On the way to work Tuesday morning, I stopped to pay my last respects to a place I didn't even know existed until Monday night — Green Acre Courts on McCoy Street, a decomposing motor hotel in the shadow of downtown.

Didn't have much company as the sun rose, just a parked bulldozer and the gentle roar of traffic heading down Ross Avenue into downtown. There was evidence of a once-upon-a-time homeless encampment: tattered sleeping bags, a small mound of discarded beer cans and graffiti decorate the rotten shells of the dozen rooms and cafe that made up Green Acre Courts. The only guest on this morning was the giant rat that skittered out of the ruins and into the rubble piled next to what had once been the only nice motel where blacks — including the prominent and immortal, Ray Charles and heavyweight champ Joe Louis among their estimable ranks — could stay when they passed through Dallas in the early 1950s.

1 / 2The Green Acre Courts as it looked shortly after it opened in October 1950 ... (James C. Thibodeaux Photograph Collection/UT-Austin's Briscoe Center for American History) 2 / 2... and the Green Acre Courts as it looked the morning of Sept. 5, 2017.(Robert Wilonsky / Staff)

I am not here to lament Green Acre's demise, to chastise its current owners for vanishing the historic footnote to make room for the "office showroom/warehouse" listed on the demolition permit posted on the site. What remains of this structure isn't worth saving, except, perhaps, for some of the green-and-white bathroom tile peeking out of the ruins, once a selling point in ads that also touted air-conditioning, free phones and the attached cafe grilling up the "best steaks available."

I offer only a brief eulogy to a historic footnote that was financed, constructed, owned and operated by a black man (Redmon Revis) and woman (Charles Etta Jones) who filled a desperate void in a city where, not so long ago, black travelers found few open doors offering soft beds, cool rooms and hot showers. Not long from now, the remains will be carted off to the McCommas Bluff Landfill. And that will be that.

On Tuesday afternoon, the city's Landmark Commission briefly paused its regularly scheduled meeting to remark upon its demise and its inability to stop it. Katherine Seale, its chair, wanted to start the process that would have made the motel an official Dallas landmark with a strong push from commissioner Evelyn Montgomery. But it was merely a symbolic gesture; the demo permit was pulled long ago.

1 / 2Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis at the Green Acre Courts around 1953(Dallas Public Library/Dallas History & Archives / James C. Thibodeaux) 2 / 2Joe Louis appears to be checking into the Green Acre Courts motor hotel during his 1953 visit to Dallas.(Dallas Public Library/Dallas History & Archives / James C. Thibodeaux)

"We just felt like the real tragedy would be not recognizing the memory and the history of Green Acre Courts," Seale told me Tuesday morning. "It was not just a safe haven for people traveling through the city, but also it treated people with dignity and respect at a time that was not a given."

Montgomery withdrew her motion to initiate — because there is almost nothing left to initiate. Instead, she asked only that the owners erect a memorial of some kind to note what had once stood on the site. Seale said such a commemoration was an imperative, a nod to the "cultural fabric" being erased from a city that values the newest, shiniest thing.

It's an idea past its time. If we cannot save significant buildings — if they are beyond repair, shadows of shadows — the least we can do is remark upon what happened inside them before they were erased.

1 / 3The green-and-white bathroom tile was once one of the Green Acre's selling points.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3Ivy has begun to devour what remains of the Green Acre Courts motor hotel off Ross Avenue in the shadow of downtown Dallas.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3Not much remains of the Green Acre Courts, which will be replaced by an office and warehouse.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer)

"Dallas has a beautiful black musical history," said David Ritz, the raised-in-Dallas co-author of Ray Charles autobiography Brother Ray. "When so much of it -- like the Thomas and Hall corridor -- has been destroyed under the guise of slick urbanity, it breaks my heart. This is another example that requires a landmark, a plague, a restoration -- anything other than annihilation."

What little we know about Green Acre Courts comes from passing references in musicians' biographies and a hastily assembled history compiled by local historian Carol Roark. She came up with the owners' names, found a photo of the motel stashed at the University of Texas at Austin, and discovered that in the '40s and '50s there were but a handful of Dallas motels serving black travelers, most in small repurposed homes or apartment buildings or the YMCA.

Green Acre Courts was built in a black neighborhood then known as Short North Dallas. Ray Charles stayed there on and off during his ascendancy to icon in the mid-1950s. There, he assembled his band, which included Dallas tenor-sax man David "Fathead" Newman, and jammed at the round-the-corner Empire Ballroom on Hall Street and the American Woodman Hall in South Dallas. History books show, too, that Charles moved Della Beatrice Howard from Houston to the motel when she became pregnant with their first child Ray Jr. in 1955, before they moved into their Eugene Street bungalow.

1 / 3Remains of the Green Acre Courts, which will soon be taken to the McCommas Bluff Landfill.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3The Olympus at Ross sits across McCoy from the old Green Acre Courts.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3This used to be the cafe attached to the Green Acre Courts, which over the last 40 years has served as home to many auto-wrecking yards and car mechanics.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer)

Photos stored at the Dallas Public Library show that around the same time, Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, stayed at the Green Acre Court. "At Last" singer Etta James mentions the motel in her autobiography, also co-written with David Ritz, titled Rage To Survive — as the place where her Cadillac was repossessed because she wasn't toting the note. Roark also discovered that Jimmy Reed and Fats Domino were among the musicians who stayed there.

Green Acre Courts hasn't been a motel for close to 40 years, since shortly after the death of its co-owner and manager Revis in January 1976. It was abandoned for years after that, then slowly beaten to death by the wrecking yards and auto mechanics who trashed their temporary home till just months ago.

It started falling apart long before Ross transitioned from a strip of used-car dealers and auto mechanics to a stretch of eat-and-drinkeries and lookalike shoe-box apartments with hollow names like the Icon and the Olympus.

Redmon Revis and Charles Etta Jones share a gravesite at Lincoln Funeral Home, south of downtown. In a few days, their motel will be buried at the landfill that is but a five-minute drive from its owners' final resting place.