31 Days of Five-Minute Writes: Day 20 - Temporary

I hate that we look at so many things as temporary. My city was in the center of an oil boom in the 1920s and 1930s and so many of the buildings in its downtown are in the Art Deco style of architecture. Beautiful on both the outside and inside, these buildings are monuments to an age when even appliances were works of art. Unfortunately, many people find the appeal of these buildings temporary and so many of the treasures in my city were torn down to make way for taller, glass boxes of buildings and for the worst reason imaginable, parking.

I look at old photographs and I can't believe the history that is no longer standing because of the temporary vision of people. There was a building just blocks from my home that used to be the neighborhood grocery store that someone demolished recently to make room for a more modern facility. Their temporary desire for something new destroyed a part of a community's history.

The photo above is the ceiling of the lobby of a building in my downtown. Luckily, there have been some individuals with the foresight to see this building as a permanent fixture in my city and have developed it as mixed use - retail, office, and residential. It is a gem of a place that would not have been left standing if someone had seen its beauty as temporary.

I'm proud of my city for turning these buildings into something new. Of course, their current use may be temporary and they may be reborn as something new in the future but I love that people are seeing the use of buildings as temporary, not the buildings themselves.