That weird abandoned green stucco house with the horrific mid-1970s full on remodel is finally being torn down. This is the house that's one in from the northwest corner of Nevada and Lincoln, across from the Caffe Paradiso. The house on the corner (pinkish red house) still has occupants (judging by a sign in their window, it seems they're renting out a room even). The apartments to the left, and another rooming house to the left of the apartments (not in the picture) are apparently toast. Toast? Yes, quite literally... as the buildings are slated to go, they get given over to the fire department for practicing.
It's a bit unfortunate about that green house, though. It's sat for a while open, and so I've been in it. It has seven bedrooms, each of which gets quite a bit of light. The floors are in good shape, not sagging, and the woodwork hasn't even been painted over. In its abandonment someone knocked part of the ceiling down in the living room, and filled the place with junk, but amazingly enough I saw no evidence of any fires. The walls are solid. Okay, they WERE - they now have axe holes as of this week.
What the house did have was a LOT of money spent on it circa 1976 or so. Yes indeed, someone blew some big buckage and remodelled every room, leading to such wonderful details as the bathroom shared between two bedrooms on the second floor having those faux-marbled mirror tiles on one wall, complete with the big dressing room style fat light bulbs around it, and pale blue wallpaper with a fuzzy (yes, fuzzy!) dark brown octagonal wicker pattern on it on the opposite wall. The carpet in there was of course dark orange deep pile shag. In the hall, meanwhile, the carpet was some orange and goldenrod fever induced pattern which extended into the guest toilet. Killing someone on the stairs might go unnoticed given that the wallpaper in there is shiny (yes, shiny!) orange with dark red splotches all over it. In the kitchen the paint from the ceiling hung down in strips but the ceiling itself was structurally fine.
So yeah, you'd need to take all the wallpaper out, rip up the carpet, and refinish the floor underneath, but the place was solid. Thing is, the U of I has eminent domain over the land it sits on, so no one was gonna buy it. They apparently think they want to start some sort of retail on the land, we'll see if that ever happens. Meanwhile they're tearing down yet another old nice apartment house on Oregon and leaving up what might be the ugliest apartment houses I've ever seen only a block away.
