Following up on my “North up Blair” post, I took a different route to see how other buildings were faring in the late summer in the neighborhoods hugging Interstate 70. First up was Old North, where I confirmed from old photographs that a house on the south side of Palm just west of Blair had been demolished, exposing its western neighbor. You can see the house before its demolition in the first two photos of this post from 2018.

Moving north, into the Hyde Park neighborhood, the old Eliot School seems to have more broken and open-to-the-elements windows, which does nothing good for the preservation of this building. With its sturdy walls, and a record of success renovating school buildings in the neighborhood into housing, there needs to be more done to secure this building. At the least, taxpayers’ money, paid through property taxes, goes to the school district which owns this building, so indirectly, taxpayers’ money is wasted when these assets are wasted.

Below, up at the corner of Blair and Grand, at the southwest corner, these old limestone-sheathed houses remind us that the major boulevard once held all sorts of beautiful homes.

Moving into the heart of College Hill, the neighborhood’s appearance has changed dramatically from when I photographed much of it in the winter after a light snow. Below, John Avenue takes on a total different feel when the trees grow foliage, and many of the houses are hidden.

North Twentieth Street, below, looks much the same as in the winter, though a leafy volunteer tree hides the fact that the second house from the right has lost its entire side wall to a collapse or fire.

There are still many nice streets, such as the one below.

But I was saddened to see this beautiful new playground; on the day I visited, it was a nice, temperate day in the afternoon with low humidity, but there were no children in sight. Was it just a coincidence of the time I passed by, or do people not feel safe enough to bring their children to play here?

I also discovered, below, that the burned out house I had seen in the winter had been demolished, replaced by a vacant lot sowed with new grass.