WHAT REPLACED IT
A Column — Part Two of Still Standing
Fourth Ward, Houston — August 15, 2026
By Jim Towers, MJA., JD.
Houston Heights Independent
Old paved over cobblestone road, exposed cobblestone.
Eleven o'clock in the morning facing east on Andrews Street. You can hear I-45 before you can see it — the Pierce Elevated cutting through downtown and Midtown, a constant low roar that never stops. Buses. Sirens. Horns. Engines. A homeless man pushing a shopping cart down the alley yelling something at nobody. Two people arguing about a parking space. A twenty-something woman walking a dog too big and too powerful to live in a $5,000-a-month apartment, both of them pretending this is normal. Power lines and cables hanging everywhere — infrastructure jerryrigged onto streets that were never designed to hold any of this.
It smells like that part of the city always smells. Car exhaust. Smoke. And along the alley, urine.
This is what replaced it.
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The steel and glass jungle that grew up all around it has no soul. It is violent, vicious, dangerous, exclusive — penetrative, forcing out the indigenous, ignored, exploited, mistreated population, and in the last act of exploitation throwing them out and charging $7,000 a month to live there.
Twenty, thirty years ago they spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to build that monstrosity blocking the sky from this place. And then Covid came. Work from home came with it. Now the building sits 80% empty, losing money, heading toward bankruptcy, because people looked at what they were being asked to do — drive in from the Woodlands or Sugar Land, park and ride in the rain carrying everything they own, 45 minutes on the HOV if it moves, drop off two blocks out, underground through the tunnels, up 88 floors, reverse it all at six o'clock — and they said no. And they were right.
And here is the truly sad part. The things that replaced it are already dying.
We have seen this before. We had malls. Dozens of them. Monuments to a way of living that seemed permanent and wasn't. Now they stand half-empty or demolished, and we barely remember what we lost to build them either. The people who were pushed out of Freedmen's Town did not get to watch the mall die. They just lost their neighborhood. The mall got a retrospective. They got a historical marker.
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It is the same model, over and over again. The chain bookstores came and killed the independents. Then Amazon came and killed the chains. Then the publishers. Then direct publishing cutting everybody out. The same logic, the same hands, the same result.
Look at Seattle. Seattle had some of the most beautiful historic landmarks in America. All of it paved over to make Amazon happy, to make Starbucks happy. And now those things are gone and you have lost everything that was once great and unique and beautiful in that city. What is left is not a city. It is a scar.
That is what these towers are. Scars. And they are going to collapse into rust and rubble. The dream someone had of a city — that is all they ever were. Someone's dream. Not the community's dream. Not the people's dream. Someone's.
You threw away something beautiful in a place that could barely make anything, let alone something beautiful. You threw it away and replaced it with something that is already dying. And the whole thing leaves you standing in the street asking the same question with no good answer: for what. What was it all for. Looking back on it now it doesn't make any sense. Nothing the people behind this — the billionaires, the real estate men in their houses in the Woodlands and Sugar Land — nothing they did or could say would justify this. They knew what was here. They didn't care. They never do.
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And yet in the middle of all that, in what was left — and there is not much — there is just a hint. An echo. A shadow of what it was. Just echoes and shadows. But you can still feel it in this one beautiful place. You can still feel the echo of the grace that was once there.
Sort of like when it rains, and there is one small delicate beautiful flower, leaned over heavy by the water and the condensation and the rain dripping off it as if it was crying. And even after all of that, it is still there.
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And I am just standing there in an old cobblestone street that doesn't match the modern world anymore — paved over with asphalt, but on the edges, if you look down, you can still see the old cobblestone underneath. Still there. Still holding.
And I am looking up at the massive city surrounding this place and realizing — it isn't just dying.
It's already dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
— Houston Heights Independent | houstonheightsindependent.com
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