The old Rice Hotel
July 11, 2008 (Friday)
The last two blogs have been about the view from atop the J.P. Morgan Chase Tower. Yesterday I wrote about the old Gulf Building.
As you look down from the 75th floor of the tower, you see the Post Rice Lofts, a collection of 312 luxury apartments, formerly the Rice Hotel, beneath you, on the north side of Texas Avenue between Main and Travis. Built on the site of the original capitol of the Republic of Texas, this grand old building has been there a long time. It has a block long canopy over the wide sidewalk in front of it. When I was a boy, I could hear the man selling newspapers under that canopy on the corner of Main and Texas. He had the most powerful voice I ever heard, and it echoed loudly under the canopy. He was always announcing something. His voice is one of my childhood memories that seems very real today as I think about it.
Under that canopy I encountered Loyd Chapman one day as we were both attending a Baptist meeting of some kind. We were each staying at that hotel. We stood and talked a while. Loyd was still pastor at Marlin and I was pastor at Rockport, where he and Dixie, his wife, loved to visit. Loyd loved to fish, and when he retired, the couple moved to Rockport where he and I became fast friends for the next twenty years. What a tremendous blessing he and Dixie were to the church in Rockport, and to me, personally.
After World War II ended, I went downtown one day and stood in the street with thousands of people to hear an Admiral (Nimitz? Halsey? My memory fails me) deliver a speech from a podium on the canopy at the corner of Texas and Main. (I cannot find information about this event, so I am open to your comments about it. I know I was there and heard somebody. I can still see him standing there delivering his “off the cuff” remarks to the jubilant crowd).
At any rate, when the picture of the window washers appeared in the Chronicle a while back, I couldn’t help but focus on the buildings below them in the background. They brought back memories.