A courthouse, restaurants and a pool. Downtown Fresno’s history of demolishing buildings

For years, El Torito Mexican restaurant was a popular spot in downtown, known for its buffet lunches and happy hour drink specials.

The Spanish-style building on Tulare Avenue near Freeway 41 was torn down last week.

Passers-by stopped to gawk at the demolition. Word is, some people were seen scavenging through the debris of twisted kitchen equipment and fans, mixed with pieces of a tree and the restaurant’s green front door. Others went online to mourn the spot.

There has been no word on what might be built in the building’s place.

El Torito isn’t the only downtown building that has been toppled to make way for new construction.

From the historic to the iconic and the just plain condemned, here are five other spots that have been demolished over the years.

Fresno County Courthouse

The razing of Fresno’s original county courthouse is, by far, the city’s most famous demolition.

The building sat at the end of courthouse park for nearly a century (92 years) before it was demolished in April 1966.

Officials at the time said the old courthouse was obsolete, antiquated, cramped and unsafe — if there were to be an earthquake, for example. Restoration being too expensive, the county board of supervisors voted for demolition. It was replaced with the current eight-story courthouse on Van Ness Avenue.

Legal battles ensued, reaching all the way to the state Supreme Court, but the building eventually came down. The demolition gave us one of the most Fresno’s most icons news photos and became the center point for historic preservation arguments to this day.

Old Fresno Hofbrau

Brothers Jimmy, Tommy and Sid Saghatelian opened the Old Fresno Hofbrau in the 1960s and for years the brick building at Tulare and R streets served as an everyman (and woman) hangout; the kind of place equally frequented by cops, lawyers, judges, city officials and downtown workers — and also guys like William Saroyan, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and sportswriter Prescott Sullivan.

It was a place of legend.

It’s where WWF wrestlers “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, “Cowboy Bob” Orton and Don “The Magnificent” Muraco started the night after an event at Selland Arena in 1986.

They ended up on a rampage through downtown and Piper and Orton were eventually arrested by Fresno police (including current Mayor Jerry Dyer, then a sergeant in the department).

The business closed in 2007 after its owner was sued for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and couldn’t afford to bring the building up to code. Fresno Bee columnist Bill McEwen saw the closing as one of several signs of the demise of the area.

“Downtown Fresno is dead, it’s never coming back,” he wrote.

The building was demolished to make room for Fresno’s first Fresh and Easy Neighborhood Market.

It is now a Grocery Outlet.

The Vagabond Hotel

The Vagabond Hotel was just a derelict collection of overgrown bushes, boarded-up rooms and chain-link fence on a mostly empty street in downtown Fresno when was it was torn down in 2004.

It was also arguably one of the most visited tourist spots in downtown.

That’s because the Vagabond — and its empty pool in particular — was an iconic skateboard spot. Skaters traveled to Fresno from across the county to skate the pool, which was featured in skate magazines and blogs and in stories from famous skate-types like Steve-O, who used to visit the pool when he lived in San Luis Obispo and had a girlfriend from Fresno.

The hotel (and pool) were eventually demolished (but not without protest) and replaced by a 38-unit apartment complex in the then-growing mural district. The Vagabond Lofts paid homage to the spot by keeping the name.

Before the it was destroyed, the pool was digitally mapped in the hopes that it could be rebuilt inside another skate park.

The Cosmopolitan Tavern

The Cosmopolitan Tavern, or Cosmo’s as it’s known, was a casualty of high-speed rail’s development through downtown Fresno’s Chinatown. The popular Italian restaurant and bar sat at Fresno and G Street, in a building the owners’ family started its original business in more than 100 years ago.

The family actually staved off eminent domain in 2007 when the city tried to include it in a 180-acre area slated for Chinatown redevelopment, but was finally demolished in 2015 — but not before the city helped the owners find a new location on O Street in a spot that was once part of the parking lot for Selland Arena.

Cosmo’s is still open and operating at that location.

On a side note, Wildcat Enterprises, a somewhat infamous adult bookstore at the northwest corner of Fresno and G streets was also demolished to make way for high-speed rail.

Droge Building

At one point in time, the Droge Building was the scariest building in downtown Fresno; from a visual standpoint at least.

Sitting at the corner of Van Ness Avenue and Inyo Street, across for the city’s Spiral garage, the building’s roof had collapsed and its interior had been gutted. By the time it was torn down in 2013, it was being held up by a dozen 30-foot iron props.

Originally, the building housed government programs during the Great Depression, including the Works Progress Administration offices. It was also the site of an evacuation control station established in 1942 to register Japanese and Japanese-Americans for internment, which later led the city’s Historic Preservation Committee to recommend it for status on the local register of historic places.

The city council at the time decided the site was a historic resource. The building itself, not so much.

The corner was developed into the CityView at Van Ness.

The four-story, 45-unit apartment complex opened in 2015.