When people talk about “The Leaning Tower”, most minds immediately flash to Pisa, Italy and its iconic construction, tilted upon its completion and slowly canting more with each successive century. In Texas, another structure has recently come to mind.
Let me personalize this. On Sunday morning, February 16, I was driving a highway which passes through Dallas on the way to a pop-up art exhibit near Fair Park called Rainbow Vomit. Someone in the car noticed a building on the east side of US-75 and pointed it out to the other two. Speculation began. It appeared that the building was in the process of being demolished, because it was gutted and a crane was nearby, but there was no activity on it. It was simply a partially-destroyed building standing beside the highway. And it was leaning.
We were later to learn that the explosives used to implode the building were enough to take out the sides, but they failed to compromise the core of the building. The result was what we had seen… a building waiting to fall.
After a few hours, it became apparent that the building was not likely to fall, and new plans were put into place. After a careful second analysis, a wrecking ball was brought in to hammer at key points in the structure. The hope was that the building would be down by the end of the first day the ball started striking.
In the interim, people started having fun with the newest north Texas landmark. The expected Pisa-esque photos of people standing in the foreground and pretending to push the tower proliferated on social media, but so did other things. For instance, the tower got its own Twitter account… and so did the wrecking ball.
In the nearby Legoland, they constructed a Lego tower to put into their Dallas skyline. Then, as the day arrived for it the real tower to be knocked down, they added a Lego crane and wrecking block:
The wrecking ball wasn’t able to take the tower down as quickly as expected. Demolition experts were warning on Tuesday evening that it might take weeks, not hours, to complete the job. In a strangely appropriate move, Twitter responded by suspending the account for the wrecking ball.
That’s not to say the citizenry isn’t willing to support the demolition of the remaining building. Some certainly are.
Others are taking advantage of the attention. The Richards Group decided to get a little free publicity for a casino by use of a projector:
And the police department of nearby Fort Worth decided to poke some gentle fun at its more famous sibling city:
Mistakes will be made, but opportunities can be made from them.
Question of the night: What’s something unusual you’ve seen while on the road?
