Photo taken from my window, zoomed in substantially, cropped with reluctance.

Above: Rubble. A long reach excavator with a big fat chomping robot claw has been slowly demolishing parts of this derelict eight-story brick building across the street from us. Here on the west face of the Hotel Fantod we get to observe this spectacle up close. Lean out the window a bit and one may watch, hear, and savor the bouquets of the resultant dust clouds as the claw meticulously eats each section of the building one floor at a time, releasing great thundering showers of crumbled brick and concrete blocks and rusty-looking girders and roughly several hundred million billion petrified rat corpses all over the debris-strewn ground below.

I guess I disapprove of the demolition — I’m told, persuasively, that it would’ve been better for the city had the building been converted into lofts (as was done with the Hotel Fantod) — but I’m not exactly shedding tears over the loss of the building, a former federal-government hellhole where tax-department drones of yesteryear slaved away at their lead-and-asbestos desks. I’ve only ever known the building as an old, ugly, long-abandoned embarrassment taking up space in the downtown core. It is an eyesore. A reptilian local developer with a comic-book-villain name is knocking it down to build some sort of new and even worse eyesore. And of course the long process of knocking-down and building-back-up will enliven the downtown area with plenty of interim eyesoreness to tide us over. The sort of thing Ogden Nash refers to in “Paradise for Sale” as: This manic, fulminating ruction / Of demolition and construction.