Another day, another historic landmark in D-town gets the boot.

Driving along McKinney Avenue in the Uptown area, you may have noticed the gaping hole where the Hard Rock Cafe used to be. The restaurant closed last March after a lack in sales, but the building has been around since the early 1900s.

The building was built in 1906 as the McKinney Avenue Baptist Church. In 2007, the building was on Preservation Dallas’ list of most endangered historic places. Apparently this was not enough for the landmark commission to give the building historic status, and it was sold it to a real estate developer.

According to the Dallas Landmark Commission’s Web site, historic buildings are structures that possess any of the following properties: character; cultural, economic or social heritage; architectural style or innovation; archaeological significance; identification with a significantly historical event or person; or value as an aspect of community sentiment and pride.

So it seems that the Hard Rock building didn’t possess any of these merits, otherwise it would have been saved. But the Hard Rock did possess some of these merits. Actually, it possessed a lot of them. Many have asked the question (and we’re going to ask it again), what is the point of having a preservation committee if it’s not going to preserve anything?

Ten buildings on SMU’s campus are on the National Register of Historic Places, including Dallas Hall and McFarlin Auditorium. If the Hard Rock building was torn down, what is to say that our beloved SMU bricks won’t also be moved out to make way for a newer, younger, prettier building?

We see it time and time again in our lovely city of Dallas where beautiful buildings and homes that have been around for many years are suddenly torn down to make way for a new bank chain or McMansion. How can Dallas establish itself as a great city when it continues to get a nip here and a tuck there? Before you know it, the face of Dallas is going to be so lifted it will start to look like some of the regulars at the Dallas Country Club.

Currently on the proposed list of landmark structures is the Old Deep Ellum Historic District. We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that this aging area, one that is losing business by the minute, probably won’t get billing as a historic district.

Instead we’re expecting the streets to be lined with an Urban Outfitters, a Corner Bakery and a Brut Champagne Bar. No, wait, we take that back. We don’t want to give real estate developers any ideas.