Stadiou Street gets splendid remodeling
Since the 1970s, when the dismal appearance of Athens began to weigh heavily on governmental and public minds, countless ambitious remodeling project have been started on Stadiou Street. If one were to open a newspaper from 1978 or 1980, one would be sure to find an article about a project to enhance the appearance of the most-studied street of central Athens. Numerous plans have been drawn, but they have inevitably been fragmentary, inconsistent and, for the most part, incomplete. Barring the removal of most of the street’s storefront signs, the majority of efforts to beautify Stadiou can be attributed to private initiatives. Now though, Stadiou and the rest of the city center have been encompassed within the sweeping Unification of the Archaeological Sites of Athens SA (UASA) project which is currently under way. UASA did not invent the wheel, but it did succeed in doing the simplest of things where others had failed: It reached an agreement with the owners of the buildings on Stadiou to share the cost of their renovation, hired an architect, Ariadne Bozani, to do a study of the colors it would use for the facades, and in a few short months put its plans into action. Up to now, UASA has already renovated the facades of 20 buildings along the street. The other 11 are to follow, while important, privately funded projects are taking care of the rest. Among these are works on the Army Pension Fund building, the neoclassical building at 41 Stadiou and a marble arcade which was rebuilt in order to house a department store. Most of the efforts to make Stadiou more pleasing to the eye have focused on its most abandoned section, from Klafthmonos Square to Omonia. Projects being carried out on a string of badly kept buildings extending from Georgiou Stavrou Street to Aeolou will help relieve the abandoned air of the area. The silver lining is already becoming apparent, for under the scaffolding one can catch a glimpse of how the derelict building at 45 Stadiou will eventually look: A bright sea blue is explosive proof of what can be achieved when there’s a will. Across the street, the progress of works on the beleaguered National Press building is uplifting: Warm ocher may seem a conventional choice, but it is just right for a building of that size. However, no amount of facade work can bring the results Athenians are really looking forward to if two real sore spots are not quickly fixed: the two-decade-old «hole» where Katrantzos used to stand on the corner of Aeolou and Stadiou, and the dark, smelly remains of the Athinogenous Mansion at 52 Stadiou. In the first case, UASA can only work on the visible walls since the empty lot has been classified by the Athens Municipality as a green area. The Athinogenous Mansion, on the other hand, cannot be saved with fancy paintwork because of serious structural problems in its main frame and as the complexity of its ownership complicates an agreement. Similar problems of ownership are being faced over the two abandoned houses on the corner of Stadiou and Amerikis (across the street from Kolokotroni Square). UASA has already contacted the owners of these buildings, who have refused cooperation. If however, the foundations that own these two buildings are unwilling to reach an agreement, they should be forced into a deal by the two bodies in charge of Athens’s image, UASA and the Municipality of Athens. Either way, their dismal shells should soon become a thing of the past.
