Day 308/365

     Monday/yesterday/day 308 was a pretty quiet work day. I went on a tour with an MLive reporter in the morning of two buildings in downtown Saginaw that have been in the local news quite a bit recently. The Bancroft and Eddy buildings have changed hands over the years, and most recently it seems they were both assisted living homes. They've been closed down for a while, but have recently been bought by an investment/construction group that are renovating the buildings and hoping to turn them into upscale apartments in order to bring more people/business back to the downtown area. The décor left over from the last owners was all pretty outdated, but the grand ballroom in the Bancroft building had some beautiful detail work still intact. Luckily the group is planning on retaining as much of the buildings' historical significance as possible, and have some nice plans to restore the ballroom as well. 

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 193/365

     One of the assignments I covered today was the scavenging of lumber from the historic Mill End building in Bay City that's scheduled to be torn down in the near future. The lumber from the floors and shelving units are being donated to the local Habitat for Humanity to sell in their resale store. We got to walk around all four floors and the basement of the building, which was cool and sad at the same time. It really is an interesting building, and it's too bad that it's too expensive to refurbish everything that's wrong with it. We had to wear masks and go outside for breaks every once in a while since there was asbestos found in a good amount of the materials, (which is why more can't be donated or saved). I ended up taking the photo from today's post in the basement of the building. The building's owner, the Habitat for Humanity director, an MLive reporter, and a college student that was shadowing me today were standing at the base of the stairs talking, and I liked the way their shadows mixed with the colored reflections from the glass panes in front of the stairs on the floor above.

If you'd like to see other photos I took at the Mill End building today, you can find them on MLive here!