The Middlesex Hotel in the 1890s

As the Middlesex Hotel decayed through the 1890s, it fell prey to vandalism as well as to natural agents of deterioration. By mid-decade, it presented a grim façade of broken shutters, smashed windows, and peeling paint. In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that Concord tolerated such a spectacle in its center of government, business, and social life. At the time, however, buildings had greater value in relation to the land they occupied than they do now, and people were by and large slower then than now to demolish old structures. Well into the twentieth century, it made economic sense to rehabilitate or to move buildings rather than to take them down.