Monday, July 12, 2010

The Simon Building


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A few soft-focusy photos of the Simon Building, on NW 3rd near Couch St. in Portland's Old Town. As you can see, only the building's brick facade survives. Seems that the rest of the building burned in a fire some decades ago. So they left the facade standing and put a surface parking lot behind it, rather than tearing out the facade and just going with the parking lot. In that era, this was apparently considered a rather daring act of historic preservation.

Simon Building

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

  • More photos in this post at kodakula.
  • A passing mention in a longer post about historic preservation at Cafe Unknown.
  • A Portland Preservation post about the adjoining Sinnott House. One commenter briefly mentions that plans exist to put up a new (and controversially tall) building on the spot, perhaps incorporating the existing facade. That would be an interesting development. Whatever they end up doing would have to be less Detroit-like than the current arrangement, which would be a plus. Although this is just a comment to a blog post, so make of it what you will.
Simon Building

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