My grandmother worked right there on the first floor in the "aisles of beauty" selling cosmetics for many many years. As Hudson's was winding down operations downtown they offered her a transfer to another store at some place called Lakeside that she'd never been to and sure as hell couldn't ride the bus to. She took a retirement package instead, but missed her job there and the people she met and interacted with everyday for the rest of her life.

When they blew the place up I thought of all of the hundreds of times I'd been in that store and I just couldn't bear to go watch such a thing. It is still in my mind a monumentally idiotic thing they did, blowing up a big solid building and creating a giant hole in the middle of downtown with nothing at all scheduled to replace it [[didn't we learn anything at all from the Kern Block and Monroe Block debacles?). And I sure as hell didn't understand at all the celebratory air that seemed to surround its implosion. To me it was like going out to have fun watching the execution of an old friend. So, instead I sat in my living room and, as ridiculously melodramatic as it sounds, shed a tear when I heard the multiple explosions echoing out from downtown.

My grandmother, who loved that place like a second home and always talked about her days there, had thankfully passed away earlier that year and didn't live to see it go.