What's Old on Kingsway

Now that the rains have passed from sweet music to claw scratchings, I do my best to get outside during its silences.

Yesterday, while walking back from Famous Foods, I noticed an excavator's bucket rise up from the middle of the 1200 block Kingsway, north-side. Could it be that, after all these years of boarded windows and metal fencing, these low-rise buildings are finally coming down? Sure enough. The building that once housed the Kitsch's Brew coffee house is now gone, as is the one just east of it, where a meth lab technician was blown out of its upstairs window and found sprawled on the sidewalk, laughing.

As for the building where Kitsch's Brew moved to -- that stimulant complex known as the Cedar Cottage Pub at the southeast corner of Kingsway and Clark -- it is currently in the asbestos-removal stage, after everything of value was salvaged by contractors and the copper wire miners who roam our streets and alleys.

An advantage to tearing down wooden, stucco-clad buildings during rainstorms is the absence of dust control devices, like those fountainesque hoses that have become a fixture at demolition sites. But these buildings were likely coming down on these days anyway, so I suppose it's more a cost-saving coincidence than anything else.