Perhaps the most quietly symbolic structures to face the wrecking ball, dynamite, and a host of other assorted instruments of destruction in recent months were the American Rice silos on Studewood Avenue, west of downtown. Scorched by fire in the late 1980s, they sat vacant for almost a decade, mountainous remnants of a dried-up commercial flow, and reminders too of the rice fields that once covered much of Houston's damp landscape.

Though they had been built only in the 1960s, the silos were clear symbols of an economic order whose time had passed. Hoping to sell their land more easily, American Rice ordered the silos' destruction in late 1995: a slow, painstaking, monumental task.