This is the view from 8 Jefferson Place, then (1932)the General Offices of N&W Railroad. Now, a high-class apartment building on the very edge of downtown.
And this is very nearly the same view today, taken from a parking garage just to the west of 8 Jeff.
Whats the first thing you notice missing? Aside from the grade-level crossing?
Allright, I'll make it easier, whats in the new photo thats not in the old?
How about that Wachovia/FirstUnion/Dominion tower? Getting a hint now?
How about this:
closer? 
If you guessed the Hotel Lenox, your nearly correct! Although it was the Hotel Lenox in the 1930's, it was also the Hotel Milner. They should have stuck with Lenox, it sounds more cosmopolitan. And as you could probably guess, the footbridge over the tracks has also been removed, although with the closing of the 1st St./Henry St./Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial bridge over the tracks, it's not totally missed. What else was lost when the Wachovia Tower rose? Well, aside from numerous shops and vendors, there was a restaurant or two and just past the white-fronted building on the left was the Roanoke City Municipal Water Department storage facility. And prior to it being a hotel and water authority storage yard, it was a loose collection of shops and stores. From which was tacked together the building that became the Hotel Lenox. And yes, that entire building WAS the hotel. Cobbled together from 3 vastly different buildings, as one can see from the architecture, the Lenox stood as one of the finest hotels Roanoke had to offer at the time. With easy access to the old rail station platforms (just down Norfolk to the overpass, and onto the platform) it was sought out by travellers who did not wish to stay in the Hotel Roanoke, or one of the myriad other hotels downtown at that time.
A word about the platform, and a picture about the platform:
You
had the platform, the passenger depot, and.. yes, that is a restaurant.
Between rails, you had food. Brilliant idea, if you ask me. And you
did, admit it. If you head to the O Winston Link Museum/Former N&W
Station, you can still see the concrete remains of the platform, which
eventually grew a canopy (very hard to grown even under ideal climates)
and a glass & steel overpass linking it to Salem Ave. and
Shenandoah Ave.Removed for dubious reasons years ago.
2 of my most favored walks these days are Norfolk from Williamson to Commerce.. uh, 2nd. and Salem from Williamson to whenever my legs get tired. Or hunger sets in. It becomes easy to see how Downtown spread outwards from the rails, and why. It's hard to imagine now a time when the W/F/D Tower was not there, but it was not always so. The small businesses which grew on Norfolk and Salem, Jefferson and Shenandoah became the big businesses of the future.
Although I do find one curious fact as I delve through maps and adverts of the past, what ever happened to Roanoke's obsession with candy factorys? Factory 324 itself was a candy factory (Martha Washington's Candies), and so was part of the Hotel Lenox (that part on the left again). Well, more for future pages...
For now, that was the all too brief look south from the top of the General Offices of the Northern & Western Railroad.
Coming soon, we look north.