Urbanism with blinders on.

When an instructor for a real estate and development class told his students, “You can’t own a view,” he said it with the nonchalance that suggested it should become a mantra.  What he was implying was that neither the developer nor the prospective property owner should stake all of an investment on the quality of a view.  No legal recourse exists to enjoin a landowner from building in a fashion that inhibits or weakens another individual’s perspective from the window or front door, regardless of how much that waterfront, mountain range or skyline gratifies the eyes.  Lines of sight are nebulous enough that private ownership of them is difficult to protect or enforce: if everyone was entitled to his or her view, nothing could ever get built.  Any collective attempt to protect a view loses its punch, because the magnificence or importance of the objects beheld is highly subjective.  Thus, the retention of the prized object itself will usually earn more legal credence than access to the “viewshed”, a contemporary buzzword appearing in Wikipedia (but not most dictionaries).  While it is possible that Landowner A could seek an injunction against Landowner B’s development permit under environmental, historic preservation, or public health considerations, in most circumstances, view deprivation does not evoke a judge’s sympathy.

Nonetheless, the private market continues to demonstrate how greatly people value a fantastic view in aggregate, regardless of the likelihood that something else in the future will impede it.  Waterfront high-rise residential buildings still command high prices, not only because of the proximity of the building’s front door to the water, but also because of the terrific views at the pricier higher levels.  The fenestration of many high-rise buildings exclusively orients itself toward the side with the great views, since windows on the other side are not worth a fraction.  Conversely, the market also tends to shun properties with particularly poor or unappealing views.  The price that consumers attach toward great views makes this fairly recent multifamily development in downtown Indianapolis, known as the Maxwell, that much more of an oddity.

The developer Kosene & Kosene completed this structure a few years ago, with the intention that it would function as condominiums, but it entered the market at the bursting point of the real estate bubble, when downtown condos sat empty and unsold.  Thus, the developers repositioned the building as luxury apartments, and the smaller units (studios and one-bedrooms) sold quite briskly.  The numerous chic Art Deco references probably aligned with young professionals’ tastes, and the location just south of the heart of the Lockerbie Square neighborhood was ideal.  In short, the Maxwell could command high prices as rentals.  And, as Indianapolis midrises go, it’s big, at 105 units occupying one quarter of a city block: with the exception of an interior courtyard, it covers nearly the entirety of its parcel, indicated through this side view:

The above photo also reveals that the designers devoted the entire frontage along Ohio Street to retail and saved the back for slyly concealed resident parking spaces.  Such a move placates urban advocates who have criticized other midrise developments in Indy for neglecting retail altogether; the Regional CenterDesign Guidelines of Indianapolis also stress the need for first-floor retail in residential developments.  However, the absorption of this retail space so far has been problematic.  As this December 2011 photo below indicates, most of it remains vacant, almost three years after completion:

Only the easternmost corner has a tenant—a total of about 25% of the Maxwell’s retail GLA.

To its credit, the Maxwell has successfully secured a highly successful temporary tenant for that large space in the past: the Indy Winter Farmers Market.  But it has never found a permanent occupant.  Why is the retail here so hard to lease, when it has a reasonably high-density concentration of well-heeled residents right above it?  Well, the building doesn’t sit at a prominent intersection: the north-south street at the corner, Park Avenue, is never more than a local road, with very low traffic volume.  This building sits right at the southern edge of a neighborhood, with an as-of-yet largely undeveloped ocean of parking directly south of Market Street, which weakens its opportunities for pedestrian activity.  Very few other buildings in this portion of Ohio Street support retail, so the Maxwell is largely alone in that regard.  But the biggest Achilles heel is what sits directly across the street from this upmarket residential building:

An electrical substation—not most people’s idea of the Eiffel Tower, the Chrysler Building, Lake Tahoe, or even the Hollywood(land) sign.  Such goliaths are commonplace in downtowns, since they provide a centralized source for the “stepping down” of voltage from the original (coal) power plants to a more suitable level that serves neighboring communities.  My estimate is that the average buyer would think this is ugly.  Who would want to view this from a front window?  Accompanying its ungainly appearance is the toxic perception—whether real or imagined—that they are noisy or potentially dangerous.  Given these considerations, what prospective business owner would choose this as a location for a restaurant or boutique when so many better alternatives exist?  While it’s hard to tell from the photographs, the one tenant (Civil Engineering Consultants, still there at the time of this blog post) has Venetian blinds which it often keeps partially drawn.  Despite the positive buzz the Maxwell generated when it was completed, I have my doubts that even during the best of economic times it would have worked as a condominium, thanks in large part to that view.  Renters are going to be less particular, but clearly an owner will just see this as one facet of the overall investment, and not a positive one.

Whether unconscious or not, it would seem that the folks at Kosene & Kosene who built the Maxwell took the aforementioned maxim “you can’t own a view” and inverted it to their advantage.  The location, just outside of the edge of one of the city’s elite urban neighborhoods, endowed it with an apparent strong potential to market as luxury or at least high-end housing.  But the appearance of the electrical substation across the street deflated the assessed value of the property and no doubt helps to explain why no other developer had stepped up to the plate in area that had been experiencing a multifamily housing boom for years.   Maybe the biggest element of risk was the attempt to build condos here; like most urban condominium projects, the developers have usually conceived of the viability of their structures as apartments as well—part of a safeguard against a soft ownership market.  And the Maxwell could continue to enjoy viability as a high-end apartment complex for years to come.  But my guess is that if it someone hoped to make it into a condominium complex, he or she would have to do something about that substation.

Three options come to mind.  The first, though widely implemented in Europe, is relatively rare in the US: to bury the substation.  Anaheim (California) Public Utilities received a fair amount of attention when it recently built a new substation under the 2.5-acre Roosevelt Park, with maintenance access points built inconspicuously into a hillside.  The inception of this new substation was a response to steady population growth—a contrast from the already existing one across the street from the Maxwell in Indianapolis.  Burying a pre-existing substation would amount to a huge expense for merely aesthetic goals, and since there is no financial incentive for Indianapolis Power and Light Company (better known as IPALCO, lesser known as a subsidiary of Virginia-based AES Corporation) to do so, the most likely resolution would be funding through a city subsidy.  Since a subsidy to improve aesthetics of a small, obscure substation is likely to prove hugely politically unpopular, this solution is probably already dead in the water.

The second of the three options would be to conceal it through a sheath, as has been attempted many times, with mixed success.  All too often, the resultant structure is an imposing, windowless titan of brick or concrete, surrounded by a chain-link fence—an marginal improvement over the exposed utility that is so architecturally uninspiring that online searches offer few examples (this one in Chicago is an exception).  But it doesn’t have to be this way: European cities have long sheathed their substations within chic façades, and, according to a 2008 New York Times article, Consolidated Edison found a way to hide a recent South Bronx substation within a multi-story sheath with “windows”, which proved so effective that passers-by asked when the condos would start going up for sale.  Cheaper than burying an existing substation, building a sheath would seem to be the best option if the owners of the Maxwell ever hope for a viable conversion of their apartment building back to condominiums at some point in the future.

The third and final option is a flight of fancy, but I have to mention it because it echoes an endeavor I proposed in this blog a few years ago, in order to mitigate the relentless prominence of utility cables across older New Orleans neighborhoods.  The following 2009 NewYork Times article references how electric substations “lack the perverse elegance of utility poles or transmission towers”, in order to bolster an argument for following Anaheim’s example by burying one under a city park.  Perverse elegance was exactly what I had in mind when I thought that New Orleanians should turn their tangle of poles and electric wires into a pop culture meme, much the way they already had with water meter manhole covers.  And trendy loft apartments have found beauty in exposed ventilation ducts for at least a decade or two.  Who’s to say substations are objectively ugly?  Surely a gifted spin-artist could turn the spiny monster across from the Maxwell into a suavely strummed chord from a twelve-string guitar, or an irregularly metered stanza from an urban poem.  Since it’s probably a bit dangerous to host a café, art installation, or a miniature skate park within the chain link fence (or even along the sidewalk adjacent to it), one can at least probe the substation’s intrinsically curious qualities, like the one in the photos below:

 

What’s going on with those railroad tracks that terminate abruptly at the chain link fence?  Do they serve a purpose, or did they have a function in the past?  Could they have linked to an old interurban line?  If this parcel of land offered even a trace of a sordid history, it could re-integrate itself to the public consciousness in a chic fashion that just might even allow it to transcend its perceived assault on the senses.  Obviously this option is a stretch, but it would undoubtedly prove cheaper than blotting it from the landscape, and it would earn a greater integrity because of the creative verve that generated it.  (Whether it would last a full decade as “hipster infrastructure” is another concern altogether.)

The act of brainstorming these potential solutions for the Maxwell Apartments in Indianapolis only serves to weaken the “you can’t own a view” assertion—even if it’s true from a legal standpoint, the psychological ownership of views are immutable.  Quite simply, people will think they own a right to this view if they own property that forces them to look at it.  They will manifest their sense of ownership in either planning and development hearings, or simply through deflated prices and reduced market demand.  Only steady persuasion of the reality of the real estate market stands any chance of convincing them otherwise.  In this downtown Indianapolis neighborhood, a small parking lot that sits immediately to the west of the Maxwell no doubt also suffers a reduced demand for residential development because of the utility substation across the street.  But perhaps, in the future, a potential developer of this parking lot could team with the owners of the Maxwell and IPALCO to build a safe, aesthetically pleasing sheath around the substation.  Any initial costs incurred would be recouped in improved property residential values due to the superior view, and IPALCO may enjoy reduced maintenance costs, since the substation would no longer be directly exposed to the elements.  The only other alternative is for them to higher a PR guru far more gifted than the writer of this blog.

Tilling the dirt.

I recently arrived back in the States and am working on a new blog post, which I hope to submit in just a few days.

In other words, American Dirt is back up and running.  I look forward to continuing the dialogue on landscapes across the country.  Thank you for your patience.

Hiatus continues...not an abandonment.

I regret that it has now been over three months since I have been able to post to this site, but my computer, without a doubt, threw in the towel at the end of last year, and the dusty environment of Afghanistan is no place to buy a new one. I have finally left Afghanistan at the beginning of March and will be through late May.

American Dirt is not forgotten and will re-emerge when I return. Thanks for your patience and your subscriptions; I look forward to writing, photographing, and responding to comments again when I return.

Technically a hiatus.

Happy New Year's wishes to all, though this blog ends the year on a bit of a sour note. My computer revived while in the States, but, now that I'm back in Afghanistan, it seems to have failed again--while another December blog post was in the process (among the only files that was not backed up). All my photos are also stored there, and while most are backed up as well, it is very difficult (and a bit risky) to manage external hard drives while working on shared computers over here.

Until I figure out what is wrong with this computer, or purchase a new one, I'm going to have to do the unthinkable and put this blog on hiatus. This could be only a matter of a few weeks, though it may also be a few months, since it's possible I'll be in Afghanistan that long and I don't want to bring a brand new computer into these living conditions. All is well otherwise, I wish you the best start to your 2012, and please stay tuned.

DUST: Bringing the basic training obstacle course inside the wire.

The integration of pedestrian infrastructure into the expeditionary base environment in Afghanistan has proven far less contentious than one might expect. A culture that prioritizes short-term efficiency over long-term functionality (at least partially evidenced by my article on building code violations from nearly a year ago) would seemingly scrutinize exclusively on infrastructure that accommodates gargantuan armored vehicles that need to get around with as few obstructions as possible in order to complete their respective missions. But the fact remains that only a small fraction of the people use MRAPs, Humvees or the all-too-rare tanks to get around. A slightly larger fraction use Toyota trucks, but because most people enter and leave a base through from the air, the number of vehicles on base isn’t nearly great enough to accommodate everyone. Most people get around by foot.

While the infrastructure might not be as conducive to pedestrians or bicyclists as your average neighborhood in Portland, it’s not as bad as many bases on back on American home turf, which are consistently spread out across huge tracts of land, with huge standoff distances between buildings intended as a protective measure in case of a vehicular explosive attack. Afghan bases are typically densely settled, or, at the very least, most planners recognize the efficiency of clustering residential tents and ensconcing them within ample protective barriers. And while grade separated sidewalks are not too common— particularly at the smaller bases that usually have the shortest life span—the regulatory and operational culture recognizes pedestrians. Speed limits for vehicles are incredibly low, often only 20 kph (12 mph), with fines for violators. Many units require their personnel to wear reflector belts at all hours, just to keep them prepared if the sun sets when they are out. (Most bases are fairly dark, and some are completely blacked out for safety, so pedestrian visibility is critical.) American soldiers must wear helmets if they ride bicycles. The larger bases often devote their sprawling outskirts to storage and industry, so they must employ a shuttle system with various mapped stops for ease of getting across those vast distances. And some of the largest bases, such as Bagram Air Field, close off primary arterials at certain early hours in the morning to all vehicles to devote the road for running and PT (physical training). In a multinational base, the American penchant for order and enforcement promotes a higher standard for pedestrian safety for its soldiers than is evidenced by the more relaxed coalition forces of other countries: coalition forces do not live under a mandate for reflector belts, nor does it seem that speed limits apply (at least for the Germans). This dichotomy between US and Europeans proves ironic, since the Germans, Swedes, Croats, and Latvians are more likely to come from a pedestrian friendly, densely populated settlement pattern back home than the Americans, yet the American rules are superior at promoting safety for the numerous troops and civilians depending on boots and bikes.

In contrast with the regulatory environment, the road design in expeditionary bases isn’t always great: sidewalks are inconsistent, rights of way are narrow, turn radii don’t accommodate the really long vehicles, drainage (if it exists at all) usually consists of wide-open ditches along the verge. But pedestrians and vehicles coexist reasonably well, thanks to those vehicular speed restrictions and a culture of awareness among drivers and walkers, particularly visible among the Americans in the multinational-base in which I reside. I have yet to hear of an accident, which is always a good thing, but particularly so on a military base, because a collision between a person and an armored vehicle would almost certainly result in death. However, force protection requirements sometimes trump other safety considerations, so that the design of a compound simply accounts for defensive barriers in the event of an external attack, rather than thinking about pedestrian safety and explosive defenses as a comprehensive protection strategy. As a result, it is not so hard to find situations such as the one below:

The wall on the left consists of what the military simply calls “HESCO”, much to the advantage of the UK-based HESCO Bastion company that manufactures them. HESCO enjoys a virtual monopoly on this distinctive fortification, known generically as a gabion (its brand name is a Concertainer), which essentially consists of tall (approximately 8 feet) durable paper bags enclosed in a thick wire mesh and filled with a combination of soil and a concrete topping, intended to absorb much of the impact of high speed missiles or mortars without eliciting dangerous projectiles if the bags themselves explode. The helices of concertina wire that coil on the top help keep out intruders.

Anyone who has read more than one or two of my blog posts can guess what I’m identifying as the problem in that photo above: there is simply not enough room on the side of the road for people to walk safely. The scaling of the objects does not quite capture the problem, but this footprint in the dirt does a better job of it:

It’s narrow. During the day, this proves a minor annoyance which a person can at least in part avoid by walking on the other side of the street. The real threat is after dark, when neither side of the road is terribly appealing, since the darkness would obscure the obvious tripping hazard found in the open drainage ditch, only a few portions of which are covered and protected.

And the typical base in Afghanistan is shrouded in absolute darkness with few isolated exceptions—a particularly salient problem during the long winter nights. I’ll admit that I tend to sound the warning bell in situations like this far sooner than the average person would. So this design deserves a special mention because multiple colleagues have also pointed out the safety hazard this poses. Why did the original squadron build the HESCO wall so close to the street? No compound is so crowded that the construction team couldn’t afford to shift the barriers at least a few feet inward to make room for walkers, or a drainage ditch for that matter. Turning the corner at the next intersection and pivoting to the left, one can see that on the next perpendicular street, the gabion of HESCOs offer plenty of room for both pedestrians and a drainage ditch.

The photo merely depicts a different wall to the same compound, this time with ample room for drainage and pedestrians. This road segment, far closer to achieving a US model of a Complete Street, also features intermittent wooden bridges across the drainage ditches, prominently visible in the photo above on the opposite side of the street. At night, these bridges feature blinking LEDs that both manifest the bridges to pedestrians as well as identify the edge of the road to passing vehicles, so the drivers avoid hitting and destroying the wooden bridges or slipping into the adjacent drainage ditches.

A bit further down the road, one can witness a rare installation underway: sidewalks.

Until this newly laid segment, sidewalks were unheard of in the American portion of the base. Most of the smaller bases with populations under 10,000 (which is practically all of them) have no sidewalks whatsoever. Sidewalks are intermittent in the German portion of the base, as visible in the photo below:

But they aren’t everywhere in the German portion. About 500 feet down the same road, the configuration of the Relocatable Buildings (RLBs) is identical, but the street lacks sidewalks, bollards, or drainage ditches.

The Germans can be just as cavalier about accommodating pedestrians as the Americans have been. I scrutinized the German street design in greater detail in this earlier blog post).

The contrasting appearance between the various road segments identified in these photographs delineates a dichotomous approach to expeditionary base construction: permanent versus temporary. As the photos above indicate, German billeting is overwhelmingly permanent: the modular buildings sit in lengthy rows of two, unified by a central hallway, like a conventional double-loaded corridor hotel building. Some of the central offices and meeting spaces even use brick and mortar construction. By most regards, these buildings function at a higher standard of quality and durability, predicating upon the assumption that, since the German military purchased the land, it will maintain a presence at this base for the foreseeable future. Hungarians and Croats also appear to prefer the permanence of relocatable buildings. Conversely, at this same base, Americans use tents:

So do the Norwegians.

As do the Swedes, Finns, Latvians, Armenians, and Dutch. While I can’t vouch for the other Coalition Forces, I knew that the American mentality is that everything they construct should be capable of disassembly in 48 hours if necessary, leaving as little of a permanent footprint as possible.

I wouldn’t begin to assert that one approach is better than another—I’m not sufficiently informed on the long-term plans of Germans, Croats, Swedes, or even Americans for that matter. Permanent and temporary construction practices both have their merits. The average German base will, based on its construction materials, transition much more conveniently to eventual use by the Afghan National Army. The American bases won’t transition so easily, but if the priority is to get out and return to the land to the Afghans in a more fallow state, then clearly the non-permanent approach is wiser. My only concern comes in all the impervious surfaces used throughout the base—a topic which effectively concludes this rumination on pedestrian infrastructure.

It seems like a smart decision for the Americans to build a sidewalk along a stretch of road that hosts the American PX (Post Exchange, the closest thing to a big box store), a coffee shop, a Pizza Hut, a future Burger King, and, on the other side of the road, a USO Tent, post office, gym, finance office, chapel, and computer lab. It is undeniably the road segment in the American quarter with the highest amount of pedestrian traffic. But a concrete sidewalk is permanent. So are the drainage culverts, the basketball courts, and the foundations to all those tents. In short, the vertical element is what constitutes “temporary” in American expeditionary base construction: when we leave Afghanistan, it will look empty when standing on the ground staring at the horizon line, but peering downward from a helicopter will reveal a patchwork of pavement. How likely is it that the Americans, Swedes, Norwegians, et cetera will actually remove or destroy all that concrete—or, for that matter, the far vaster ocean of gravel that occupies most other unpaved, habitable portions of the base? Then again, even concrete pads and paved streets can prove a significant investment that would allow Afghans more freedom to build upward from an existing configuration. Concrete pads for temporary FEMA trailers in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina helped pave the way for the possibility of more permanent mobile home parks after the immediate need had subsided. Paved roads, drainage ditches, and sidewalks are amenities that much of Afghanistan does not enjoy, so although paved infrastructure forces future inhabitants into a certain configuration, it does provide provincial governments with infrastructure that they otherwise cannot always afford. A middle-of-the-road approach—combining permanent infrastructure with semi- or non-permanent structures—may prove the wisest compromise. Though I doubt that engineers at my compound will ever correct the mistake of building the HESCO gabion too close to the road and squeezing out the pedestrians, at least the potentiality for a correction remains in ways that wouldn’t if a permanent brick wall ran along the road instead of soil-filled bags. Like all other aspects of expeditionary base living, pedestrianism is malleable—precisely as it should be when tomorrow’s exigencies could require an immediate change in the urban form.

Technical tangles.

This month has been a little arid in terms of posts, and some of it is due to workload, but a lot is just due to poorly functioning IT over here. Due most likely to an unusually cold, rainy and snowy November, we have had very inconsistent Internet access--usually less than half of a day. That has hindered my flexibility in getting the blog completed at a reasonable clip.


In addition, the battery to my personal computer just went dead, leaving me without any option for uploading some of my most recent photos. I will get this situation fixed so that I might be a bit more productive next month. And, since I will soon be ending this contract in Afghanistan, my blog will hopefully soon include some very recent photos and hopefully my postings to this blog will occur a little more frequently. As always, thanks so much for reading.

MONTAGE: Washing and cleansing every stain from the sin of neglect.

This montage blog post pioneers an unusual organizational approach: the time elapse. During a six-month period in which I was living in the city of Baton Rouge, a particular edifice caught my attention: a stalled high-rise with its load-bearing walls fully complete but little else. All evidence suggested that its owners had abandoned it quite some time ago: graffiti slathered upon the lower levels, overgrown weeds, a makeshift chain-link fence installed to deter trespassers (unsuccessfully). Sadly, these sorts of structures are all too common in American downtowns after the housing bust that began around 2008: even some of the most successful ones have some weathered relic from an era of high demand for vertically oriented condominiums that has since retreated almost completely, along with the rest of the owner-occupied market. Fortunately, many of them have since gotten converted to apartments—a downgrade by most assessments, but better than sitting vacant for years. The building that caught my attention in Baton Rouge wasn't so lucky:

It could be anywhere—except that it looked like it had been abandoned far more than three years ago. And Baton Rouge’s downtown hadn't been enjoying a huge housing boom up until the bubble burst. Perhaps most importantly, this relic doesn't even sit downtown. It would have made sense if the developer put the kibosh on construction when he or she realized the real estate wasn’t as lucrative as initially expected, perhaps due to a surrounding area that was turning increasingly low-income. But that wasn’t the case here. This faceless golem stands in one of the most sought-after parts of Baton Rouge metro, just down the street from the Mall of Louisiana, the state’s largest and probably most successful megamall. It’s not far from the Highland Road corridor, where Baton Rouge’s stateliest homes preside over large lots. And, just a mile further south sits Perkins Rowe, a high-end lifestyle center with multi-family housing on the upper levels, an ambitious project that would probably have lower vacancy levels if it hadn’t opened at the peak of a recession. Either way, this building clearly struck me as an oddity. Why was it abandoned?

The answer: it was a casualty of one of the biggest televangelist scandals in history.

The 206,000 square foot building was intended as a dormitory for students attending the Jimmy Swaggart World Ministry Center. Reverend Jimmy Swaggart fell from grace after being caught at a motel outside of New Orleans with a prostitute in February of 1988; his widely publicized contretemps may not have toppled his empire, but it certainly stalled the growth of his once-burgeoning bible college. His very public, televised apology (without acknowledging what he had done) remains legendary; YouTube claims over 150,000 views. After the Swaggart sex scandal gained momentum, enrollment at what was then the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College plunged, and construction stopped at the dorm by 1989. Apparently many other plans for Swaggart’s campus stalled in the late 1980s, and a second time caught with his pants down in 1991 only further thwarted any chance for renewing construction as a dorm. However, this building most likely advanced much further in construction than anything else stalled by Swaggart Ministries after his 1989 scandal, and this first set of photos, from May of 2010, shows it at its bleakest. (While the rest of the campus appears fully operative twenty years later, it would appear from the above photo that many of the palm trees aren’t getting the care they need to fend off disease.)

For nearly two decades, a concrete shell sat there in lugubrious decay, even as the area around it boomed, culminating in the construction of the Mall of Louisiana in 1997. Finally, the abandoned shell caught the interest of a developer, who in 2007 hoped to begin rehabilitation of the structure to convert into a high-end hotel, but the real estate and financial market’s slump prolonged the delay. A somewhat recent Associated Press article that the developer ultimately scaled the project down from an initial $75 million proposal to a more modest $42.5 million: a 256-room hotel with conference rooms and a ballroom. Interestingly, the Louisiana Legislature applied Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to expedite the project, which uses the estimated future sales tax revenue to help finance a project that might otherwise lack either the equity it needs or is unable to secure an adequate loan. While this tactic is common throughout the US, governments normally apply it in economically disadvantaged areas—not directly across the street from a metro’s most successful shopping hub. The City of Baton Rouge also granted tax credits under the state’s restoration tax abatement program.

Though it lacks the materials, plumbing, wiring or mechanical engineering that would be most vulnerable to inclement weather or thieves, the cement skeleton still shows considerable wear and staining from elements.

Ten-foot tall chain-linked fences and threatening signs aren’t enough to deter the graffiti artists.

And many of the vandals made their way up to the top floor.

A return visit to the site a little over two months later (near the end of July 2010) revealed a surprising level of further deterioration and graffiti.

My one college course in materials science doesn’t provide me much illumination on why the concrete on the upper levels seems to be in much worse shape than closer to the ground, but it is obvious that these higher floors are deteriorating considerably. Could that have really happened so quickly since May?

It looks systematic, as though it involved a human hand, dismantling the top floors and working the way down. An orange outer fence on the front side (facing the principal arterial, Bluebonnet Boulevard) appears to have been installed much more recently and suggests the sort of deterrent used for construction projects.

At this point, without having read anything about plans for the site, I had drawn the conclusion that the building was getting demolished, an assumption substantiated by the presence of backhoes and other earth moving equipment.

And, at that point, my chronicle of this building seemed likely to come to its end; shortly thereafter I was reassigned another city. Thankfully, my ever-loyal blog-follower and South Louisiana native, Nici English, remained close to the Red Stick and was able to follow it over the ensuing months. With a sharper pair of eyes and an undoubtedly better camera, her professional approach picked up where I left off. (And I cannot help but offer a shameless promotion, since she more than deserves it: her personal site, Oak Tree Photography offers breathtaking black-and-whites of the built environment across a number of southern cities.)

The developer had clearly taken real initiative over the winter: by late February of 2011, the “Swaggart dorm”, as we call it, was taking on a new life, with the installation of what appears to be insulation.

Note that the developer has apparently deemed it unnecessary to remove the graffiti on the concrete at the ground level of the building.

A few weeks later, a sign offer promise of what is to come:

By late August, clad with what I strongly suspect is EIFS, the Renaissance Hotel is starting to establish its identity.

And, in mid October, the building opens to the public.

It appears that some of what I saw as deterioration on that top level was actually an alteration of the fenestration: hotel rooms generally emphasize larger windows than dorms. I’m not going to pick apart the architecture any more than to acknowledge that the huge “Renaissance” sign atop the roof manages to compensate for its dull typography by suggesting to me a throwback to the 1950s—a time when rooftop signs for hotels were commonplace, even though at that time the majority of Baton Rouge’s hotels would have likely been downtown and not off a major highway in suburbia (especially not on Bluebonnet Boulevard, which was nothing but countryside sixty years ago).

It was almost twenty-five years in the making, but now this plot of land has a structure worthy of its market value. In a less sour economy, this suburban arterial would probably see many more construction projects capitalizing on every developable square foot. As it is, the redevelopment of the Swaggart dorm represents an ostensible public-private partnership effort at revitalization, the heart of which remains a mystery. Did the area really have to depend on a TIF and tax credits to turn the blighted Swaggart dorm around? Perhaps I overstate the area’s desirability: if it were that lucrative, something would have been erected a long time ago. But the truth of the matter, I suspect, is that the area really is desirable, but a stalled mid-rise project throws a wrench into any other efforts. The cost of demolition before a developer can build may offset the area’s intrinsic market advantages. As mundane as this project may seem, it may have taken a shrewd developer with an eye for the building’s “physiognomy”—coupled with a city/state government willing to go to bat—in order to get anything off the ground. And at least the Renaissance Hotel seems to be taking care of its trees; something that will hopefully inspire Swaggart Ministries to do the same for its remaining share of the campus on this stretch of Bluebonnet Boulevard.