Why old buildings matter

Jaws, says Mark Kermode, the brilliant, endearingly eccentric British film critic, has nothing to do with hunting down a murderous Great White. It's not about the shark; it's about infidelity.

He has a point. All the really great stories, the ones that move us, the ones that inspire us and ennoble us, the ones that tear at our hearts and our fears and our prejudices, the ones that make us think, hard, about who we really are, and who we ought to be, all of those stories are about more than what shows in the narrative. Plato's Allegory of the Cave isn't a treatise on spelunking. The third chapter of Genesis isn't a consumer warning against buying fruit from talking reptiles.

Nothing that matters is ever about what shows on the surface. This is especially true in Houston, our liquid city, constantly reshaping itself to fit whatever containers we fashion for it, perpetually absorbing our regular patterns of expansion and construction, then abandonment and demolition, then expansion and construction all over again. The buildings we build aren't just masonry and steel; they are tangible evidence that we have lived our lives here, that this is where our story happened.

When the bulldozers and the backhoes show up, as they inevitably do, some of us gets pulled down with the bricks and the beams, and another piece of our history retreats from the tangible.

There are as many Houstons as there are Houstonians, all of us carrying round memories of places that are not there anymore, of places that for us represented stability and happiness and purpose and home. I cannot pass the empty lot at the intersection of Main and Richmond without thinking about the long-gone Maceba Theater, and the swelter of a mid-spring evening, when the three of us, my wife and me and the baby we didn't know we were expecting sat in the Maceba's beat-down velvet backed chairs and put up with the busted A/C and listened to Los Lobos play their conjunto hearts out. For a flash, I'm a kid in college, newly Texan, newly wed, just plain new, and the joy of that memory runs up my spine and out my fingertips like electricity, and my whole day feels lighter. And I wish I could take my wife's hand, and sink into one of those beat-down chairs and listen to one more concert at the Maceba.

This is why the old Wheatley High School building matters. This is why the paving stones in Freedmen's Town are more than just bricks. This is why, on the far side of the city, a small group of Houstonians are desperately trying to preserve the Henington-Alief Regional Library, which the city seems intent on replacing with an "express" branch in a soon-to-be constructed welfare services complex. They are reminders of who we are, and of what we've experienced together.

There are perfectly sound reasons to demolish all three, just as there are perfectly sound reasons to raze the West Gray shopping center and the Josephine Apartments and the Astrodome, and just as there will be, four or five decades hence, perfectly sound reasons to implode NRG Stadium and whatever atrocities replace the West Gray and the Josephine to erect some newer, statelier pleasure domes in our Xanadu on the Bayou. The reasons for removing them don't matter. Our historic buildings are more important to our city, to our collective memory, than the perfectly good reasons for destroying them. Their purpose is deeper than rationality. The story isn't about the shark.

In Alief, the most diverse corner of the most diverse city in North America, the library is the center point of the community, the most heavily used branch in the Houston Public Library system. For an area that is perpetually ignored by the folks on Bagby Street, an area that struggles with poverty and a dearth of green spaces and the unfairly negative perceptions of its neighbors, losing the library amounts to a great big civic wedgie, one more blow to an already shaky self-image.

A few months ago, Mayor Parker weighed in on the Alief library. She blew into a Super Neighborhood meeting twenty minutes late, brio and brimming self-confidence in a purple pantsuit, a little like James Brown, if James Brown had been a middle-aged white lady. Mayor Parker spoke about the power of Our Diverse Community and the myriad Challenges We Face and promised that together, we could Accomplish Great Things. She chided the "save the library" supporters, reminding them that times are tough, and money is tight, and if we were good citizens, we'd understand that the city just can't afford to do anything for a creaky old library in Alief. She shook some hands, and posed for some photos, and trailing a coterie of advisors disappeared into the night, to wherever mayors go when it's late and it's Tuesday and they're tired of talking about old libraries.

At Wheatley, the death sentence has been signed. The building will be leveled, some of the material salvaged to build a sort of architectural Beatlemania: not the real thing, but good enough, if you don't look too closely. There is some precedent for such a project. Old Town Warsaw was rebuilt after having been pulverized by Hitler's war machine, the fallen bricks reused to restore the city to its former beauty. The difference is that in Poland, the buildings were leveled by an invading army, intent on destroying all trace of the city, the resurrection project serving as testament to the indomitable spirit of the Polish people, and at Wheatley, the city's own contractors will used the repurposed building materials to create a mute reminder that in this town, some community history is just not worthy of preserving.

Wheatley, like most of the Fifth Ward, was left too long neglected, untended, unloved. In its day, Wheatley produced Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland and three-quarters of the legendary jazz group The Crusaders. Scholars and athletes walked Wheatley's halls, and when Reverend William Lawson needed a place put Martin Luther King's philosophy of nonviolent social change into play, he called on Wheatley students to help him. The Wheatley Boycott spurred the death of Jim Crow in Houston, a death that came not with riots and bloodshed, but with peace and quiet courage. Wheatley High School is sacred ground.

Not too long ago, Houston and Harris County found a way to foot the bill for a $65 million renovation of the Harris County Courthouse. It's a lovely building, beautifully restored. Is Wheatley, with all of its real stories hidden down deep under the grime and neglect on the surface, any less worthy of restoration?

Fourth Ward's water pipes are antiquated and leaky. The prudent solution, the practical solution is to do what usually gets done when pipes leak: tear up the streets and replace what's damaged. The streets in question are brick roads of Freedmen's Town, the community settled by freed slaves after the Civil War. Most of the bricks were fired by residents, in homebuilt kilns, because the city had no interest in providing these men and women and their families any services at all, not even roads. The people of Freedmen's Town platted their streets and fired the bricks and laid them themselves, fashioning the pavers in patterns that evoked memories of their old lives, and fading traditions their people had carried with them into bondage. Those brick streets, says local historian Catherine Roberts, are "an in-ground cultural resource," and removing them, even for a practical purpose, wipes away one more sign that Freedman's Town was ever here.

Cities are living things. Living things grow, and change. That baby we didn't know we were having when we went to hear Los Lobos is now six foot two, sings like Caruso, and lives in Nebraska. And the Maceba is probably a far finer concert venue in my memory than it ever was in real life. Change is inevitable. Change is often good, often necessary. Change absent of any context is incoherent, no matter how much sense it seems to make. Change that wipes away our history in the name of expediency is criminal.

Yes, it costs money. Yes, it's less convenient. The stories that matter – the stories worth keeping -- are never about convenience, or economy, or the simple things found right on the surface. The real story is never about the shark.