Oh, this is a beautiful building.

An impossibly romantic building built in 1930 as a downtown Carnagie library, it was designed by Herbert S. Greene. Greene is also responsible for the 1929 San Antonio Express-News Building, the 1923 Robert E. Lee Apartments downtown, other projects in the city.

Multiple inscriptions, bands of ornament, a really beautiful facade and a marvelous, mysteriously urbane presense on the Riverwalk. The combination of that massing and ornament on the back is just spectacular, especially as revealed to a slow passing boat. It's a serious, talkative, civic-minded structure.

This was used for long years as the Hertzberg Circus Museum, as of 2006 this building is empty, owned by the city, and looking for a job. (Oh wait -- here's a site that lays out plans to 'restore this building to its former glory' by turning it into Western Art museum, the newly named Briscoe Museum. They also don't know who did the integrated statues, and their guess is Shakespeare and Cervantes. Who would have a ruffled collar? )

My memory of the Hertzberg from a string of rainy afternoons in the late 1980s is a kind of double or triple nostalgia with circus displays, a thing I'd never cared or thought about before. The Hertzberg in question was Harry Hertzberg, state senator and civic leader, started his collection in 1920 and collected items from circuses as they'd go through town, through the 1920s and 1930s. Most impressive were these huge circus posters, y'know they'd pull into a town on a train and while the roustabouts were setting up the tents these kids would whiz through the town pasting up posters simply to let people know, this was the best way to generate a buzz, bright contrasting colors and perspective and huge-scale wild animals and shockingly racist images and anything to catch the kids' eyes, that sense of style that's driven by what's viscerally immediate and effective, which puts the circus poster in a vulgar visual-art lineage with lurid mass-market paperback covers, there's all that. And it was in the high-ceilinged quiet and eerie chambers of the Herzberg I was first introduced to the incredible story of Lillian Leitzel, the German-born aerialist / diva / headline performer / circus royalty, the emotionally unpredictable and demanding Queen of the Air, the premium personality of Barnum and Bailey from 1919 until her death in the ring in Copenhagen in 1931 while performing her signature grueling one-arm 'planges', a trick in which she would dislocate her own shoulder over and over as many as 249 times in a row, a woman who fired and re-hired her devoted personal maid multiple times every day, a woman who…. Well, I could go on and on, to her star-crossed marriage to the Mexican acrobat Alfredo Codona, circus royalty in his own right, the first - well, you get the point.

The Herzberg was a great example of maladaptive re-use but I really hate to see this circus stuff hauled off and introduced into a safe, over-interpreted space with clean white walls and a clinical atmosphere.