I hope that historic preservation and reconstruction is a big part of the redevelopment of the Avenue of Fashion. When this shopping strip was built, the shops were just as stylish as the fashions they sold. The prevalence of Colonial architectural cues harmonized with the surrounding neighborhood and made for an elegant streetscape. It would be a shame (and counter-productive, I think) if that character was lost. Rehabbed historic buildings are cool and establish a sense of ""place"". That's why we like our historic houses, right. Even the later period enameled steel Art Moderne buildings on the avenue are old enough now to be cool again if restored. I'm going to be brutally honest here. Most of the newer buildings on the avenue (the pet supply store, for example) have no architectural merit at all and don't relate to the character of the neighborhoods. They scream ""Low Budget!!"" It saddens me to see the architectural details on such buildings as Williamsburg Row rot away and disappear due to lack of maintenance. And any remodeling that has been done and improvements that have been made have been very misguided. Take the store at the NE corner of Livernois & Cambridge. It used to have very nice wooden trim around all the windows & doors. The current owners stripped it off and replaced it with multi-colored unsophisticated pseudo-Victorian Painted Lady trim. I think they were trying to make their building look ""classy"". They already HAD a refined, elegant building! They wound up with one that looks tacky and fake! And then there's Noni's Grill. It's wonderful that Mr. Noni invested a lot of money in our neighborhood, but we all paid a big price for it. There used to be a restaurant on that site that was styled as a Cape Cod cottage. It was run-down, but charming nonetheless, and it related to the surrounding neighborhood perfectly. It could almost have been a house on any of our streets! That building was demolished and Mr. Noni put up a monolithic stone bunker in its place! It's HIDEOUS! It looks like something a 3rd-grader would have designed. It's widely recognized that historic preservation is a good economic development tool, so in my perfect world, I would make sure that the building facades on Livernois had some kind of protected status, that financial incentives were available to restore altered facades to their original appearance, and that any new construction went through some kind of design review.

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