Vanished Houston Landmarks by Mike Lardas. Image: Courtesy of the History Press—Arcadia Publishing

More than a decade ago, when Mark Lardas first started researching Vanished Houston Landmarks, his book about the city's constantly disappearing history, he was certain the West Mansion—a storied pile on the edge of NASA’s Johnson Space Center built by lumber magnate, rancher, and oil tycoon James M. West shortly before the Great Depression—would soon join countless other Bayou City landmarks bulldozed into oblivion, making it the perfect subject to include.

But then something unexpected happened. In 2006 legendary Houston Rocket Hakeem Olajuwon bought the place, renovated it, and used it as the headquarters of his clothing line, DR34M. Naturally Lardas—a Michigan transplant who spent decades as an engineer working on NASA’s space shuttle program while moonlighting as a self-described “amateur historian”—dedicated the final chapter of his recently released work to this exciting turn of events, citing it as a rare example of successful preservation.

And then, to the League City–based author’s horror, last November Houston did what Houston so often does: “No sooner did the book go off to the publisher and it was too late to change things, they bulldozed the thing,” says Lardas. “I think God played a joke on me, but I’ll never be sure.”

Of course, that lesson on the impermanence of things, even mansions, is exactly what makes Lardas’s new book—documenting 15 bygone Houston landmarks—so relevant. Here’s what we learned from our chat with the man on a mission to understand our city’s future by documenting its elusive past.