In memory of the Waco Clarion

Sometime either earlier this year or late last year, I discovered another casualty of my past that went away: the Clarion in Waco, Texas, which I visited in 2008. I mean, the Comfort Inn from my 2008 trip was unceremoniously wrecked a few years back, but it was a one-story motel from the 1960s that had received a few facelifts and was probably due for a change anyway.

But the Clarion to me was special. It hadn't been updated in at least a decade, but it meant something and I wondered for a time afterward if it hadn't been a Holiday Inn given how much it resembles the Holidome, another Holiday Inn creation (scroll down mid-way, you'll see it). Of course, "enclosing the courtyard" of a motel wasn't an entirely new creation (a local Ramada did it in the 1980s), and I've confirmed it wasn't a Holiday Inn anyway (there were two Holiday Inns back in the 1980s in Waco, both of which were later torn down, the more modern one ended up becoming the Hotel Waco, which was torn down around 2012 for the McLane Stadium). I've written about this trip in my blog before in a more contemporary time (I went to the flea market that same trip, but note that aforementioned post is very, very old). Since I didn't have a camera at the time, I got these from TripAdvisor.





Funny story: I remember that this was when Rolling Acres Mall was in its throes of death, and a new owner (prospective) had proposed some wild and crazy renovation plan that would turn the old Target into some sort of "indoor beach area" (see Labelscar for that). I actually remember talking/thinking about that back then (I remember weird stuff like that).

The only reason -why- I'm adding this here was because I was cleaning up an old Brazos Buildings & Businesses post and didn't want to chunk what I had here. An update to Carbon-izer.com will be coming soon.