An update on the idea of raiding dying but beautiful cities (like Detroit) to dress up today’s drab new construction: a few years ago, the theft of a set of stone lions from the facade of an abandoned Detroit apartment house made the papers after the lions ended up in a set of Edgewater rowhouses, courtesy of brokering by none other than Architectural Artifacts.

The apartments had previously been occupied by subsidized seniors. Senior housing gets such rich subsidies (comparatively speaking; it’s hard to get, but about as dependable an income stream as any imaginable) and has such a bottomless pit of demand that if you can’t keep that up and running, then there’s little chance anything will work.

Bill McGraw writes in the Detroit Free Press:

It’s never easy being a Detroiter in Chicago.

We travel around the big lake and see thousands of charming old buildings there that look like thousands here, except that the old buildings there have windows and roofs and people inside.

That’s why local preservationists are so upset about the discovery that Chicago is the new home for six stone lion heads stolenfrom a once-elegant Detroit apartment tower.