A Remembrance: Historic & Unique Lubbock Building Lies In Piles

A historic Lubbock building is now mostly a crumpled, twisted pile of ceiling tiles, conduits, drywall, and dust. Soon, even that will be swept away. Perhaps replaced by something modern, and hopefully not too millennial gray.

The Godbold Cultural Center, a deliciously strange building, quietly watched the whizzing cars on 19th Street with its one large, painted eye for decades. Parts of the building were actively in good use, the most current being Cafe J, which still stands (for now).

As a young adult, I adored the part of the building occupied by Chrome, with its exciting, gradually revealing, winding layout, with the surreal surprise of an indoor goldfish pond near racks of chic clothing. It felt like a carefully curated ode to style as an art form. Chrome has since moved to Slide Road with a more open and modern feel. 

When I was a little girl, I remember flitting around the building's main area as my father's band played covers— which I can still hear in the disembodied stereo of my memory:

I cried for all those Beatle Fans
So old so quick they grow
I follow the example to destroy
What I love most

It was here I was first exposed to Lubbock art beyond the burnt umber sketches of the distant West, and bronzes of bucking, angry horses.

I saw bright, bold colors. Abstract shapes. Tiny details that were whispered riddles, daring you to understand. Portraits of people looking back at me that I could feel were real, that could understand me, a strange child afraid of a horse's large teeth, the ominous brown spittle of a dipping cowboy.

The Godbold Center began its life in the 1920s as a hospital, adding to the building's feel as a temporal anomaly, a gateway to Lubbock's rich past. Some of you reading this were birthed into the world inside this building, now a heap of bricks.

A less romantic, and much more practical person than I might claim that most of the building had been "useless" for years. To which my dramatic heart screams, "Is Stonehenge useless!?"

Since time immemorial, the priests, the shamans, the eccentrics, and the crazies have erected megaliths in honor of the world we cannot physically see. The world of wonder, of magic, of ancestors, of dreams.

No place in Lubbock will ever occupy the dream state of the Goldbold, and that is why today I mourn something I did not own, could not hold, and have not beheld directly in years.

This was written in honor of my friend Darcy Achin, who fought diligently for years to keep the magic alive in Lubbock.