We start on the edge of town. Not a nice building. It will get better, right?

Pressed-tin decoration, the original pre-fab. Must have looked nice at first, though.

Paint and time are a building’s worst enemies.

An earlier visit.

After the supernova, perhaps.

Rehab!

We have to go back to a previous year to make out the name:

D. H. Davis, local man of means; ran the bank. Among other things, I presume. The main hotel in town once bore his name, but it’s gone.

This building is affordable housing now.

OUMB . .

Next to its much more dignified and stately parent.

Note the pot of flowers: urban renewal galore, there.

The building on the right looks like an old dog standing on spindly legs.

Typical clueless 60s / 70s overhaul of the bottom floor. It’ll look up-to-date! For a week, maybe.

The storefront on the left seems almost disgusted - okay, I’ll do what I can with what they left, the fargin’ vandals.

Usual Buckaroo Revival, loved by none.

That’s how you do it.

The door-to-upstairs problem vexed many an architect whose preferences tended towards symmetry. Best, perhaps, not to care too much.

2013: The sixties styles will come back and this place will be in great demand!

2016: never mind

The Telephone Building. Given that modern examples are always windowless bunkers, you wonder if this ever looked different.

I’m pretty sure it did, and looked better.

2013: A theater? Looks like it had its facade and lower floors converted for department store use.

Ah hah! I’m a genius. Now:

Cinema Treasures:

The Lark Theatre dates back to 1924. By 1950 it was operated by Affiliated Theaters Inc. of Indianapolis, IN. It was closed as a movie theatre in the 1950’s. The building was then used for retail by JC Penneys. Today the building is used as a community theatre.

HAH

BRAZIL ROTARY

GET IT?

I think it was a bank. Let’s take a look at the side.

The ground-floor stone says bank.

As does . . .

This is rare. 2013:

2016:

It’s like we almost caught them doing it. We always think they stopped doing that decades ago. No.

Wherever they brick 'em up, the effect is the same: don’t look go away

If we wanted to interrogate the building a bit more, we would see this:

You don't see these very often. G. C. Murphy, a 5 & 10 chain. The usual end: bought by Ames, which later sold it to McCrory's, which filed for super-extra bankruptcy in 1992 and ended the story for keeps.

Here’s something of a puzzler.

Built all at once, or in two stages? Again, the problem of the upstairs-access door. Here the architect took pains to extend the element all the way up the side of the building. It looks less unbalanced with different coats of paint.

But why does it have different coats of paint?

The Times, they are a fadin’

The newspaper Times, of course. We read that yesterday.

Poor thing’s trashed upstairs - and wearing a Buckaroo Mansard hat, too.

The Walnut:

Not much on the outside, but that was the style. Remember yesterday, when I said I'd explain the Sourwine Ad? I just did.