September 2025 | Eyesore

The old ten-story Hedrick Building (erected 1928) at St. Mary’s and Martin Streets in downtown San Antonio gets a severe facial to take off the make-up applied sometime in the early 1960s. Note the revealed, original, intricate “Spanish Baroque” detailing (with grace-notes of “Aztec Terminalissimo”) in the applied terracotta ornaments. There’s quite an inventory of similar period office towers in the old downtown of America’s seventh largest city, a great many of them already rehabbed and sparkling again. Very impressive! The city must have been roaring like all git-out in the 1920s. (Oil money, would be my guess.)

Of course, this prompts you to wonder: what on earth was going on in their brains in the 1960s that would prompt such an horrific defacement of this building? It really boggles the mind. Perhaps it was a simply shame. . . for being less than up-to-date in the new GoGo decade. All those lovely figured ornaments embarrassed them, like looking at grandma’s old flapper outfit from the 1929 Roughneck’s Ball, where she drank too much gin, danced the Black Bottom on an ice sculpture of the Alamo, and passed out face down in a bowl of chili. Or perhaps the darn thing had just grown dingy from forty years of auto emissions and, rather than clean it, they opted for a cheap “skin job,” as the architects say, on some sales-pitch that the rain would keep it clean.

But, good Gawd. . . that hideous matrix of blue and red enamel panels? If architecture is a kind of language, the new dress-up said, “Look, I’m a moron now!”

Finally, the new owners who bought it out of foreclosure did the honorable thing and saved it, returned it to its former glory. Looks like it will be re-purposed as a hotel. Kudos to ya!

And salutes to Breck Breckenridge for the nomination!