On the one hand, there are so many old, architecturally interesting buildings being torn down in Detroit nowadays that I’m tempted to begin a Demolition of the Week series. On the other hand, it would likely go the way of Photo of the Week and Scan of the Week, which are anything but weekly.

But here goes anyway – today’s nearly identical subjects are two apartments that stood side by side for a century: the Lancaster and Waumbek apartments.

Built in 1904 on Palmer just east of John R, the apartments were among the hundreds that sprang up all over the city at the beginning of the 20th century to house an rapidly expanding population.

The Lancaster and Waumbek were built in English Revival style at the same height and width, and with essentially the same brick and stone pattern, with a few small variations in their facades and porches. Each featured six large apartments that stretched far back to the buildings’ north ends.

They were designed by Detroit architect Almon Clother Varney, the most prolific apartment designer in Detroit at the time. Varney was responsible for dozens of architecturally significant dwellings, some of which still remain, including the William C. Boydell Home on Cass, the Jerome H. Remick & Company Building on Library Street, and the former William R. Hamilton Funeral Home, now the Art Center Music School on Cass.

They centered a nice residential apartment district, sharing Palmer Street with the Harlakenden, Sheraton, Stirling, Croydon and Maywood apartment complexes, among several others.

The two apartments were originally owned by one of Michigan’s first suffragists, Sarah A. Sampson, who resided in the Lancaster with her husband from 1906 to 1919.

Despite having vacancies here and there over the years, both the Lancaster and the Waumbek remained occupied up through the 1980s, even as the apartments surrounding them became abandoned and dilapidated, though they too succumbed to neighborhood pressures and have been empty for a couple decades. Both the Lancaster and the Waumbek were listed in 1997 on the National Register of Historic Places.

Infill housing that replaced similarly down-on-their-luck apartment structures, and which doesn’t contain even a fraction of the simple architectural charm of the Lancaster and Waumbek, gradually encroached on them from the surrounding neighborhood over the past few years, to the point where they had to either be saved or brought down.

And of course, idiots came along and decided that a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places was a fitting canvas for tags spray-painted on century-old brick, further pushing it towards death by deflecting people’s eyes from their latent beauty, causing them to see only blight. Nearly a century without a single bit of graffiti, which suddenly appeared in the last couple years. And just as suddenly, another two lovely Detroit buildings are deemed unsalvagable and fall to the ground.