I agree. Take the handles off and give it a lick of paint (or stick on some fascia materials) and it would just look like a building.
BTW… never heard of or seen this building before, so when I entered this thread, I expected it would be a basket in the same sense that the gherkin is a gherkin. I wasn’t expecting such a literal basket.
Yes, but it’s just too big of a building for the location. It’s out almost in the sticks, on the wrong side of town for an office building like that.
The company has been in trouble for at least ten years.
Longaberger didn’t go out of business? The employees just moved?
I have negative associations with Longaberger, because in the past I’ve been approached twice by women co-workers who tried to sell me their baskets. Both started by acting like they wanted to be my friend, and then I saw it was a sales routine. And the baskets were ridiculously expensive.
The building’s price, were it to be foreclosed upon, is a minimum bid of $570,000, plus court costs. Presumably, the heated handles to prevent ice accumulation are included.
Had this… “edifice” been erected on the WEST side of town, closer to Granville and John Glenn Int’l. Airport , I’m sure it would have purchased, given a makeover, and be filled with employees. Even Amazon is building on the west side of (OK, I’m NOT making this up) Licking County.
As of today, the building belongs to a direct-to-consumer housewares company called JRJR Networks of Dallas,Texas and get this, Luzern, Switzerland. Longaberger stopped paying taxes a few years ago, so we’re used to companies hiding money from the city. They’ll fit right in.
Now, frankly, I wish JRJR Networks would rename it the “Who shot? Who Shot? Building” and provide paychecks to SE Ohio workers. We already have newly-renovated apartments downtown. The people like me who want to live there can’t afford them and the people who CAN afford them wouldn’t live there if you paid them.
So, I’m pretty sure we’re going to lose our worldwide claim to fame. At least Zanesville’s Y-Bridge still stands!
So you think one basket building is interesting? What if I told you there were plans for a whole Disneyesque theme park of them, including a monorail that brought you out from Columbus?
Preposterous you say, but I saw the model with my very eyes. Longaberger owned and leased out an old research campus on the other side of Newark/Granville. I worked for a company that leased office space in a couple of the buildings. Except office space was a bit of a stretch. They just walled off old labs and renovated parts for office furniture. Go through the door and you were in a chemistry lab, and over there was the photo lab. At any rate, Longaberger left some stuff from when they used it as offices. This included a mock-up of what old Dave Longaberger imagined as Longabergerland. A collection of basket shaped buildings with a monorail running through it. This probably morphed into the Longaberger Homestead that is now out in Frazeysburg.
I wish I had been smart enough to take pictures, but alas I was not.
I used to ‘collect’ Longaberger. Their ironwork was nice. Then they outsourced it to China and the first piece I got from China cut my finger when I picked it up.
No one I know sells or collects it anymore. It’s been a good decade.
Unsurprisingly, no buyer has been found for this albatross, and the county is starting the foreclosure process.