A Møøse once bit my sister…

So far this week we had my post Waffle, Iron, and its follow-up In Defense of Being Dumb, inspired by a question from a friend about the first post. Today we have a post inspired by a question from a friend, Vince Lepre, about the second post.

(For those not familiar with the title above, it’s from the opening credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a Swedish translator goes rogue. The credits include the line “Those responsible for sacking
the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.”)

Vince’s question focused on my statement that old buildings may not have been built to the standards we use today but were well built. He asked if maybe the historic structures we see today are those that survived because they were well-built and the badly-built ones are not around to show off how terrible they were.

There is certainly some truth to that. Very badly built buildings tend to go away, through fire, collapse, or simply demolition by owners tired of paying for more and more maintenance. But the picture is more complicated than that. A lot of historic commercial buildings in New York’s financial district and Chicago’s Loop were demolished when less than 60 years old for no reason other than to be replaced with something bigger and newer. They were often not even functionally obsolete. On the other end of the spectrum, thousands of Old Law tenements from before 1901 have survived in New York despite being terribly-designed, terribly-built structures that were not meant to last more than 25 or 30 years. They’ve been upgraded, to some degree, and still serve a purpose, so they are still here.

My feeling, without any kind of statistics to back it up, is that badly-built buildings are more likely to be demolished before they’re around long enough to be considered historic than well-built ones, but that is only one of several unrelated factors. Finally, I can say from my practice, and I’d guess Vince can say from his, that some of the old buildings I see are well built and some less so. I don’t know that the percentages of each category are so very different than the percentages for new buildings.