 Okay, and now to bring it all home, we have my dear friend, Dr. Catherine O'Rourke. One of the things we've, you know, we've talked today about a couple of different things. The specifics of the sit-in movement, the importance of Woolworths and the lunch counters, Alamo Plaza and its history has so many things, as Dr. Winters pointed out, and its long civil rights history, as Everett Fly pointed out. So Catherine O'Rourke is coming to tell us about Alamo Plaza Woolworth in our unfinished project. She is the associate professor of art history at Trinity. She teaches architectural history, Latin American art. She's the author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City, History Representation and the Shaping of a Capital, which received the Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2018. She's the editor of the recent O'Neil Ford on Architecture from last year and is at work on her third book project, Archaism and Humanism in Modern Architecture. She's on the State Board of Review and is secretary of the Society of Architectural Historians. Welcome, Catherine O'Rourke. Good afternoon. Thank you, Vince. Thank you, Patty. Thank you, Conservation Society, for including me in this process. This is not just today. As many of you know, this is an ongoing process. But thank you especially for today and for putting this together. If we could possibly turn down the lights just a little bit more. It's much more important that you see the pictures than you see me. And I just, I want to see too, you heard a bit from Vince. He asked me to talk about the plaza and the relationship between plazas and civil rights. And that's not a small topic, so I'm going to try to pull as much together here as I can. We are here today because of the Woolworth building. But also because of the building that stands opposite. And because of the space between them. There is perhaps no building in the United States to which so much meaning has been attached for so long as to the Alamo. Indeed, the Woolworth is at risk of being demolished because of the emotional and symbolic weight the Alamo has long been made to bear. And while it would hardly seem necessary to revisit the story of this mission for it, ruin, icon, tourist, magnet, revenue generator. In order to fully make the case for the Woolworth, we have to talk about the story attached to the building across the way. There are many reasons why the Woolworth, and I think the whole Woolworth, should remain standing. The building itself is a great example of urban commercial architecture of the early 20th century. It is representative of the broad patterns of commerce and economic development that have long shaped U.S. cities. With James Warrenberger's Reuter building down the street and Alfred Giles' Crockett block in the palace, in the post office and federal courthouse, on the opposite corner, and the Gibbs building across Houston Street. The Woolworth forms part of a vibrant streetscape of great buildings by important architects. And this wonderfully varied stretch of the urban fabric is even richer because of its proximity to the Alamo. A building whose form and structure we owe to the work of, among others, Antonio Tejo, Ironimo Ibarra, John Fries, and Carolyn Peterson. A list of names stitched together across centuries that itself attest to the historical and cultural richness of this place. Indeed, the Woolworth is an integral piece of a cultural landscape marked by its diversity. It belongs to a network of buildings where in March of 1960, thanks to the courage of ordinary people, we, the people, became a little bit more democratic and a little bit more free. Woolworth should stand because of the people who sat down in it. And among the places of business that began to integrate that day, the Woolworth is especially important because of where it is, because of the plaza in front of it and the building opposite it. It's true that the lunch counter is gone. It's true that you can't see the history of the civil rights movement in the building right now. But there is a lot of history that we cannot see. And in fact, we know that the histories and the places and the spaces of the people who weren't in power, or whose stories proved inconvenient or uncomfortable to the ones who were, have often been allowed to disappear or made to disappear. As it exists today, the Alamo Comprehensive Interpretive Plan reflects a long and difficult process in which the architects, I imagine, have worked quite hard to acknowledge a wide range of perspectives and concerns. It's clear from the differences between the initial plan that the public saw and the revised version that the designers have been listening, and so too have the city leaders charged with shepherding the design development process. And yet the fundamental idea is unchanged. The plan doesn't take a definitive stand on the Woolworth and instead offers four possibilities for treating the buildings on the west side of the plaza that range from preservation to partial demolition to complete demolition. It tries to somehow make the space between market and Houston do so many things at once to be both rural and urban, to be both open and closed at the same time. On the south end it is to be a lively public commercial space while the north end, the space between the Alamo and the Woolworth, is to be defined by some kind of perimeter barrier with gates in order presumably to help ensure that this area be, in the words of the plan, a place for reverence and learning. The text of the proposal has ample language about inclusivity and the telling of many stories, and yet it is clear from the drawings that one story is more important than the others. And that is the story, of course, of the 1836 battle. The Alamo Trust, which is the private entity driving much of the proposal, makes clear what that battle and the redefined space is supposed to mean. In the mission of the trust, they write, this is in the mission statement, the 1836 battle of the Alamo is one of the most pivotal battles in world history, signifying Texan identity, the fight for liberty, and bravery in the face of impossible odds. In radically altering the character of the most important stretch of downtown San Antonio, the Comprehensive Plan aims, among other things, to help people in the language of tourism and marketing, quote, personally connect to the Alamo area experience. And it promises that the space will be comfortable. There is no question that the 1836 battle fought in the crumbling remains of a Spanish colonial mission turned for it is of great historical significance. But the implications of that battle, and of the social and political transformations that followed it, are so much more complex than a tale of heroes and villains, of defenders and aggressors. The difficulty is that the place where that battle occurred has changed in character so dramatically since then, and the meaning of the Alamo been manipulated so much that in privileging one story over all others, the plan subordinates the histories and experiences that don't match up with the one that is given supremacy. To put it plainly, the Alamo and the space we call Alamo Plaza have radically different meanings for different people, as Dr. Winder's noted. But because of the centrality of the space in the city, its public character today, and its highly charged symbolism to give it over to one narrative, is not only to deny the other stories, but to foreclose on the possibility of creating new ones. Of greatest relevance to the fate of the Woolworth is the proposed redesign of the area bordered by Houston and Crockett. Here the plan proposes transforming what today is a pretty vibrant, pretty successful urban space of a kind that many cities would love to have into, in the words of the plan, an open-air museum that functions essentially as a memorial, a memorial centered on one event. A space in which we are all supposed to feel a sense of reverence, and presumably to behave reverently. Nearly all of the other aspects of the history of this space are meant to be dealt with in a museum, shoved inside while the focal point, the spatial evocation of the battlefield, that place imagined as essential to Texan identity, is made even more prominent outside. And probably, many of the drawings suggest, that museum will require taking down another place where history was made. It is a proposal that spatially and visually represents and re-enacts exclusion. What is a plaza? The space between the Woolworth and the Alamo doesn't neatly fit the historical definition of a plaza. The space originally belonged to the atrio, or the atrium of the mission. Atrios in front of churches in Spanish colonial missions began to appear in the Americas in the 16th century. And you see an example here at Huelo Tzingo in the state of Puebla in central Mexico. They were integral to the entwined projects of evangelization and colonization. In its earliest incarnation, the space we call Alamo Plaza was a very late example at the northern edge of a vast empire of a distinctive spatial type. More characteristic of the plaza type is in fact just outside of this building, what we call main plaza. It reflected the principles of one of the world's most influential planning documents, the Law of the Endes of 1583, which itself was shaped by ancient Roman ideas about cities, new Renaissance theories of urban space, and the monumental plazas of the great Mesoamerican cities. As the Law of the Endes and the History of Urban Planning make clear, plazas are not just big, open-planned spaces in the city. They are defined by the buildings that surround them and by what goes on in them. One of the most remarkable things to me about the Alamo is its doorway. It's less celebrated than the parapet, but unlike it, it was actually there in 1836 and long before. The doorway is a regionalized, baroque interpretation of the triumphal arch form popularized in illustrated texts by the Renaissance architect Sebastian Osterlio in the 16th century, just as the Spanish began their vast building campaign in this hemisphere. The triumphal arch dates to antiquity, but it was in the Renaissance, in the work of Leon Battista Alberti, that it began to appear on building facades, not just to make them look nice, but in order to help them define the spaces in front of them. The Renaissance ambition to order urban space, which you see here in Piero della Francesca's view of an ideal city of 1460, expressed a humanistic belief that well-ordered cities reflected and supported well-functioning societies. In reality, the plaza, whether it was geometrically regular or not, was physically and symbolically the epicenter and the embodiment of this ideal. This planning tradition has come down to us in a variety of contexts, and governments have long spent enormous sums building and changing plazas precisely because they are such potent characters of symbolism. Since the Renaissance, the shaping of urban space has been marked by a nearly perpetual tension between the ideal of social harmony and the reality of governmental control. Indeed, the history of many of the great plazas, such as Angeot Gabriel's Great Square for King Louis XV in Paris of the 1750s, which you know as the Place de la Concorde, is a history of the shaping of space in order to project an image of a well-functioning, agreeable society. Yet in this instance, as in so many others, patrons, planners, and architects used urban space and the buildings and monuments that define it to project power abstractly. In Paris, the Statue of the King, placed at the center, and it's pretty tiny, but it is up there in the middle of the square, seems to command, the Statue of the King seems to command not just the square, but the vast reaches of the city and country beyond it by virtue of its alignment with the axes of the streets and gardens. Several decades later, revolutionaries built a guillotine here. Colonial Mexico City offers a vivid example of how a plaza may be transformed by enclosure and its political and social meaning changed in the process. The main plaza, or Socalo, had itself been built to help affect the spatial and political transformation of Aztec Tenochtitlan into Spanish Mexico City. Cristóbal Villalpando's 1704 Vista de la Plaza de México shows an idealized image of the city's great square as a place of well-ordered markets, tranquil social interaction, and even class diversity. Above all, it is a space of busy, bustling urban life. But in the upper right corner, he shows the rebuilding of the part of the royal palace that had been badly damaged in popular riots over a steep rise in the price of corn. This detail served as a subtle reminder of the ultimate authority and stability of the monarch, even in the face of insurrection. Much less subtle was the step the viceroy took nearly 100 years later, when in the waning years of Spanish control, he directed the plaza to be cleared of markets and of people, and to be enclosed by a low wall and, in the French manner, installed a statue of the king at the center to remind everyone who was in charge. Perhaps the closest comparison in the U.S. to the Alamo Plaza plan was the creation of Independence Mall by the National Park Service in the 1950s. The idea there, too, was to make a focal building seem more special by clearing out the city around it, demolishing buildings that didn't fit into a central narrative, and replacing them with lots of open space. The result was intensely criticized, and one observer likened Independence Mall to an open wound. Of course, Alamo Plaza has never been completely shaped by a single entity. Over the course of the second half of the 19th century, the space west of the Alamo took on the character of an urban commercial plaza, to its east and southward modest vernacular buildings. In 1880, the two-storey Hugo and Schmelzer store occupied the former site of the Cloister, a modest meat market stood in what had been the atrio. By the 1890s, the city we know had come into view. New three- and four-storey commercial buildings stood on the west side of Alamo Street. To the north was James Riley Gordon's Romanesque Revival Post Office. The plaza had been paved with mesquite blocks and an oval-shaped landscaped park with winding paths, a bandstand, and a rock encircled garden known as the Mexican Cactus Garden was installed. This park was still in place in the plaza, and the Alamo grounds were fully integrated into a dense urban fabric in 1918. The Hugo and Schmelzer stores dismantled in 1913 for the rebuilding of the lower walls of the Cloister, following a fierce debate about whether the Alamo should be commemorated chiefly as a battle site or a mission. In the 1920s, Alamo Plaza Park embodied the informality and genteel rusticity that were hallmarks of San Antonio's spaces of leisure in the early 20th century. A new octagonal bandstand with classical columns on a rock base replaced the old one, and a small faux-bois bench by Dionisio Rodriguez stood among palm trees. The cenotaph was dedicated in 1940. By then, the park was bisected to accommodate vehicular traffic along Crockett Street. The land behind the Alamo, between Houston and Bonham, had been developed as another park, a change that contributed to the denaturing of the Alamo itself as part of the city, and anticipated the demolitions of historic buildings throughout downtown San Antonio in the decades to come. Buildings that comprised a larger cultural landscape that also reflected the diversity of the 19th and early 20th century city. That denaturing at mid-century accelerated the process of converting the Alamo into a memorial as the building grew in importance in the popular imagination. Thanks in large part to Walt Disney and John Wayne. Popular fascination with the Battle of the Alamo had emerged in the late 19th century and reached one of its high points just after the turn of the century. As Richard Flores has documented in the 1950s and 1960s, the Davy Crockett television show and Wayne's film intensified popular interest and helped solidify the familiar story. The accelerated spread of that version of the battle, now to a younger and very large generation, coincided with the rise of the suburbs as destinations for white flight. The shift of commercial and civic life away from downtown and the deepening racial and economic segregation that accompanied that process. It also coincided with the civil rights movement. Indeed, the Alamo has been the subject of greatest attention at moments of social and political change that were strongly bound up with race. Yet through all of this, the plaza was a place of vibrant activity. Since at least 1890, the site of festive celebrations, a photo-op setting sought by politicians as different as Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, the place that people went to see Douglas MacArthur and the Fiesta Royalty. Segregation was by definition spatial. It was enacted in the public realm on sidewalks and buses and in restaurants and schools and in housing. Segregation was enforced in the public realm by official and unofficial means by, we might even say, public-private partnerships. It was also in the public realm that desegregation happened, where it was realized by ordinary people. Historian Dell Upton has observed the civil rights movement may have been the only truly democratic movement this country has ever had. Indeed, civil rights become real not only through the execution of just laws, but in the public spaces of ordinary life. They are enacted, lived, protected through the conduct and contact of individuals face-to-face in a diverse, multi-colored society. Having places that are widely recognized as communal, shared and capable of bearing many meanings and that are lived as open and flexible is essential for the kinds of interactions that are the cornerstones of tolerance and understanding, the foundation of real democracy. The civil rights movement was forged in heroic, memorable moments, but as importantly, it was lived in millions of unrecorded ones. Small ones, when people in their daily lives reached out from what was comfortable to do what was right. Our great open space of democracy at the National Mall is lodged in our hearts, not because we love long expanses of grass, or even because of the buildings that frame it, but because of the democracy-defining events that took place there. The moments when citizens have come together from all over the country to make real the promises etched on the walls of the monuments and written in the documents housed nearby to stand up for civil rights, to make clear that gay lives are worth saving, or that women's rights are human rights. The Alamo Comprehensive Plan says that the plaza will be comfortable, and above all that it will be a place of reverence. Comfortable for who? Reverence. A word repeated so much in discussions of the plan, not just by its promoters, but by the press, by the politicians. Reverence for what? And this is where it gets uncomfortable. Reverence that requires taking down a building central to the history of civil rights in Texas. Reverence for an idea that has been, over the course of the last 120 years or so, been predicated on a narrative of us versus them. We, the white Americans, against them, the brown Americans. There is abundant scholarship that explains how the story of the Alamo got to be this way, and how it is not an accurate reflection. But more to the point, there is the lived experience of the many Mexican Americans who, as a consequence of this story, have been made to feel themselves the enemy. Who have been made to feel different and made to feel lesser than. Reverence for what? 1830s Mexico was hardly a democratic utopia. But how to 1836 and 1845 look if you're African American? Reverence for the codification of slavery in Texas and its expansion in the United States? Reverence for the new danger in which your forbearers now lived? For a significant number of Texans, the world actually became less free as a consequence of the battle of 1836. And now the proposal is to transform a pretty good public space into a memorial to that moment. When we historians talk about architectural history, we understand it contextually, because buildings and cities require patrons and clients. Indeed, there is no greater index of the values and priorities of a culture than what it builds and what it tears down. When we talk about the plaza of Louis XV, we talk about monarchical absolutism. When we talk about the redesigned Socalo of the late 18th century, we talk about a regime clinging to power in a colony that would soon slip away. So what will historians of the future say of this time and this project? Will they write that at the moment that Bear County was working so hard to reconnect itself through great parks and public places along its river and streams and creeks? As the city of San Antonio worked to make housing more affordable and transportation more effective, that in this period, for the first time since the 19th century, when more Texans were not white than were, that the people of San Antonio let the state cordon off and control their most important public space and tell them how they were supposed to feel there. That same state at that same time did nothing as the federal government separated brown-skinned children from their parents at the border. The historians will not miss that that state welcomed the further building of a giant wall along that border. If they are writing about the demolition of the Woolworth, those historians will surely note that the building was taken down by the same state that tried all sorts of things to make it more difficult for people to vote or to make sure that their vote didn't matter too much and that that state seemed perpetually unwilling to adequately fund public schools. But that history hasn't been written yet. The bulldozers haven't arrived. There is still a chance that the historians could write a different story. They might record instead that those Texans who so loved doing unexpected, daring things, especially when they knew the world was watching, looked at their history and at their present and said, come and take it, repurposing that old phrase while keeping its spirit of optimistic defiance. Those Texans, they might write, realized that that plaza and the buildings around it were embedded in their history not because of one event, but because of the many. They might write that those Texans even remembered that sometimes they had fun there. They looked around and realized that maybe that plaza had been doing its work all along in honoring the long, hard, unending work of making a little bit more real the promise of a more perfect union. A promise that even through or especially through the strained, tense, acrimonious years of the late teens and at least the first month of 2020, the backers of the plan and its opponents both cherished. Whether people came to the plaza because they wanted more prayer or because they wanted ethnic studies. Whether they came to proclaim their rights as gun owners or to demand an end to the shooting of students in their classrooms, the plaza the people realized was working. With their different histories and cultures and memories and feelings, people kept coming, renewing democracy through their varied and various expressions. And when they paused, they realized that the proposal to change the plaza had done more to help them realize their common ideals than actually redesigning it ever could. Because it brought them out and into a conversation about their history, about who they were and what they wanted their city to be. And they rediscovered that freedom and liberty don't live in an open-air museum. They live in the processes through which people work for these ideals. They live in the contest of ideas and in the basic, ordinary act of coming together in the public realm. So they left the plaza alone and the Woolworth and the Crockett Block and all the other buildings continued to stand, but with some new plaques and information about why they were important. Nearly everybody agreed that they'd prefer something other than the souvenir shops and touristic amusements across from the Alamo. And in the historic buildings there, they worked with legacy business owners in different parts of the city to open branches in ground floors of the historic buildings so that residents and tourists alike might better understand what was truly distinctive and special about San Antonio. And in one of those buildings they created a big bookstore with all kinds of books about Texas, books about the 1836 battle by commentators on conservative media, along with those by scholars of Mexican-American history and of African-American Texas. There were biographies of Davy Crockett and William Barrett Travis and James Bowie and also of Anne Richards and Barbara Jordan and Emma Tenayuca. And they did build a museum but not where the Woolworth is. Instead they built it on a parking lot nearby. And that museum had lots of objects associated with the battle, but it also told a longer unfinished story about courage, bravery and the struggle to realize the ideas that for quite a long time had seemed to only belong to the Alamo defenders. In the museum people learned about bravery on battlefields but also of the bravery of the African-American men and women who in 1960 sat down at lunch counters along Houston Street. Of the bravery of the African-American children and their families as they walked into white classrooms. Of the courage of the parents and grandparents who kept speaking Spanish at home even as they knew their children might be punished at school for doing so. The museum presented Texas history in a way that visitors learned, in the words of architect Robert Venturi, about the difficult unity of inclusion, not the easy unity of exclusion. And the tourists still came, in fact more than ever, because they had heard that the people in San Antonio were doing something different with their history, really different. And because they wanted to see the Alamo, they were surprised to discover how entwined Mexico and the U.S. have always been. And surprised to learn that on a Monday, each January, so many people in San Antonio got together to affirm the importance of everyone's liberty. They were astonished by just how big Texan identity, like Texas, actually is. And they admired the bravery of the Texans. Thanks. Thank you so much. I literally have two minutes for questions. That was wonderful. Well, we have to be out of this space in the next 15 minutes or so. So I do have one, we'll take one question back here and we'll try to go as quick as we can. I'll make it quick. You mentioned that in the drawings, one story is more important than the others. So I just want to caution us about so much focus on the Woolworth and not speaking of the Crockett as often as possible, because the story of Samuel Maverick and his sons and Alfred Giles are tied up in all of this. Absolutely. And that is totally the point, too. There are so many stories, and I think we've been hearing that in different ways all day long, that this is a part of our city that is so rich with histories that we don't even fully understand. There's so much that is not yet even known, and that's all the more reason to not obliterate it, and that it's the many buildings, the many people. There can't be a sort of trading card game here going on. This has to be, I think, a very clear statement about the whole picture, the big picture that we're dealing with here, not to get into little bargainings here and there. I'd like to say a thank you to everyone. As you all may know, this is the African American Month. Anyway, our separation, all this coincided together is excellent. I'd like to say also about, I hope all of us come out and continue to support this effort to say to what we're building as such. There's a whole lot going on here. One is that, okay? We're building here, and then there's one in Greensboro as well. To me, you should see the coalition there. It is very important, to my opinion, only two are left in the United States. One in Greenboro, one in San Antonio. To me, in Nashville, wherever, but to me, that's very important. How many people realize that it impact that the Civil Rights Movement have had in our society? Not only for African Americans as such, but all of us have benefited from that. Women's rights, human rights, all of us. So I'm saying to San Antonio, to everybody involved here now, hey, yesterday you used this not only for the Alamo, but when people come in to show them, hey, the importance of this woodwork building has had on society today. This is why they're here today, because we all have benefited and still benefit from it. Absolutely. Okay, one more. Catherine, thank you so much. That was just absolutely amazing. You got everything in. Quickly, I have to say, you said it was such elegance. I'm not sure that the room really understands one of the things that really tugs at my heart, and that is that I have read enough to understand that when the Battle of the Alamo occurred, this territory was Mexico, and I'm saying it clearly because you said all of this gracefully. But at the same time, Mexico had outlawed slavery in this territory. As a result, they were not allowed, the Texians, the white settlers, were not allowed to bring their slaves in, though they did and there was a lot of discussion about it. Mexico said, you just got to stop doing that. So I want people to make sure they know that historically, and maybe everybody does know that, but I didn't for many, many years, and it wasn't taught in my school. It's not taught, right? But the point is that one month after the Battle of the Alamo, after the Republic was established, slavery was written back into law in this area. So I have to say that we have to kind of say out loud by extolling the virtues of the Alamo, not the mission part of it, but that battle meant freedom for them, but enslavement for my ancestors. And as a result, we could walk across the plaza now and tell what those enslaved Americans, citizens of Texas, did in order to further gain their freedom. Exactly. So I think it's important that we make a point of saying that. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I just wanted to say that in the third grade at Grand Elementary School, Mrs. Mitchell taught us about blacks and slavery as related to the Battle of Mexico. And then Mrs. Richardson continued it. In the fourth grade, Ms. Marshall in the fifth, and Mrs. Garrison in the sixth. But Grand Elementary doesn't exist anymore because they tore it down. That's it. And so then we moved over to Dunbar. We were taught more and more about it. They didn't tear it down, but they changed it into something else. But I'd like to ask a question of everybody here. How many people here, lives were affected by segregation? Right. Right. How many people? Well, it's amazing that most of you put your hands up, but some of the white people did not. And let me just tell you, your lives were affected also. That's the point that I'm trying to make, that all of our lives were affected by segregation. San Antonio perhaps was a little bit more liberal than some of the East Texas towns and stuff in terms of riding the bus where the sign was said that the back seats were reserved for colored patrons, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes you didn't have to sit at the back of the bus. And my brother integrated San Pedro Park swimming pool by simply going swimming. My mother integrated the chameleon room at Joskies with her friend, Kathleen Voight. They went and they had lunch there. And my uncle showed up and said he wanted to join them. And he told them that he couldn't because he was colored. He said, well, you're serving my sister. And he said, who is your sister? And he pointed to my mother who was sitting inside. So they went inside and they asked my mother and said, there's a man out here who says he's your brother and he wants to come here and eat. And she looked at, she asked my brother, G.J. Yeah. And so they brought him in and that integrated the chameleon room. Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes it was very, very difficult. But I'm glad to hear what you had to say. I know that you didn't bring up the cannon in Gonzales. We'll come and take it. And just want to again say thank you. Thank you so much to the Andrews family. Amy, do you have one? Just one second comment. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the Alamo Plaza became also a place to tell the story of the struggle for control of a narrative? It played a big role. It played a big role in the creation of the Fiesta City, as we say. And in teaching the majority Mexican American population to celebrate the victory of the U.S. over Mexico. So that would be great too. Absolutely. I mean there's so much opportunity here actually to go in the right direction. Okay. I'm going to give Nettie the last moment and then Patty's going to bring us home. Everybody, listen, last year the state demolished the Sutton office building. The first office building belonging to the state that was the state legislature that was not located in Austin, Texas. So the first state office building that was named for the first black state representative for the state of Texas. They demolished the Sutton office building. It's now a vacant lot. Do not let them demolish or repurpose the Woolworth building. You have come and you have heard. I hope that you will go forward with the spirit that we've all shared today. We've heard from five wonderful speakers. We've heard from Everett who had to leave and Tara and Catherine and Todd and Bruce. Did I get you all? Yes, I did. It's very important that we save the Woolworth building. But what's important is that we have to save the narrative that's there. And we as preservationists, I think we're all like-minded in this room, know what it's like to fight a battle, to preserve something that's important to our lives, and most importantly, the legacy of the future. Because you can't have a future without having your past. And we need to keep the elements of our past to tell the story for the future. We've had some really good speakers today. And I hope that you have enjoyed and appreciated them and your time here today. And the girls have passed out some comment cards and feedback. We weren't real sure what this day was going to be when we started out planning it. And I have to thank Vincent because as you've seen, Vincent is the intellectual, and I might be the president, but I'm also the little detail person that runs around and picks up on the details. So I cannot thank you enough for being here, because your presence here has shown the support that you are giving us and our coalition members, thank you. Thank you to our coalition members. Because it can't just be the conservation society. I think someone said it takes a village. Well, this is our village, our coalition is our village, our coalition is our spirit that keeps us going. And we have so many people that are on this journey. And it's a journey, it's a long road, it's not finished yet. And we may have to place ourselves in front of the wrecking ball. So just make sure your life insurance is paid out. Thank you for being here. God bless your travels.