Urban Renewal and Lost Buildings at Main and 3rd

Recently I wrote about the lost East Second Street historic district (today the Premier Health Tower).

For today’s post we’ll shift south one block to see how the entire east side of Main and the north side of Third have also been lost to demolition over the years, not at the scale of the biggest urban renewal projects like Center City West, Midtown Mart, or even Courthouse Square, but causing a similar effect when repeated on multiple connecting blocks over time.

On the corner in the foreground in the image below is the Callahan Bank Building, after its remodeling in 1920 which added several floors onto the original portion. (This is the building where Paul Laurence Dunbar worked as an elevator operator.)

You can also see the Cooper/Eaker building anchoring the lost 2nd Street district in the distance. And behind that you can also see the tower of Steele High School.

The tallest other building visible farther up Main is not 34 N Main / Paru Tower, which would be built later, but rather the Mutual Home Building which stood at the SE corner of Main and Second and is now occupied by the Stratacache Tower’s annex building.

In between there are a number of interesting small to medium-sized mixed use buildings with a variety of small businesses on the ground floor.

Here’s an angle that better shows the Third Street side. The building with the Beckel Hotel signage was at the corner of Third and Jefferson, and beyond that we can make out the Huffman Block Building and the rest of the Fire Blocks.

Below is an even earlier image of the same block of Third Street from Main to Jefferson. You can see the same Beckel Hotel to the right, but several of the other buildings here were later replaced (the Callahan Building site is at the far left).

This type of incremental substitution has always been a staple of any urban environment, but it’s a far cry from the wholesale destruction of the second half of the 20th century, and modern building replacements often have barely any interface with the street and are frequently surrounded by parking lots.

Here, the present corner building is interesting in its own right and was actually built by a world-famous architect (I. M. Pei) but the blocks will always struggle to foster a vibrant street-level experience compared to what they once were.

A surface lot occupies all the space in between the building and the Fire Blocks. Main does have more of a street wall, but nothing to attract or interest passersby at the first floor level. (A renovation of 34 N Main would do wonders.)

The story repeats itself on many other downtown blocks, and the cumulative effect of this type of transformation is massive, negatively affecting walkability, safety, and economic development. The hollowing out of these blocks was a major theme in my article about downtown’s retail decline.