Scraped

The tree found in about two minutes at the Rudolph's lot in its traditional location (Bluebonnet and South Lamar) is up and smells great. The lot-keeper has a friendly arrangement with the 'phone business next door from whom he rents so it's not really necessary to park out back, it seems. How sad to see all those trailers gone, all those trees vanished, all that soil scarred and compacted, all for the sake of a giant Walgreen drugstore. We took a sort of Sunday drive and are very sorry to see tiny duplex houses from the 'teens and 'twenties made into single-family dwellings or, worse yet, demolished entirely. The small one- and two-story cheap apartments close in everywhere are being bulldozed or turned into condominiums. As we poked around looking at people's gardens, we were surprised to see how widespread this destruction is. Just off South Congress, the tiny houses from which people used to sell rabbits, pigeons, laying hens, and sometimes eggs are mostly gone. Every time I'm near the convention center downtown I'm reminded of the nineteenth-century houses with worn-away paint and old furniture on the front porches on which sat old men talking and smoking and enjoying the company of their many cats.