna be real here, Dan; I'm kinda glad I'm not there to see the changes coming. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems like what was the "soul" of Lorain is being cut out, like a tumor.

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  2. Dan BradySeptember 9, 2013 at 4:36 PM

    There does seem to be this frantic urgency to tear things down in Lorain lately, whether they're commercial buildings or schools. I realize that there are various groups involved (the city, the school board, etc.), but the idea is the same: tear something down to save money or because it looks bad. The problem is, often the hole that is left looks worse.

    Look at the area where the building that housed Ghoulardi's used to be. It looks like hell there now.

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  3. Mike KozlowskiSeptember 9, 2013 at 5:52 PM

    Just remember how long it took to fill in the southwest corner of the old Loop after they took Heilman's down.

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