Here are a few excerpts from a sad story out of New Orleans as described in the Wall Street Journal. It makes me wonder how long the journey is from a place where old homes are demolished and sent to the dump to one where knowing pirates roam the streets looking for urban treasure.
Architectural Theft Adds Insult to Injury in Old New Orleans
Looters in the Know Scavenge Valuable Detail Work; Eager Buyers at the Ready
Professional photographer Keith Calhoun is resigned to the hurricane that destroyed his studio. And he has even reconciled himself to the pilfering of negatives he had stored there. But what has him spitting nails is the recent looting of the fat cypress beams that had kept his Victorian-era building standing.
The beams--or joists--long pieces of dense, 19th century timber that support roofs and floors and are virtually impossible to purchase new, fetch about $10 a running foot at a salvage yard. Mr. Calhoun reckons he lost a truckload of antique wood.
Mr. Calhoun suspects that common thieves working his neighborhood wouldn't be going after antique building materials such as joists, mantels, and Victorian shutters unless they were directed by someone in the know. The value, he says, is only clear to renovators and aficionados of historic design.
Collins Phillips, a retired fireman who lives in a tattered Victorian house a few blocks from Mr. Calhoun, says he returned from exile in Atlanta recently to discover that someone had tried unsuccessfully to wrench a stained-glass transom out of its casement over his front door.
"Next it'll be all my cypress baseboards," Mr. Phillips says with a sigh.
Architectural Theft Adds Insult to Injury in Old New Orleans
Looters in the Know Scavenge Valuable Detail Work; Eager Buyers at the Ready
Professional photographer Keith Calhoun is resigned to the hurricane that destroyed his studio. And he has even reconciled himself to the pilfering of negatives he had stored there. But what has him spitting nails is the recent looting of the fat cypress beams that had kept his Victorian-era building standing.
The beams--or joists--long pieces of dense, 19th century timber that support roofs and floors and are virtually impossible to purchase new, fetch about $10 a running foot at a salvage yard. Mr. Calhoun reckons he lost a truckload of antique wood.
Mr. Calhoun suspects that common thieves working his neighborhood wouldn't be going after antique building materials such as joists, mantels, and Victorian shutters unless they were directed by someone in the know. The value, he says, is only clear to renovators and aficionados of historic design.
Collins Phillips, a retired fireman who lives in a tattered Victorian house a few blocks from Mr. Calhoun, says he returned from exile in Atlanta recently to discover that someone had tried unsuccessfully to wrench a stained-glass transom out of its casement over his front door.
"Next it'll be all my cypress baseboards," Mr. Phillips says with a sigh.
- Written by Joe Baylock
If there's any comparison -- in the dark days of NYC (the late 1970's into the 1980's), people would steal electical wiring (for the copper), cabling, and light systems from operating lines of the NYC subway system. In many instances this resulted in the shutdown of running train lines and in some instances train crashes!
Tragic.
Both scenarios.
Tragic.
Of course the Chinese and most Middle-Eastern countries have much more severe penalties for theft than we do here in the U.S. Think more severe penalties would act as a deterent?
Posted by: Resident | December 13, 2005 at 04:05 PM