New Use for An Abandoned WalMart

I love seeing abandoned buildings and architectural features turned into new, productive ones. This is pretty cool – in McAllen, Texas, an abandoned WalMart has been turned into the nation’s largest single-floor public library:

There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest environmental impacts. But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.

Another example of this is the High Line, one of my favorite parks in New York City, which is built on an abandoned elevated train track on the West Side Highway. It’s amazing what a little imagination, coupled with some God-given creativity, can do, turning old into new.