“The last wall of the fort is gone.”
—Dick Schmidt, retired Bee photographer, about the demolition of
The Sacramento Bee building, 21st and Q streets, Oct. 29, 2025

•••

(For Dick Schmidt and those who spent their careers committing
acts of journalism for The Sacramento Bee—and those who still do.)

•••

On the last day that the last shell-shocked shred
of exterior wall stood like an exposed wound,
overlooking the vast area where hundreds

of people once worked around the clock to
put out a daily newspaper, I watched one
of several T-Rex-sized mouths scoop up

the detritus of weeks of demolition, clattering
into the waiting mouths of hulking dump trucks.
The next day I brought you back to take photos

of the site where for four decades you made
pictures for that paper. We stood on the corner
looking into the pit of what had been

the basement, the spot where you and many
others processed color film, a formerly dark
room now rudely exposed to sunlight.

The last wall had disappeared, adding
to the rubble being collected by machines
that had no idea what had taken place here.

Acts of journalism happened, reported
and photographed and edited and laid out
and printed and delivered by people like us

who saw the work as a calling, who believed
in the importance of delivering timely, accurate
news as part of the foundation of democracy.

Now this fortress that we imagined as
permanent, unshakable, lies in ruins. Concrete
and bricks, iron and pipes, giant balls of wiring,

even the old venetian blinds heaped like
bodies in a war zone, will be hauled away,
the three-story-deep hole filled in, smoothed

over. Something new will rise in its place.
Condos, we hear, over the ashes of an admittedly
imperfect institution run by generations of fallible

humans whose names and faces have vanished,
but whose hearts, for the most part, were in
the right place—leaving those of us who remain

to wonder whether, in the long run, how much
of it mattered, if our life’s work amounted to
any more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.