Destruction of Grain Elevator at Milton & Hecate, Nanaimo

I remember when this still operated as a grain elevator, but it must have shut down in the early 80's. Since then it has been a warehouse mostly, a series of increasingly suspect thrift stores, more recently abandoned & then a crack house, which probably accounts for its destruction. Broken windows & all that. Though not photographed by me, people were scavenging wood on the site. For readers of my poetry, this building is from the block of Milton discussed in the first book of Hammertown & is rich in association for me. I lived a half-block up Hecate (on Prideaux) in the apartment mentioned in my poem Gin & Lime. I had always wanted to build a scale model of Tatlin's "Monument to the Third International" using the grain elevator as a base....I suspect the site will become a vacant lot; that blue perimeter fencing is not a good sign, another piece of the old town gone...