Dungeness crab is a rare treat. You can get it fresh out on the west coast, or frozen here in St. Louis. If you steam the frozen ones, they still taste very good. Served with melted butter, garlic, lemon, white wine and french bread and you have a great meal. More and more regional delicacies can be found here in St. Louis. It's a nice add-on to our quality of life.
A Dungeness crab has a hard exterior and a soft, delicious interior. Eating crab takes a little skill. You have to work to get to the delicious tender meat inside. The photo above shows the first step in getting to the delectable crab meat: removing the main shell. Once cooked, it's pretty easy to pull off the body. When you do, you expose all the insides of the crab.
The result of removing an outer shell is also what is happening in the image below. Unfortunately, butter and lemon are no help here:
Here we see the remains of an abandoned building. Like the crab in the upper images, the hard exterior is gone, exposing the building's insides. Notice the interior stair, now on the outside of the remnant structure. Frame walls, plaster, all the guts of the building are revealed.
The problem is, when you get to the inside of an abandoned building, you don't get a sweet reward. What you get is a big mess for someone else to clean up. It takes a long time for a building to get to this point, and it can take many more years to clean this up.
If we are to avoid situations like the one in the lower picture, strategies need to be in place that intervene long before the outside walls of an abandoned building start coming down. The city's effort to create a vacant building registry is a step in that direction.
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