Audio By Carbonatix
Last month, Jane Bryant finally lost her years-long fight with the city when demolition crews rolled in early one morning and made quick work of 604 Elsbeth S., better known as Lee Harvey Oswald’s old apartment.
For a brief moment, the building, with its tangential connection to history, drew the world’s eyes. Then it was gone, and so was the attention. Bryant was left to sift through the rubble alone.
“Things have slowed down, but I’m still trying to decompress,” she told Unfair Park this afternoon.
Bryant called to offer a small correction to our post about the demolition: The front door of Oswald’s flat had never actually been auctioned off, the planned sale having been halted by a lawsuit. Bryant says the door disappeared shortly after the city seized the property.
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But it seemed like a good occasion to check up on Bryant post-razing. She’s still a bit upset at how the city handled the whole thing.
“Really, they just trashed everything,” she says. She had hoped to salvage as much as possible from the Oswald and Tobias (Oswald’s landlord) units, but the city moved in too quickly and destroyed everything but a few bricks.
An unexpected casualty was Bryant’s cell phone. At one point, as reporters and others were swirling, she had some 170 voicemails, which she says killed her phone. Worse, her phone was set up so that each voicemail generated a text message. By the end of the month, she had accrued some $600 in texting fees.
“Clearly, we did not think this out,” she said, wishing she’d had the foresight to sign up for a plan with unlimited text messages.
