The old Nueces County Courthouse in downtown Corpus Christi could be demolished within the next month after the county received seven bids for the demolition project.<\/p>\n
Six of the seven base bids came in between $1.2 million and $1.8 million, while the seventh came in at $5.8 million.<\/p>\n
Nueces County Precinct 1 Commissioner Mike Pusley said the county will now evaluate each bid to make sure it complies with the project’s specifications, which were prepared by Hansen Engineering.<\/p>\n
“All of the bids except for one came in well within the budget or kind of the value that we had been looking at,” Pusley said.<\/p>\n
Pusley said he hopes the county can complete the process and have the courthouse demolished before the end of October, pending approval from Commissioners Court.<\/p>\n
Nueces County Commissioners Court is scheduled to hold two meetings in October, where Pusley expects the selected bid to be formally approved.<\/p>\n
Courthouse isn’t the only historic Corpus Christi building lost to demolition<\/p>\n
The potential demolition of the 112-year-old courthouse also comes as local preservation advocates point to other historic Corpus Christi buildings that have already been torn down.<\/p>\n
At Bill Witt Park, remnants remain from a former facility that played a critical role in NASA’s Apollo program.<\/p>\n
Corpus Christi Landmark Commission Chair Gordon Landreth said the facility, NASA’s Rodd Field tracking station, relayed the first live television broadcast from space in October 1968 during the Apollo 7 mission.<\/p>\n
“The signal, the live television broadcast, came from the capsule to Corpus Christi, and the operators in Corpus Christi were the first to see it, and then to send it out over the network so that the entire world could see,” Landreth said.<\/p>\n
Landreth said the facility also had a connection to the Apollo 11 astronauts. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were brought to Corpus Christi and introduced to technicians who would communicate with them.<\/p>\n
The building was eventually demolished after it fell out of use.<\/p>\n
Landreth said the loss illustrates why the Landmark Commission works to make people more aware of the city’s history before historically significant places disappear.<\/p>\n
“There is so much history in this city that people don’t realize,” Landreth said. “The building where it happened was demolished to make room for a sports field, without knowledge of the importance and the significance of the building. These are the sort of things the Landmark Commission is trying to bring to light to make people aware of the history.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The old Nueces County Courthouse in downtown Corpus Christi could be demolished within the next month after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,154292,156,94168,53662,5790],"class_list":["post-447736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-landmark-commission-chair-gordon-landreth","tag-corpus-christi-news","tag-landmark-commission","tag-mike-pusley","tag-nueces-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}