Real Estate Stories
Real estate fascinates me, especially a building with a history.   The story of how a property evolves over time to either become part of a city, town or neighborhood, or slowly erode is one that interests me.  When I was young, I would spend hours looking through my dad's book, Lost New York, which detailed architecturally beautiful or significant buildings that were torn down in New York City to make way for new buildings.  It is hard to imagine all the mansions that used to line Fifth Avenue that were replaced by today's buildings.

I recently came across two articles on two pieces of real estate with history.  The first is on Atlanta's Equitable Building, one of the city's first office towers.  I have seen this building on numerous trips to Atlanta.  The article does not go much into the building itself, except for its recent financial problems, but it was built in the 1960s and has become a landmark.

The second property is a hotel/motel in Orange County and its demise is detailed in three articles from the Orange County Register.  The articles are here, here and here.  (The slideshows in the first two links are worth viewing.)  In the 1960s and 1970s, the Saddleback Inn was the place to stay in Orange County.  It hosted Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, and the Washington Redskins stayed there before a Super Bowl.  In the 1980s a wave of new hotels across Orange County cut into the Saddleback Inn's business and it slowly began to deteriorate.    It is now closed and is associated with vagrancy, drug abuse and prostitution.  A fire in January gutted a portion of the old hotel and demolition is likely.

You can't compare a kitschy Orange County hotel with the Old Penn Station in New York City, but both properites have a story.  It is sad that the Saddleback Inn is going to get razed, especially now that some retro hotels and motels are getting renovated.  Atlanta's Equitable has the advantage of being a high-rise, and looks to have passed a point where it changed from being an office building to a city icon.