In praise of old buildings

The older I get, the more I love the old buildings still standing in Spokane. I was fortunate to go to high school at Marycliff, in historic old buildings on Spokane’s lower South Hill, but I never appreciated the architecture until I saw it with older eyes.

Our cross-town all-girls school rival, Holy Names Academy, was also housed in a beautiful old building. (It’s now a retirement community.) Spokane artist Jeannine Marx Fruci has painted the building, as seen with this post. She’s displaying her new watercolors, including “Holy Names Academy”  this evening at a reception at The Lincoln Center, 1316 North Lincoln Street, from 5 to 9.

In the book below, the author has an insight into why we are drawn to old buildings as we age.

From Long For This World by Jonathan Weiner: Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire what is old, as Shakespeare observes in one of his death-defying sonnets. We are brief, and therefore we admire a stone tower, a storied tavern, a Greek myth, an antique rippled windowpane, almost anything that seems to have more time than we do.

(Jeannine Marx Fruci watercolor, courtesy of the artist)