Do you have really old and historic buildings in your area that are open to public use?
This weekend, Vaderling and I made a day trip to Montini Cabin. (link is to a google maps page showing the location of the building, if you click on the picture in the side column, it opens a series of pics) This was a homestead for a pair of brothers from Italy 100 years ago. The cabin today is on land managed by the BLM and owned(?) by Joyce Livestock Company. They use the cabin as a winter camp apparently. It was pretty neat and the cabin is just as it appears in the pictures in the link. As long as people leave it as they find it, it is open for public use. So far so good it seems.
Do you have anything like this where you are. I’d imagine our friends from Europe probably have buildings older than this in everyday use all over the place, so maybe just for those of us from the young upstart countries
There was a community barn across the street from my house that was built in 1727. There wasn’t a historic plaque or anything. It was just a barn, used to store stuff in the neighborhood. We knew the date because per tradition iron bars were bent into numbers signifying the year of construction and embedded high on the exterior.
For illustration, here’s another building in my area showing its date of origin:
“Mairie” means “town hall.” The year it was built, 1798, is marked across the top. That’s pretty old, but the barn across the street from my house was older, predating the United States.
The barn isn’t there any more. It was torn down to make space for a housing development. How tragic, you might say, such an old building lost.
Nope. Just a barn. In this part of the world, age alone confers no historical significance.
But we can do better than 1727. Just this past weekend, we visited Trier in Germany and walked through this gate.
Built more than 1800 years ago by the Romans. Still stands as you see it, still serves as the northern gate to the old part of downtown. Not set aside or blocked off at all. You just walk through it like the pedestrian gate that it is.
In USA senses of old, I give you Birkett Mills. Though the current mill apparently only dates to 1824. I’m not sure that they’re still doing sales directly out of the building, though; although they were when I first moved here, so it was open to the public in at least that sense.
FWIW, this is not even the oldest building still in use in my region, but the most impressive and beautiful IMHO: the Südsauerlandmuseum (South Sauerland Museum) in Attendorn. It was built around 1350 as the town hall and was also used as market hall and courthouse, and now houses the local museum. The town of Attendorn was a member of the Hanseatic League, and according to the museum’s website, the building is the oldest surviving town hall and the most southern of the Hanseatic League.
There’s going to be a million answers from Europeans (heck, my own home was built in 1880), but I thought you might find this interesting.
The Landmark Trust is an organisation in the UK that specialises in rescuing old properties, renovating them and renting them out as holiday homes. I rented one for my 30th birthday, and it involved two Tudor period cottages with a 15th century ‘hall’ in the middle, which was open to the public but also free for us to use as our party venue. We ordered a takeaway curry for 30 people and ate it at the long table:
New Mexico is absolutely lousy with historic buildings that are open to the public in one way or another. Albuquerque has the San Felipe de Neri church, built in 1793, still has an active congregation and regular Mass schedule in addition to being open to visitors. The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe dates to 1610, when it was built for the Spanish colony administration. It’s a museum now. And the Taos Pueblo main building is still used by members of the pueblo and is opened to the general public on feast days. It’s been in use since about 1450.
That cabin reminds me of a bush cabin hand-built by a wilderness man named Richard (Dick) Proenneke in Alaska (not my area), though not as old. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is open to the public to visit, though I haven’t done so, but would like to. PBS did a documentary on him and his cabin, called “Alone in the Wilderness”, which was really interesting. He lived there for 30 years (from age 51-81) by himself with no electricity, running water, or other modern conveniences.
I would have thought that there were several classes of public buildings that meet the OP’s spec and are fairly common in the US. Two that immediately spring to mind are railroad stations and airports. As a (British) example, how about Shoreham Airport terminal, a charming art deco building:
Yeah, that is weirdly similar in design. I can’t find anything to suggest that Long Beach was based on Shoreham, so I kind of wonder if both were based on a third building, but I have no idea what that might have been.
I think it’s more that most pre-WWII airport terminals probably all followed the same basic template, and form follows function and all that. Plus art deco / streamline moderne was the most popular style of architecture at the time, probably more so for places like airports that likely wanted to present a “modern” image. So you get a lot of airport terminals that all look kind of similar.
I live in Toronto where there is really nothing prior to 1850 inside the city limits, but we do have a grand castle which is about 1500m from my house:
It does date all the way back to 1914 and you might remember it from such films as X-Men.
