Three of the eight units were vacant and two had liens that totaled more than $100,000, with owners who wouldn't respond to requests from the condo association.
"We almost lost the building," said longtime resident Rolynda Ford, whose advocacy of one vacant condo -- along with upstairs neighbor Suzanne Nuss' advocacy of another -- got the attention of the Redevelopment Authority of Allegheny County.
Because so many liens were owed to the borough, the redevelopment authority's program to clear the title took some convincing, but Wilkinsburg council eventually voted to approve letting the building go through the county's Vacant Property Recovery Program.
All eight units are now owned by people who pay condo association fees. Ms. Ford was able to buy the unit she is in now and Ms. Nuss bought another of the vacant units. She intends to sell one and stay in the China ceramic tile.
Tracey Evans, executive director of the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corp., said the condo building is one of the oldest to have been built specifically for condos, early in the 20th century. Another like it across the street was demolished in the 1990s.
The condos' dining rooms are wainscoted in tiger oak, and pocket doors separate the living and dining rooms. The kitchen floors are hand-laid tile. Each bathroom has mosaic tiling and tile lines the stairwells, whose treads are made of cork.
The Brighton festival's theatre programme ended with this extraordinary import from Argentina in which five actors recalled, with the aid of photos, letters, home movies and old clothes, the lives of their parents. Conceived and directed by Lola Arias, the show offered a compelling mix of personal memories and – since the actors were all born around the time of the 1976-83 dictatorship – a mosaic of modern Argentinian history.
I suspect Arias is an admirer of the Brazilian pioneer Augusto Boal, whose "theatre of the oppressed" dramatised communal issues. Here, the big question is how the actors either live up to the radicalism of a previous generation or, in one case, live down its collusion with dictatorship. The most moving story is that of a performer who discovered that her supposed brother was actually the child of a "disappeared" family and had been illegally abducted by her policeman father: there is both sadness and a sense of relief in the way she recounts that her guilty dad is currently serving an 18-year jail sentence. But amid the stories of parents who suffered death or exile for their politics, there are lighter moments. One actor brings his eight-year-old son and the boy's pet turtle on stage; as the reptiles allegedly have prophetic powers, we watch in suspense as the turtle slowly indicates whether there will be a future Argentine revolution.
Arias's production would doubtless have an even greater impact on a society that had lived through the events described. But it gives us a vivid picture of the high price paid by a previous Argentinian generation for opposing, either openly or covertly, a dictatorship. It is also inventively staged, with descending cascades of clothes symbolising the weight of the past, and performed with great verve: you had to admire the unfazed cool of Liza Casullo as she coped with a technical hitch in the midst of a filmic re-creation of the lives of her exiled parents. But that, one would guess, is the least of the problems this resilient and blazingly honest group of performers has ever had to face.
His “Memento” line for Ceramica Vallelunga looks like it was lifted from a 500-year-old palazzo in Castelfranco, the small town in Northern Italy where he lives. Somehow Barbieri has managed to infuse these look-alikes with the patina of age — the surface of all the tiles has the rounded, irregular wear pattern produced by thousands of footsteps over hundreds of years.
Unlike Barbieri’s work, the originality of Phillip Starck’s “Flexible Architecture” line for Ceramica Sant’Agostino is not apparent at first glance or even the first five minutes. The bold colors and patterns are captivating; the fact that five barely dissimilar tiles can be rearranged in a seemingly infinite variety of distinct patterns is cleverness itself.
Then the light bulb goes off, as you realize that the generating motif for all the patterns is the humble grout line, something that most tile designers regard as distracting, ugly and something to hide.
Starck has done the opposite, celebrating it by incorporating an exaggerated textured grout line into the tile itself. When the tiles are installed you can’t miss the “fake” grout line’s three-quarter-inch width; the actual grout line is one millimeter wide and nearly invisible because it’s colored to match the tile.
Starck also shows us that it doesn’t take much to create a three-dimensional effect — the one-quarter-inch difference in the thickness of the tiles in his “Flexible Architecture” line creates a distinct shadow line in every pattern.
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