Depressing Fates of Iconic Landmarks
The world’s most iconic landmarks employ maintenance teams the size of entire governments, because if, like, Mount Rushmore just crumbled into dust one day, people would be mad. Still, some end up having to close down, get relocated or even destroyed by greed.
CBGB
As the venue where some of the most infamous punk musicians of New York City in the ‘70s and ‘80s cut their teeth and large swaths of their skin, CBGB was about as far away from a New Jersey airport restaurant as you could get. In 2016, however, long after the venue itself closed, it became exactly that, Newark Airport’s CBGB LAB, where nondiscriminating passers-through could get overpriced sandwiches delivered by servers who couldn’t begin to tell you if the decor was authentic. Shockingly, it has also since closed.
London Bridge
Quick, think of the place on Earth most unlike London. If you said Arizona, that’s probably as good of an answer as any, but that’s somehow where London Bridge — yes, the one from the song — ended up. By 1968, the bridge had become too expensive to repair, so the city sold it to an American businessman. Yes, they literally sold him a bridge. To put up in a desert. Against all odds, it actually has become a popular tourist attraction, but man, at what cost?
Scotland Yard
Boy, London has been really strapped for cash for some reason. By 2015, the police force had long since moved out of Great Scotland Yard, but it was still kicking as a historic building until an international conglomerate bought it to convert into a luxury hotel. Now, the iconic setting of the Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes mysteries is a place for businessmen to listen to Joe Rogan in the shower. The next year, another Scotland Yard building was sold to investors to turn into fancy condos. To be fair, the condos will be more useful.
Nohmul Pyramid
PSA: Just because they’re called “ruins” doesn’t mean they’re scrap. A local construction company apparently needed that lesson after they demolished a Mayan pyramid in Belize to use the rubble as gravel to fill in roads. It turns out that’s illegal, and the workers responsible were charged and fined for it, but prosecutions can’t rebuild pyramids.
Zimmerman House
The 20th century Los Angeles population boom attracted some of the era’s most talented architects, who built homes the Hollywood elite still live in — or, in some cases, carelessly tear down to make way for McMansions. That’s what happened to the Zimmerman House, designed in 1949 by renowned architect Craig Ellwood, in 2024 when it was demolished to build a “modern farmhouse” in its place. To add insult to injury, the person who bought the house just to demolish it was none other than Chris Pratt, who apparently woke up one day and decided he was still too liked by the public.
Let’s hope, at some point, he at least fell in the pit.
