Ghosts in the rubble

By JoAnne Young 

 

People move on all the time. From loves, from jobs, from buildings. 

 

Moving on this time has a different feel because the Journal Star Building was a space I held, floors I walked, conference rooms where I listened and laughed and explored other people’s lives, deeds and misdeeds. That space, those rooms and floors were obliterated this month. 

 

Gone is the physical structure in which I spent more than three decades of my adult life, a formative time indeed. Rubble now. 

But somehow, it still lives in my head, like other old houses and building ghosts long gone. Anyone else have a map in their head of Ideal Grocery’s aisles and meat  counter and produce area? The counters and seating at the old landmark Valentino’s at 34^th and Holdrege that opened in 1957 and baked its last pizza in 2014? The hallways and that room in the Cather-Pound dorm, imploded in 2017, where you told your secrets to your roommate or pulled an all-nighter during finals week?

Demolishing a building is a waste of many things -- energy, material and history among them, said French architect Anne Lacaton in the Intelligencer. They billow dust and questionable particles into the environment for blocks. 

 

Still, America seems to have an addiction to teardowns, even though old buildings can be recycled into restaurants, offices, housing. The developer that bought the Journal Star property plans to build two towers, six floors and 13 floors on the site for an estimated 320 apartments.  

Over the years as staffing of the Journal Star got thinner and thinner, some reporters talked about how smart it would be to turn the first floor into a restaurant/bar, something like the popular Minneapolis restaurant The Newsroom that features newspaper décor. 

The $1 million Journal Star building was constructed in the early 1950s as a modern production plant for two independent newspapers: the evening Journal and the morning Star, a consolidation needed because of growing printing costs. 

 

The innards of the building were unremarkable, but the history and people who filled it were extraordinary. The concrete, brick and metal may go, but the work and the workers will linger as long as people who can remember exist. 

 

Those rooms, and those people who came in and out over the nearly 70 years of the building’s life, are part of the building blocks of our memories.

 

* Editor Kathleen Rutledge on the carpet by her desk illustrating the difference between lie and lay for young reporter Angie Heywood. 

 

* The stacks of documents, news releases, letters, budget books, directories, photos, AP style books, and movie review packets that overflowed on reporters’ desks.

 

* Gathering around TVs in the sports department to watch in disbelief the coverage of the Challenger explosion in 1986 or the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, and then scrambling to get local reaction. Or those Friday after Thanksgiving Husker games, that Nebraska actually won sometimes.

 

* Standing with fellow reporters and editors in the back alley with a can of Moose Drool late on a chilly November night, celebrating because we, one way or another, met our deadlines and put another Nebraska election to bed. 

 

* The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days of merging two papers in 1995, and then surviving the strangeness and exhaustion, and putting out some pretty decent papers. Then building together as the combined Journal Star. 

* That strangely lit room in the basement where the creative tech types hung out. The green tiled stairway. The smell of ink and newspapers. 

Everything else be damned, we could always count on change inside 926 P St. 

 

Bricks and mortar aren’t people, but gosh, you can still grieve them. 

 

So hug your historic home or school or workplace, and keep gathering memories. You never know when that wrecking ball will come calling.