A pile of history
Another bit of Houston’s industrial history is coming down. The Hardy Yards were the Southern Pacific Railroad’s main locomotive shops in Texas. The first railroad here was the Houston And Texas Central in 1856; the shops were built sometime around the Civil War and were in continuous use (through many expansions and rebuildings) into the 1990s.
The Union Pacific Railroad sold the property after it shifted locomotive work elsewhere in Houston and to Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The tracks, the equipment, and most of the buildings came out as part of the cleanup of the site. But three buildings remained, waiting for a new use. The land is now for sale. Cypress Real Estate Partners’ renderings show the passenger shop — the oldest building on the site — as retail space. Many other cities have marketplaces, restaurants, or nightclubs in buildings like that. But last week, a demolition permit was issued. That building is now a pile of brick and steel.
Forget the festival marketplace, though. Think of the link to history. Houston always was a blue collar city built around transportation. As Rodney Crowell memorably put it, “Hallowed be The Houston Ship Channel . . . fifty miles of salt marsh bayou turned worlds longest deep water shipping lane, host waterway to the most sludge pumping, poisonous gas spewing paper mills, chemical plants and oil refineries in the western hemisphere. The Houston Ship Channel on whose creosote soaked banks new monied oil-boom tycoons rub chaffed elbows with Mexican drag line operators and coon-ass pile drivers in a pay-day Friday winner-takes-all beer and whiskey chugging contest.” The Hardy Shops were a link to that creosote-soaked industrial past. Generations of North Side residents worked there, tending the machines that kept the country running. They deserve to be remembered.
I hear people lament that Houston has no landmarks. We have them, real places that speak to a real past. We just keep tearing them down.
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