Adding screening for privacy, porch on an apartment building on 1700 South, Salt Lake City

20+ years ago beginning work on revitalization of the H Street NE corridor in Washington DC, I saw a great photo of a new apartment building with people on balconies in the Los Angeles Times (this was before I used Flickr to store photos so I no longer have a clue on how to find it).

I thought "what a great activation device for the street."

Since then lots of big apartment buildings have opened on H Street NE but none have balconies.

Across the country, at least in commercial districts, most of the new big buildings are constructed without balconies, although Park Place in Petworth ("Chris Donatelli, a DC real estate developer, dead at 58") does.  

I have a photo of people on a balcony there, but flaws in Flickr's current search function means I can't find it.

And I have photos of balconies with bikes, as the only secure place to park a bike in a building without dedicated, secure bicycle parking like this one in Boise.

This photo shows what can be done with bigger balconies.

Although with smaller buildings in Salt Lake, yes, people climb up somehow and steal the bikes.

The photo at the top of the entry, of a building balcony just a few feet from a busy roadway and likely what is a very noisy place demonstrates that "my activation" is "someone else's space they have to live in and with" and they modify it accordingly.

Up high, like the photo in the LA Times or even Park Place which is on busy Georgia Avenue, the sound gets dissipated and the space is more usable.

But not when it's only one floor above the street and sidewalk.  Balcony screens are then a good device.

Similarly, this porch screen, with a garden motif is placed on a house on 2100 South, which at the location is six lanes, one for parking.

No the first response should not be to tear down a vacant building: rehabilitate it.

My MIL has incredibly short sighted views about "blight."  Her response, "tear it down," fails to acknowledge that a vacant lot is blight too.  She's a product of 50+ years in Orange County, California, during the period of its major growth as a suburban county converting from farmland.

(Even she refused to acknowledge a blighted house in her subdivision--which dates to the 1960s and 1970s.)

She always looked down on Suzanne and I for our "urban lifestyle," living in the city, although when we were together in DC we lived in a mixed building neighborhood-ours is a bungalow--near Takoma Park, Maryland, but in DC.  S didn't want to live the rowhouse life, because she doesn't like noise.

Anyway, in my Nextdoor thread was an ad for the new Maye House apartment building on the outskirts of downtown at 508 E. South Temple.  Since we've been here in 2019 and before, the building had been an abandoned former medical building, close to the Salt Lake Regional Hospital, vacant for many years.

Before and after photos show investment, not demolition, is the best cure for vacant properties.

I'm a sucker for a swimming pool.