If GameWorks vacates Block E, we'll have the excuse we need: Tear it down. It's a big, garish, ugly failure. Gimcrack exteriors, faux-historical facades -- if City Center had attended one class of "Make-up for Harlots 101" and skipped the rest, it would look like Block E.

And that's just the outside. Inside, it's Kafkadale. On our first visit -- coincidentally, our last -- the elevators moved like they were designed to transport nitroglycerine. Getting from A to B involved a route so confusing you expected skeletons in the stairwell, and a Minotaur at the center. I wanted to tie a string to my car door in the ramp so I could find my way out.

What lay at the end of our journey? Applebee's. No slam against Applebee's, but here's a secret: They're all over the place in the 'burbs, and you park for free. Of course, there was more to Block E then. There was also a drugstore -- wow, I'm buying Chapstick, downtown! I love it! -- and a Border's bookstore, which was attractive, well-stocked, civilized, and played exquisitely tasteful jazz you'd find between stories on NPR. It had exactly one (1) customer at the register. And I think he was trying to get change for the bus.

It's foolish to romanticize the old Block E, but let's give it a shot. It was the last dense clot of bum heaven left after they razed the Gateway. Shinder's bookstore on one end, another Shinder's on the other, and in between a grimy crew: bars, a porno house, a four-bit steak shop. You could still see the cracked black facade of the old Great Northern Grocery, a reminder of respectable times, looking like something unearthed at Pompeii. Old neon signs hung off the brick, advertising Brady's pub, Rifle Sport, or Moby Dick's, a rowdy haven that promised "a whale of a drink," and, one presumed, commensurately sized hangovers. By the '70s, it was furtive and sad and mean now and then, but it had the Vibrant Street Life we're always told a downtown needs. It looked the same in century-old postcards -- low buildings and cigar signs. For decades the city swirled around it, but never quite convinced it to be respectable.

Not that it would have mattered in the end. The debate about Block E dragged on for years, like a parole board trying to figure out what to do with an elderly Charles Manson. The block wasn't just the Hennepin-side sleaze; it had the Shubert, a theater whose elegant facade stayed the executioner's hand.

Of course we should have saved the old Block E. Empty out the tenants, gut the buildings, save the facades, spare the expense of dragging the Shubert's carcass down the block. You'd still have room for a hotel, retail, even some green space. It would look like it belonged, because it did belong; it always had.

Instead we got the new Block E, the architectural version of the elephant designed by a committee. Instead of giving the city something already woven into the urban fabric, human-scaled and modest in its ambitions, they gave us a blank block with a shopping mall locked inside, a soulless dullard doomed from the day they dug the dirt from the pit.

All for the low, low price of 39million city dollars.

Take it down. No apologies necessary; actions speak louder, et cetera. Rebuild the old small buildings, fill them with cafes and restaurants. But it's so new! you say. Give it a chance! It would be unthinkable to tear it down.

If it helps, think of Block E as "The Conservatory: Phase 2."

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz