Concrete and commerce

Why do I care that this old apartment house on 7th Street in Atlanta is so pitifully dilapidated? If it ever was a chic place to live I don't know of it and I cannot find my AIA Guide to the Architecture of Atlanta to check. Its location just off Peachtree Street around the corner, so to speak, from a Philip Shutze apartment building suggests that it might at one time have been a very pleasant and possibly fashionable place to live. It is falling down and probably not regretted but could it not be saved? 

It is facile to romance the past and find modern times and styles lacking in culture but when I compare this building, with its quietly classical door case, arched window above, topped by a cartouche and swags, with the barracks-like building behind, I cannot help but regret that this little jewel is allowed to fall to bits.  

Peachtree Street until the 1960s was lined with houses - churches oddly located in the middle of the commercial sprawl remind of communities that once stood there - survivors like this building, a Shutze Georgian style row of shops, Rhodes Hall near Buckhead, and a few others that the developers forgot - gently speak in the old polite way that it wasn't always about concrete and commerce.