She has been praised and razed, built up and torn down; variously hailed as the most vibrant British actor of her generation and dismissed as an am-dram fake who got lucky.
As for Ms. Juday, she thought that the house would be turned into a residential mental health center, like so many of the other large homes in the Germantown neighborhood here, or that a developer would buy it and raze it, putting up a concrete-block apartment tower.
In Ferguson, where many of those businesses that were not looted or razed remain boarded up today, the divisions will be difficult to bridge.
Like most of the 15 homes or so that lined "Millionaire's Row" atop the Palisades, it was bought in the 1930s by John D. Rockefeller and razed to open up Palisades views to the public.
There was a simple reason: Columbia Records was ceasing its operations at 30th Street Studio; the technologically altered church would be sold to a real-estate developer, who would raze it and put up a giant apartment building in its place.
The previous owner had died in 1997, and when a developer sought to raze it and put up an apartment building, preservation-minded local residents convinced the city to declare the house — which once belonged to James P. Farrell, a prominent Tammany politician — a landmark.
First he tried to remodel the Trupin monstrosity, before giving up and razing it four years ago to build the ultimate glass box.
At the same time, the city has also stepped up its demolition program, razing 95 houses last year, up from six in 2006.
Another of the home's tenants, the 85-year-old Lewis Reavis (Mason Adams), keeps bringing up the razing of the house he and his mother rented for 40 years.
The speaker this time was an Afghan district governor, but the "we" doing most of the destroying were American and NATO forces; what we are blowing up and razing are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of houses whose residents have fled.
