Condo Hunt
March 31, 2008
Yesterday I went condo hunting with my friend Lee. She came over in the morning with the daily papers and we circled some open houses. The first place we saw was a half-million dollar highrise penthouse with a stunning view of the river valley. But the best thing about it was dozens of scary clown paintings on the walls everywhere you looked! By freakin’ Red Skelton no less!!! I think they were original oil paintings - at least some of them (but I could be wrong). The condo lady had been friends with Skelton (or an acquaintance anyway) and there were autographed photos of him around the place, and pics of the two of them together. I was dying to take pictures of all the art because it was so weird and overwhelming, but I thought it would be an invasion of privacy. It was a nice place (if you could get beyond the clown art) but out of my price range.
This is where I want to live:
Eco-house in Old Strathcona: solar roof panels, geo-thermal heating, triple glazed windows, R28 insulation, a bicycle room(!), etc. etc. And way more styly than anything else we saw this day. Seven 2-storey townhouse units on the bottom floors and eight 1-storey flats on the top two floors. They weren’t having an open house, it’s just someplace we passed by on the way home. It’s still under construction and apparently all the units are sold already. Dammit.
We also managed to squeeze in some thrifting (never too busy to thrift).
Lee with pixies.
What is this stuff called? I thought it was tole, but google convinces me that is wrong.
Oooh, 3-D!
Ellensburg, WA
July 26, 2007
tiki faces in strange places?
Dick and Jane’s Spot:
Home Improvements
July 8, 2007
rocketship
unseasonal Santa
superfluous flying buttresses
Paramount Importance
May 6, 2007
I’m totally bummed by the news that a Calgary developer (Procura Real Estate Services) wants to demolish Edmonton’s Paramount Theatre to build a 40 storey office/condo building. The Paramount opened in 1952 as the flagship of the Famous Players cinema chain in Edmonton. It played all the big blockbuster films until it closed as a movie theatre in 2003, a victim of suburban multiplexes and home video. Since then, it had a brief life as a “multipurpose arts facility” and is currently a church.
The building is a prime example of the Modern style of architecture and embodies mid-century cool in its sleek, sophisticated lines (this article from a real estate newspaper has a nice appreciation of the building). If it’s torn down, Edmonton will lose an important piece of its architectural history and another chunk of its soul! Procura president George Schleussel doesn’t agree, of course. “I did not see any historical importance to what is there,” Schleussel told the Edmonton Journal, “I think the downtown needs modern, good quality retail storefronts.”
I agree that Jasper Avenue needs more storefront action to revive the cold, cold corpse of downtown. I’m always struck by how much street life downtown used to have in old photos. It changed in the 1970s during an oil-fueled economic boom eerily similar to what we’re experiencing today. In a frenzy of con(de)struction, most of the human-scaled buildings were razed to erect highrise towers that have no engagement with life at street level.
I’m dubious that the building proposed will be the saviour of downtown. It’s more likely to be another undistinguished, life-sucking monolith like the IPL tower to the immediate east (left in the picture above), which took out the historic Strand Theatre.
I have many movie-going memories of the Paramount, but I’ll only offer this one: cutting class with some high school buddies to go to the first screening of The Exorcist in 1973. It was pretty heady stuff - the place was packed, we were underage and worried we’d be busted before we could get in, and there was so much buzz about the movie (people barfing, passing out, speaking in tongues) that we feared for our very souls, sanity and life. As it turns out, we didn’t have to worry about demonic possession - the crowd was so giddy and noisy (quieting down only to watch Linda Blair spew pea-soup vomit) that we could barely hear the film.
