City Living -- in Prescott???

When this building wore a "for sale" sign recently, I gave it a second look, though I didn't know its history. The top floor looked to be a wonderful huge room with high ceilings and, even better, tall tall windows on three if not all four sides offering what the real estate types call "forever views." The Plaza. Thumb Butte and the Bradshaws. Great big blue skies.

On my last pass by the building, it had apparently been sold. Too bad. I can't move downtown, after all. However, this old-timer made the pages of the Courier yesterday. Turns out that the big top floor was originally the Knights of Pythias Hall; the building itself is one of the few survivors of the Great Fire that destroyed almost all the downtown in July of 1900.

A friend had known folks who rented that inviting top storey briefly; apparently there was no heat and the one winter spent there was miserable. Says the Courier, the new owners are thinking condo, complete to a roof top garden. Yeah, another $million property, no doubt.

Now, I had my days of living behind (not above) the store (a bookstore) in the big city. The sorts of people who lived in the middle of commercial streets were certainly not $million loft sorts of people. They generally were poor students or would-be artists or sometime writers. You know, the kind who first move into the abandoned factory because it is C*H*E*A*P and nobody is looking over your shoulder. Certainly not because lofts are fashionable.

It seems to me that the local developers are jumping the gun! First, Bohemian types should move into the unmodernized upper floors of such buildings as the 3-storey hulk down by the old depot or above the corner just vacated by the Christian store at Gurley & Montezuma. At that point, living in the middle of the action would become chic and the students, sometime writers and would-be artists could be forced out by well heeled young lawyers, financial advisors and similar gentrifiers.

At least, that's how it would happen in an orderly world. Perhaps I just don't understand the world anymore!