What was this year’s Best Demolition? That’s what we aim to find out in this, the second category in the 2012 Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate. The official nominees are now in the (soon-to-be-demolished) house!

The voting rules for this year’s Swampies are posted here, but they’re not that complicated: You can vote in this category through each of 4 methods: in a comment below, in an email to Swamplot, on Twitter, or on Swamplot’s Facebook page. If you’ve got a favorite candidate, start a campaign! The polls close for all categories at 5 pm on December 26th.

The nominees for Best Demolition of 2012 are . . .

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1. Former Home of the MuffinMan, 2310 Converse St., East Montrose. The demolition of this 1940 foursquare in December drew to a delayed and dusty close an entertaining episode in Montrose restaurant history. Yes, America, this was the home of — in the humble words of proprietor Jason Perry — “the greatest penis shaped muffin restaurant Houston [ever] had.” Even more notable: That Perry was able to launch his venture and operate it as a late-night after-club sobering-up hole for a few months in 2010 apparently without benefit of any city permits — despite announcing the operation’s jaunty slogan on a 6-ft.-by-6-ft. front-yard sign. (It read: “A four inch muffin is better than an eight inch cock.”) What did the neighbors think? Perry says it took him 3 months to clean up the pile of dead fish that a local welcoming committee deposited as a housewarming present in his back yard. After a foreclosure and sale, the new owner called in the wrecking crew.

2. Houston Main Building, 1100 Holcombe Blvd., Texas Medical Center. Dynamite blows sped up the protracted decommissioning and denuding of the landmark former Prudential Life Insurance Tower early last January, shutting down the Med Center for a dust-filled weekend spectacle. UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the building’s owner, appeared to treat the vanquishing of architect Kenneth Franzheim’s 60-year-old 18-story building — Houston’s first suburban corporate campus — as if it were some sort of malignancy that had to be prevented from metastasizing elsewhere on campus, by putting out a video of the final eradication procedure (above) that concludes with the institution’s jarring “Making Cancer History” tagline. (Less subtly, the included animated version of the M.D. Anderson logo features a majestic invisible red crayon dramatically crossing out the word “Cancer” in the institution’s name.) The curved, 46-ft.-long mural painted for Prudential by Peter Hurd and appraised at $4 million may have been damaged before it was removed from the building the previous April. Though the institution had initially claimed the demolition was necessary to make way for new construction, those plans were put on hold shortly before the implosion; M.D. Anderson announced nothing new would be built on the site for an estimated 3 to 10 years. In the interim, it would be turned into a “park-like” setting.

3. Ben Milam Hotel, 1521 Texas Ave., Downtown. Ben Milam went down a half-mile from the Alamo in 1835; the hulking remains of the long-vacant Houston hotel named in his honor collapsed in a cloud of dust after a series of dynamite blasts this past Sunday. Having gained approval from the city to shut down a block of Prairie St., new owner Marvy Finger plans to build a 7-story, 380-unit dual-courtyard apartment complex (with space for a restaurant or 2 on the ground floor) on the site and the adjacent block, across Crawford St. from Minute Maid Park‘s leftfield fence.

4. 77018. It’s the most popular Zip Code in Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report. Portions of Oak Forest and Garden Oaks have taken over from the Heights — and earlier busy demolition grounds West U and Bellaire — as the latest happenin’ places for small-home removal. The demolitions have been going on for a while, but they sure ramped up in 2012. Homebuilders and investors on the prowl for large lots find space here for big new homes to spread out a little more than they typically can on tighter Inner Loop properties. How much of these neighborhoods will be replaced — and with what? — before builders move on to their next conquest?

5. 3640 Willowick Rd., River Oaks. The prize $8.6 million River Oaks listing from 2011 became the notable $8.5 million River Oaks teardown in 2012. The 3-bedroom, 7,780-sq.-ft. showcase had been designed for its original owners in 1940 by Harvin C. Moore. The Italianate home with the purple kitchen featured formal gardens and an elaborate rear portico. Such poor judgment by the architect, though, to place it smack dab in the middle of a 1.6-acre lot backing up to the golf course at the River Oaks Country Club.

6. Park Memorial Condominiums, 5292 Memorial Dr., Rice Military. The demise of this garden-style condo complex already qualified as a slow–motion real-estate disaster long before the body was discovered. Yes, this was the compound at Memorial and Detering that city officials, fearful of imminent structural collapse, ordered shut down more than 4 years ago. Locked out of their homes, many residents were forced to sell their units at a significant loss, go bankrupt, or both; others took the city to court over the hasty eviction order. A few residents fought plans to sell the property. Earlier this year, JLB Partners finally managed to carry out a purchase agreement with as many as 108 separate property owners. The developers plan to build a new 5- and 6-story apartment complex on the property, more than tripling the density of the 4.85 acres. By the time demolition crews moved onto the scene this past summer, though, it seemed as if the site’s problems were ancient history. And indeed they now seem to be: Skeletal remains discovered under a removed foundation — which authorities at first thought might be signs of 1980s-era foul play — have since been identified as remnants of a somehow-forgotten African-American cemetery that once stood there.

7. Katy Prairie Animal and Plant Habitat. Segment E of the Grand Parkway, the Katy-Mills-Mall-to-Cypress-Outlet-Mall portion of Houston’s latest way-way-way out ring road, is billed as a $350 million construction project. But for the critters and growy things known to inhabit or visit the ecosystem in its path, there’s fun-filled demolition going on too. (Bonus act of destruction: The tollway-through-the-prairie drives right through previously identified 10,000-to-14,000-year-old burial sites by Cypress Creek. Their recent “discovery” by contractors threatened to delay the project; but now that the bones and artifacts have been upended by construction equipment, their value to researchers has been decimated. TxDOT, a few Native American tribes, and the Harris County Historical Commission have agreed to re-bury the disturbed remains under layers of rip rap and leave the whole thing for some future generation of anthropologists to care about.)

Which one of these smashing contestants wins the year? Let’s hear your vote!

• How To Vote in the 2012 Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate [Swamplot]
• Swamplot Awards Ballots 2012 [Swamplot]

Photos: Candace Garcia (MuffinMan); HAR (1628 Lamonte Ln., 1617 Hewitt Dr., 922 Wakefield Dr., and 987 W. 41st St. in 77018; 3640 Willowick Rd.; Park Memorial); David Hille (Park Memorial demo); Community Impact/Shawn Epps (Grand Pkwy.). Videos: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (Houston Main Bldg.); Lauren M. (Ben Milam).