Yes, yes, I know. We all have to make room for progress.

But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

I pulled my motorcycle to the side of Park Street in Lewiston earlier in the week and watched in dread silence as pieces of the old bank building started coming down at Park and Pine. For every brick and cinder and ramrod straight hunk of rebar that came crashing to the ground, 10 personal memories came away with it.

It was never a bank to me, you know. When I came here in 1994, that officious building at 40 Pine St. was a wing of the Sun Journal and therefore it was home.

Whenever I got called to customer service, to greet a source, police official or angry reader, it was to that building that I went. To reach my guest, I’d have to wade through a sea of cubicles populated by faces that were as familiar to me as those of my own family.

There was Sarah, from circulation, working the phones hard and throwing a quick wave of the hand in my direction. There was Stephen — I never was sure which department he was in — with a phone crushed between his shoulder and chin as he worked out a problem on a calculator.

There were Pat and Dottie and Venise, all hard at work, and every one of them offering me some kind of greeting as I made my way toward the business at hand.

And when I was done with that business, I never found any reason to rush out of that hustling, bustling place to return to my desk at 104 Park St.

At one time, the photographers occupied the rear of that big building and I could spend an hour there gossiping or watching them develop film in the dark room. From the big windows in that section, I could keep an eye on Kennedy Park and the 1,000 potential stories that presented themselves there daily.

There was a little gym back there, too (I used it once and got pretty ripped) and an elevator going to the upper floors, which housed all the financial big cats with whom I had little association.

But the best thing about that magnificent building was a single door, just up a couple stairs from customer service, that led to Shangri La.

My version of Shangri La, anyway. Beyond that door was a lounge area big enough and equipped enough to serve as a temporary apartment for a vagabond like me if he ever needed such a place.

There was a big leather couch down in there and a decent sized television. There was a full kitchen in the place and the cupboards were even stocked with the essentials. There was a bathroom, a closet and a couple big tables with the latest Sun Journal edition spread out all over them.

Some nights, when the editors were being particularly irksome, I’d retreat to that little apartment and nobody could find me until I wanted to be found.

Some nights I went there even when I WASN’T working. Because that building, like the one next door at 104 Park St., was more like home than any of the crummy apartments I lived in at the time. It was as much a home as the very house I grew up in back in Waterville.

Even the exterior of that big block of a building had plenty to offer me. I used to park my motorcycle in the shades of its overhangs, and bounce a racket ball against its concrete walls while waiting for news to break.

And now it’s all coming down to make way for a 104-unit apartment building and, yep, that’s progress, and probably progress in the right direction.

Still doesn’t mean I have to like it.

And there’s a grand irony to this, too. As I sit here, doing the woe-is-me thing and telling you what things were like in better days, there’s a whole population of old-timers who would like to slap me across the face.

Those old-timers, they remember when that corner at Park and Pine used to house the DeWitt Hotel, the grandest, most spectacular place you’d ever find north of Boston.

I imagine in 1965, when wrecking crews came for the old hotel, at least one young man with a heart full of memories took a seat on the side of Park Street and watched it come down.

He probably watched in dread silence, memories fluttering through his head like a photo album strewn to the wind, as the beloved building came down piece by piece.

He might have even shed a quiet tear, that man.

Wouldn’t blame him if he did.