Salvaging the Good Stuff

The brick Colonial Revival–style apartment house was boarded up, its interior dark and dusty. But with the plywood stripped from the front door, sunlight glinted off the white marble wainscoting lining the entry foyer and lit up the wrought-iron staircase railing anchored to a carved wooden newel post. Those were just a few of the architectural elements that Jerry Janszen and his Cincinnati, Ohio, deconstruction crew were going to delicately remove from this and another circa-1900 building next door before a developer started building a new condo complex on the site.