We've written a few times over the years about the awful, vacant cr-apartment building at 93rd Avenue and Woodstock Boulevard in southeast Portland. For a while, the whole structure was wrapped in plastic, thus attracting the nickname "the Christo building." A reader provided a depressing update yesterday:
I had high hopes when they took the wraps off the Christo building last summer that they were actually going to do something to make it viable. It appears it is still rotting away. They unwrapped it, but as you can see in one of the photos I took today, they duct-taped the door with wrap, and the back remains a junk/staging yard and wrapped. Maybe this construction season, they can at least do more than unwrap the joke gift.
Comments (3)
In other words, you have at least two parties fighting over who is going to have to be responsible for finishing the job and cleaning up the mess, and they're both hoping the city will step in and do it for free. I wish I could say that I've never seen this happen, but that's a Dallas MO if I've ever seen one. (And look at the bright side: with you guys getting as much rain as you do, this will rot out and decompose long before some of our boondoggles do. I can point to a big high-rise just north of downtown that stayed empty for thirty years, steadily rotting, until the city stepped in and turned it into an assisted living center. Naturally, the original owners of the property were fully compensated for their wait, because the only time eminent domain is used in this town is when a herd of rich jerks want something belonging to an individual without enough funds for lawyers.)
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Comments (3)
In other words, you have at least two parties fighting over who is going to have to be responsible for finishing the job and cleaning up the mess, and they're both hoping the city will step in and do it for free. I wish I could say that I've never seen this happen, but that's a Dallas MO if I've ever seen one. (And look at the bright side: with you guys getting as much rain as you do, this will rot out and decompose long before some of our boondoggles do. I can point to a big high-rise just north of downtown that stayed empty for thirty years, steadily rotting, until the city stepped in and turned it into an assisted living center. Naturally, the original owners of the property were fully compensated for their wait, because the only time eminent domain is used in this town is when a herd of rich jerks want something belonging to an individual without enough funds for lawyers.)
Posted by Texas Triffid Ranch | March 4, 2013 8:12 AM
The property taxes sure are low.
The whole thing is assessed at only 497K according to portlandmaps.com.
Funny that in 2007 it was assessed for 817K.
Posted by Clackamas News | March 4, 2013 9:08 AM
Maybe we should rename it the "Crisco Building" because, well you know...
Posted by Tim | March 4, 2013 9:30 AM