Tear it Down - Build Back Better

 

Back in 1985, my friend Pete bought a house at the top of Main Street on three city blocks for $75k.  That was a lot of money then.  He was so excited with the house that he went to spruce it up directly from the closing.  He cleaned up a bunch of loose finish wood around the house and started a small fire in the fireplace and sat back to enjoy a beer.  Before he knew it, there was smoke billowing from the old, single ply chimney pipe and his upstairs was on fire.  By the time the fire department got there and did their thing, half of he house was burnt or damaged.  Bummers for him. 

Pete luckily got some money from his insurance company but the first contractor he hired took half of it and moved to Mexico on a hand-shake deal gone bad.  Now all he had was enough money for materials and beer so we went up there to help him rebuild.  We spent the summer demolishing the charred portions of the house, and some connected good parts that needed wiring and plumbing, while dreaming and drawing up a new floor plan.  By September we were still tearing things out when the snow started and we realized we needed to stop tearing stuff down and start building stuff up, or it would be a very wet and cold Christmas.  Bumacious for us.

Alternatively at the Holiday Village Cinema they had 3-5 nice conifer trees growing along 248 that had been growing for 30 years and shaded the building from the road and Vice-Versa. Then after one of the restorations of the cinema, they cut the trees down.  When I asked the manager why he did that, he said, “we wanted people to be able to see our sign”.  I went out and looked at the damn sign and it simply said, “see our web page for information”.   Bumaroonie for them. 

Down south in Torrey town, across from our camping property, someone built a gigantic Cowboy Bar that failed twice since Torrey has 200 people and half of them are Mormon.  The owner threatened to build a huge bright gas station out of it to extort the townspeople to buy it to protect the un-paralleled night sky.  The plan was to build a  Community Mercantile out of it for all the Mormons, hippies and farmers to sell their wares, like beads and bongs, quilts and comforters, pies and pears, zucchini and lavender to the tourists going to Capital Reef NP.   Meanwhile they could charge their Tesla's from the proposed windmills and solar panels.  Sweet.

But first the committee went in and tore out all the bar and kitchenware and sold it for pennies that they used to tear down the sign and timber Portico share and paint the place orange.  It sat there empty for 3 years with only a State liquor store to pay a little rent.  I thought we should just get anyone to set up shop in there, for peanuts, to develop a buzz and create some critical mass.  That wouldn’t do since we would lose money, and having bills to pay we were asking market rate rent.  So, it stayed empty and we lost money anyhow.  The Merc went belly up and we are still looking for a buyer.  Probably a gas station.  Bummed my total head.

Finally,  5 - 10 years ago Park City bought the 5-acre Bonanza parcel with a plan to build an arts district with the Kimbal Art Center and the Sundance Film Festival.  That got expensive real quick and Sundance moved to Boulder and Kimbal moved to the Junction of the same name.  But first they tore everything down, including the Mexican Market with the best avocados and the Maverick with the best doughnuts in town.   Now we have a junk yard to look at and no tenable plan.  Bummage.

The moral of the story is to not tear things down before you have a plan, an answer, a solution or a real need.  Our land-fill is full of the remnants of thousands of perfectly good kitchens that had to be torn out and replaced by other perfectly good kitchens.  Perhaps it is human nature to create the need for improvement when no improvement is really necessary.  Perhaps it is blind ambition to better ourselves when the status quo is just fine.  Perhaps it is just getting the cart before the horse when we don’t know where we are going.  Nonetheless, think before you tear down.  Have a drawing and not just a dream, have a destination and not just a demolition, have some funding for a long-term outcome and not just your immediate needs is critical. 

Before we tear down a house, a business, a neighborhood landmark, or a working system, we should pause and ask whether the reasons are honest, whether everyone affected has been considered, whether the change will strengthen the community, and whether the result will truly benefit the people involved. If a demolition cannot pass those tests—or if there is no workable plan for what comes next—the wiser course may be to repair, reuse, recycle or improve what we already have.  Remember that when acting locally or thinking globally, especially at this time of year when so much lies in the balance; tearing things down is easy, building them back-better is hard.