I must admit that it was not until fairly recently I kind of got the concept of urban decay. Coming from Sweden where living central in the city is the most desirable, it is somewhat puzzling to watch major US cities on the decline. Without by any means explicitly or implicitly suggest that cities in Sweden as such are doing better (we have our fair share of cities on the decline as well), the changes in cycles becomes far more prolonged here. When it comes to boulevards and skyscrapers, United States really is second to none and after all it seems fairly understandable that cities that boomed in the early 1900s evolved in relative terms in a spectacular way.

I cannot resist recalling images from the great film "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" with Danny Kaye from 1947, visualizing how the final years before the storm must have looked like here. Walter commuted by train to his busy downtown office and made his purchases there before returning home. Some twenty years later, his ordinary workday would look entirely different and revisiting these environments some 50+ years after their peak is a somewhat painful experience. Where the capital, innovation and spirit of the 1920s created magnificent buildings, the post-WWII era had different ideals. Large one-storey air-conditioned office complex and malls with fluorescent lighting and generous parking lots being built out in the suburbs was the new paradigm in the car era. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty II" would show Walter in a car between a suburb office and a mall.

Where arcade shops in the basements of skyscrapers was seen as progressive in the 1920s and probably was an important contribution to the rent income, this of course became out of fashion as giant malls opened out in the suburbs during the 1960s. Being located centrally in the city suddenly did not make any sense and the years during the 1960s and 1970s must have been painful here. Moving up a few storeys, it becomes apparent that new creative ways of financing gave new life to quite a few disused scrapers, where speculation allowed conversion of lost property into chic condos. Over the years, this seemed to have worked well, but as the property bubble did burst in 2008, it seems like a fair amount of prospects as well as ongoing projects were abandoned.
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