A beautiful, sunny day today. The sort of day, with it's pale, wintry light, when the buildings here can look just fabulous!
A few posts back I described Odessa as a mix of very smart and run-down. This is the kind of thing I mean.
This is on one side of a street I walk along, on my way to work ...
and this is directly opposite ...
Another example, a little further along.
On one side of the road ...
... and on the other.
There is an appetite here for the new stuff - after the austerity of Soviet times, it's not hard to understand why these symbols of modernity, progress and affluence are attractive. Like during the 60s in Britain, after the post-war period of austerity. I'm not sure how much concern there is here not to lose their past, though. While I wouldn't want to work or live in the first of the "run-down" examples above, the second seems to me rather charming and, assuming that it was modernized inside, preferable as a home to its shiny new neighbour.
I was told a few years ago that there was some concern to preserve, rather than demolish, a place like the first old building above (maybe even that very one), because it was the last surviving - and, incidentally, still-inhabited - example of the tenements that many Odessits lived in, in the 19th century.
Don't know if that's why it's still there, or if it's just that the developers haven't got round to it yet!
A few posts back I described Odessa as a mix of very smart and run-down. This is the kind of thing I mean.
This is on one side of a street I walk along, on my way to work ...
and this is directly opposite ...
Another example, a little further along.
On one side of the road ...
... and on the other.
There is an appetite here for the new stuff - after the austerity of Soviet times, it's not hard to understand why these symbols of modernity, progress and affluence are attractive. Like during the 60s in Britain, after the post-war period of austerity. I'm not sure how much concern there is here not to lose their past, though. While I wouldn't want to work or live in the first of the "run-down" examples above, the second seems to me rather charming and, assuming that it was modernized inside, preferable as a home to its shiny new neighbour.
I was told a few years ago that there was some concern to preserve, rather than demolish, a place like the first old building above (maybe even that very one), because it was the last surviving - and, incidentally, still-inhabited - example of the tenements that many Odessits lived in, in the 19th century.
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