On a Sunday not long ago, we left the apartment and walked northeast on Brown Street, then across Baker and past the Taphouse. Though the chairs and tables out front were gone, the music had been left on after closing Saturday night, and a song played as we stepped up on the curb, skirted by the gym, and turned toward the courthouse. The song would have fit well on Saturday night with the beer flowing, but on Sunday morning it rang hollow. Like most worldly things do on Sunday morning.
With the streets empty of cars and no pedestrians in sight, this downtown backstreet had an almost post-apocalyptic feel. Turning north toward the courthouse, past the little, lonely and abandoned triangle building, we see the rear of that gorgeous, early 20th-century European-esque stone beauty that faces Center Avenue. The orphaned one they aren’t doing anything with. The old lady with high, arched doors in the front and square stained-glass windows and lavender trim that, while beautiful, still manages to look ghostly and bombed out, like London during the Blitz. It all seems like a video game or a zombie movie—abandoned—except I think there is an apartment on one end, but right now no one is in sight. During the week there are cars parked all around here, some illegally, but on this Sunday morning, the streets are destitute of any humanity except for us.
In the first or second decade of the last century, this building housed many shops with their white awnings of cloth, and later, probably in the 30s, it was the Central Hardware Company with solid awnings of metal. I remember on a time trip walking from the train depot (I had to pretend to be from somewhere else,) and up Center, past the GEM Theater. There was a café next door (Service With a Smile) and inside as I sat waiting for coffee I was handed a police bulletin I had to fill out because I was from out of town. I signed it and drank my coffee and then went out. From here, if you look up Center Avenue even today, the Lyric is on your right and our beautiful lady is what you see up yonder since Center turns northward right there and the building seems to stand and cross the whole street. You can see it there in the picture.
Then (back then), I walked past the QUEEN, and then to the J.C. Penny Company where I stopped to buy a better hat. Outside again, my hat askew, half-the-block up is this lovely lady—this edifice—workmanlike in her bearing. Sturdy and unaffected yet by time and neglect.
She didn’t know, then, but I know.
Back in our time, on Sunday morning, we walk the street that runs behind this building, I think it used to be called Rankin, but now I don’t know the name of it and maybe it’s not a street but an alley, but from here the building is even more solitary. Like even God has given up on it, even if we haven’t. The back windows and doors are mostly gone or are boarded up, plywood and spray paint (no parking,) and inside the rafters sag or have been pulled down and lean against now-ancient, abandoned walls.
If they could talk.
Pigeons dart down from the wires and through the windows free to come and go, but we aren’t so we walk on.
I’ve walked streets like this on Sunday mornings. New Orleans, Seattle, San Francisco, Birmingham, New York City, Tulsa. All with their own stories. Every once in a while, in each of these places, you see a building that wants to talk.
She is a senior now. Centenarian. But still beautiful and knowing and with so much to say. We hear her as we pass by.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
