BY the time David Hurlbut bought the Harmony Club, a 20,000-square-foot building on the waterfront here, it had been abandoned for nearly 40 years. Built in 1909 as a social club by a group of prominent Jewish businessmen, it had been turned into an Elks club in the 1930s; when the Elks disbanded in 1960, the building was boarded up. Mr. Hurlbut, 47, first saw it more than a decade ago, when he was working as an industrial designer in Atlanta, where he was born and raised. He found it through historicproperties.com, a Web site he compares to an addictive drug. (It’s like “my crack,” he said.) The building’s sole inhabitants were a flock of pigeons that left behind what he estimates to be about 140 cubic yards of guano. There was no plumbing, and the electrical wiring was “in shambles,” he said. Still, he knew he’d found his home. “I thought it would be a perfect clubhouse for me,” he said. “It’s probably a guy thing.”
Preservation is worth it. Its green too.
Posted via email from Stuff important and amusing to Rob OBrien
No comments:
Post a Comment