On June 23 at 5:30pm, City Architect Daniela Quesada and the City’s MPC consultants met with members of the general public in the Blue Flame Building in downtown El Paso.
90 minutes earlier, at 4:00pm, J. P. Bryan and I met privately for one hour with the same consultants in order to share with them our vision for preserving the buildings within the “Arena Footprint” rather than allowing them to be razed.
The City agreed to provide me and J. P. Bryan with a copy of our video discussion. I am providing it to you here in the interest of transparency, so that our objectives are clear to anyone who is interested in learning about them.
The discussion focused on the economic benefits of historic preservation and the historical significance of the threatened buildings. I spent some time showing a PowerPoint highlighting the history of the neighborhood. It was admittedly very general since I had to respect the time constraints. I should mention here that in my synthetic discussion I drew upon some of the research carried out by Dr. David Romo as well as various other scholars. At the end of my talk, I related a story about Adair Margo and Laura Bush which you may find amusing.