A Fire’s Damage Is More Than Architectural

“Yesterday’s horrendous damage to the 1873 Eastern Market building on Capitol Hill is a dynamic loss — a loss to the flow of space, the habits of people, the patterns of community. It is also an architectural loss, though there is hope that Adolf Cluss’s gravely eloquent brick building … can be returned to something like its former self. The sense among the people who gathered yesterday across the street from the building, gutted so badly that birds can now fly in through the front windows and out the back ones, was a profound concern that while the building may come back, its dynamic qualities may not.”