Day 304/365 - Part 1

     Today was so action-packed and filled with photos that I had to separate it into two parts! The day started out normally enough; I went to my only scheduled assignment of the day bright and early this morning. There's a section of turn-of-the-century historic buildings in downtown Saginaw that are slated for demolition if the local developmental authorities receive a $4 million grant they've applied for. 

     I got to tour a few of the buildings today with two reporters. We were only actually able to go inside of two of them; the others had little to no structural integrity left so we could only look in from the windows outside. I love touring abandoned buildings. There's something so beautifully melancholy about them to me, especially when they're historical buildings. These were structures made with so much attention to intricate details, that even as they're rotting and becoming the definition of urban decay they're absolutely gorgeous. It really is a shame that they'll most likely have to come down, but it was nice to get one last look into them in the meantime. 

You can see a full gallery of photos taken in the closed off buildings on MLive here.

Day 274/365

     Yesterday/day 274 consisted of another demolition site assignment. Yet another building in Saginaw is being torn down, and the razing began yesterday. I've happened to cover each of the demolitions that have gone on since June, and with the same construction company being at all of them, I'm now on a first-name basis with have of the crew.

Day 233/365

     I realize that it's been ages since I had a video or audio entry, so today I'm putting the 'multimedia' back into my multimedia challenge! I finally got around to shooting some video for work today, and thought that some of the footage would be a great addition to this project. The historic former Mill End building that I photographed a while ago, (to jog your memory, I put some of my favorites on my website here), has been schedule to be torn town for quite awhile, and the demolition started today. I took quite a few photos and shot some video in between. While I think demo. sites can be pretty cool to photograph, I was a little sad to see this building go. I only got to see it at its worst, (it had been abandoned for years and it'd be much too expensive for anyone to save it), but even with the damage it had undergone I still thought it had so much character. I wish I could've seen it in its glory.

If you'd like to see photos from today, or the other video I put together, you can find them under the photo and video tabs on my MLive profile.

Day 126/365

     Today I mainly covered the demolition of the old Plaza Hotel in downtown Saginaw. I've never actually seen a building being demolished before, so I thought it was interesting to see for the first time. It went slower than I thought it would; they started with the wrecking ball and bulldozer today and have only got maybe one fifth of it down. The paper will probably be going back to get pictures throughout the week as more of it comes down, but I'll be in Bay City for work tomorrow through Friday so by the time I go by there next it could very well be leveled, (most of the debris will probably be there though, the construction workers thought it would take about a week to tear the building down, and about a month to clear everything out). If you'd like to see any more of my photos from the demolition site, there's an MLive gallery set up here.