Most of the old buildings, the ones from the teens and twenties, are either long gone or they've been rehabbed by lawyers. Those old buildings are okay, but I prefer the ones from the 50's and 60's, modest modernist buildings like the Lubbock Wholesale Florist with a swoopy concrete canopy over the front door, or the old R&R Electronics place whose front facade is covered by an elegant masonry screen. Then there's the health clinic off Broadway with columns that flare out at the bottom, so it looks like the building's wearing some kind of architectural leisure suit. Okay, so these aren't masterpieces. They're third or fourth cousins to the modernist stuff that was being built at the same time in cities like L.A. or New York. But they've still got plenty of style. I also like them because they aspire to a kind of urbanity that Lubbock was just about to give up on as the city moved south and west, out toward its suburbs. These are a little city's version of big city buildings, back when Lubbock didn't just want to be big, but wanted to be urban.