HARLINGEN — To chants of “Knock it down! Knock it down!” from 120 Lamar Elementary students, the Texas National Guard happily obliged.
The swaybacked bungalow at 1309 W. Buchanan, with its scab-like paint job of white over blue, didn’t last long under the crunching bucket jaw of a Guard-operated excavator.
It wasn’t a demolition, it was a mercy-killing.
The abandoned house next door to Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church was one of 28 which National Guard soldiers will tear down in the next week or so under Operation Crackdown.
In the past six years, Guard engineers and soldiers have taken down 134 abandoned or condemned homes in the city, under a program which comes at little or no cost to the city.
With the hot morning sun bearing down on the asphalt parking lot, the scene couldn’t have been more colorful yesterday morning.
Army Guard troops in green camo were there, and Air Guard troops in a little lighter camo were present, too.
The Lamar Elementary students were wearing Guard-supplied T-shirts in bright yellow, orange, green, blue and navy. On the back, it read: “Keep Calm and Demo Like a Boss.”
“This morning is really important because what the soldiers, the men and women here from the Guard are doing for us here in Harlingen, they’re creating a fresh start,” Police Chief Jeffry Adickes told the student crowd.
“You know how when you draw a picture in school you start with a blank piece of paper? Well, they’re helping us create a blank canvas this morning to build a new home or new structure here for a family in our city,” the chief added.
The Guard commander of the operation, Lt. Col. Kevin Smith, said not only was he happy to help out the city, he regarded it as a homecoming.
“This is my hometown, or was for a couple of years,” Smith said. “I used to work over in Weslaco back about 10 years ago … and I lived right here in Harlingen.
“So for me to come back here to Harlingen really makes this complete,” he added. “Because in the Guard we partner with our communities, we work with the state, we work with the cities, we work with the schools — and we’re all a team,” he added.
Mayor Chris Boswell also stressed the team approach to cleaning up the city, and making neighborhoods safer.
“It’s not just that it doesn’t look good, right? It doesn’t look good. But bad things happen in these kinds of empty houses,” he said. “You have bad people go in there, and you can have people using drugs in there, you have graffiti that goes on these and really makes our neighborhood look bad, and there’s some gang activity in there.
“Every one of these houses that we target, by tearing them down, improves the safety of the community,” the mayor said.
