Demolitions

PRESERVING HOUSTON’S UNSENTIMENTALISM What Houston should be preserving for future generations, Scott Vogel ultimately argues in his editor’s note for the latest issue of Houstonia, is its glorious legacy of demolishing its own past. But first, there are a few annoying bastions of sentimentalism to, uh, tweak: “To me, any one of these adorable recollections seemed reason enough to save a building from the wrecking ball, or rather the explosive charges that ultimately reduced Macy’s née Foley’s to rubble over a few seconds last September. After all, why shouldn’t our descendants be able to see where Barbara, a member of the commentariat, had purchased a ‘going-away outfit’ for her wedding in 1972? Wouldn’t their lives be somehow diminished for not beholding, as John C. did, the ‘tight corkscrew ramps leading up and out’ of the Foley’s parking garage? Would they ever forgive our insanity for demolishing the place where Cody ‘actually bought our living room furniture’? The last two plaintive cries were uttered over at that other Bayou City Book of the Dead, Swamplot.com, where there is an inverse relationship, science tells us, between an agitator’s outrage over a proposed bulldozing and the number of times he has actually visited/shopped at the spot during the last decade. A club open to only the most radical, militantly preservationist of internet do-nothings, Swamplot is a place where the closing of the Barbara Jordan Post Office downtown occasions the tearing of hair and rending of garments. (“We got our passports renewed there one Saturday—no line, in and out in 15 minutes!” “I’ve been going there every year for decades to send off my Christmas cards!”) Amid all the hand-wringing, I found myself growing nostalgic too, for the negligent, squandering, unsentimental, destructive Houston of old.” [Houstonia] Photo of Barbara Jordan Post Office: CBRE