david and John,

In the course of my years in Joisey City, and specifically in the section of
it
where I lived (The Land Money Forgot), I observed the beneficent effect of
homeowners not having enough money to ruin their houses with all the modren
amenities; my house had a cast iron parlor stove in it, that I was able to
get a 90 year old coal grate for, and was able to get a kitchen coal stove
from somewhere else.  There were much better houses where the owners had been
too cheap (or backwards) to modernize, and these were real treasures.  In the
case of some of these, the new buyers came in and covered over original
plastered kitchen chimney breasts with bluestone lintels with used brick laid
in nice picturesque arches; a histo presto architect decided his back parlor
needed a kitchen installed in it, and tore out the 1880's plaster and
millwork on one wall to expose the "natural" common brick. My house also had
its' original 1887 wooden front door, which Anal Ralph painstakingly
stripped, refinished, replaced hardware on, etc. After I sold my house, I
found that the 2nd subsequent owner had decided he needed a more secure
entry, and demolished my reconstructed wooden stoop and replaced it with
concrete block, and replaced my original door and Queen Anne transom with the
same shitty flush door with crappy little windows that my less frugal
neighbors had installed in their houses 20 years earlier.  So yes, some
buildings are preserved by neglect, and some are destroyed with the best of
intentions in the process of being saved.  (Can you guess which way my
feelings lean on this?)

On the other hand, leaky rooves (roofs?) and windows, if not addressed, do a
hell of a lot of damage. The Slate Roof Bible Guy has a story about having
been offered a barn's worth of slate if he'd strip it from the barn, before
the barn was demolished (or maybe burned for a fire dept exercise).  Turned
out there were one or two missing slates, strategically located over a post
which let water leak in over the course of 50 years, until the barn was
unsalvageable.  So yes, some buildings destroyed by neglect could have been
saved for a pittance at the right time.

Let us not overromanticise neglect.

Ralph (whose house is being neglected even as we speak)

PS--Whassamatta, Metro NY Pinheads?  Nobody read Sharpshooter's Streetscapes
yesterday?