Well, I'm feeling kind of sad today.
Ever since I was a kid, there was this hardware store that stood at the end of main street here in Entwistle. Next to that hardware store stood a big blue barn, which was built in the early 1980s sometime.
The hardware store was a Link Hardware. I used to go there a lot with my Dad. It was infamous in this town because a group of old men would always sit on the stoop of that hardware store, look down main street, and ponder the fate of the universe. Link Hardware eventually became a Home-All Building Centre, and the Home-All eventually moved to Evansburg.
The Blue Barn was a variety of stores over the years. I mostly remember it as a video rental store & arcade. I remember dropping a lot of quarters into Star Wars: the Arcade Game. Eventually, it became a feed store. The owner of the feed store also aquirred the hardware store, connected the two together, and turned it into one big feed store.
Now, as it turns out, in the late 80s or so, before all this feed store stuff took place, the hardware store and blue barn were bought by the village. Why? I don't know. The village council loved buying property. Naturally, when the county took control of the village, all the village properties were now owned by the county. And the county has been trying hard for the past few years to unload all these properties.
The feed store didn't want to to buy the building, so that moved to a newer, nicer building on the other side of town. The hardware store and blue barn have stood empty for about a year now, and the county just couldn't find any buyers.
And then...it was discovered that the hardware store and blue barn were built with asbestos insulation. Suddently, the cost of fixing up and selling off these buildings was a lot more expensive than tearing them down and selling the empty lot.
So, today, the county is tearing down the hardware store and the blue barn. It was a landmark, that's for sure.
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