The Downtown Boom: Reader Photos and Videos from the Montagu Hotel Implosion

Implosion of the Montagu Hotel, Downtown Houston

Updated with more videos below.

If you didn’t hear about the implosion of that 11-story building Downtown last weekend until after it happened, you weren’t the only one. It’s just that battle-scarred Cherry Demolition was a little gun-shy about publicizing another hotel demo in advance. Fewer spectators means less chance a blurry video or two will turn the company from rubble removers to crime-scene investigators.

Fortunately for readers, nobody informed Swamplot about the media blackout. After the jump, reports, photos, and videos of Sunday’s big bang!

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First, a reader report:

It didn’t seem like much of a party where I was. Maybe that’s because the VIP section was up on the 14th floor of a nearby building, somebody said. Down on the street with us there was a reporter from one of the TV stations, but she didn’t seem to know much about what was going on. She was asking us what we knew about the building.

There were a few false starts where everything got quiet, but then a few workers went back down the street to check on things. Maybe they were just trying to make extra special sure everyone had checked out of the hotel? But it was all over by 7:30.

Note: If you haven’t seen one of these things before, you don’t realize there are a few long WTF seconds after all the charges explode but before the thing starts to fall.

A few videos sent in by readers:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjJ1G9R1cvw 400 330]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-DDS8F-1s0 400 330]

And Swamplot reader Christof Spieler sends us the following photo sequence, and comments:

This is the view looking south from Fannin and Capitol. Ten years ago, two of the three old buildings in a row here were vacant and one was in use; it’s that one that got demolished today.

Controlled Demolition of the Hotel Montagu, Downtown Houston, January 20, 2008

From left to right, the three frontmost buildings are the vacant-but-renovated Stowers building, the Montagu, and . . .

The third one (rightmost in the picture, across Rusk from the Montagu) is the former Texas State Hotel (built 1929), which was renovated in 2006 into the Club Quarters Houston hotel.

Well sure . . . 1929 is fine for now. But the Hotel Cotton, which became the Montagu, dated from 1913, so obviously it had to be stopped.

Controlled Demolition of the Hotel Montagu, Downtown Houston, January 20, 2008