On a summer evening 30 years from now, an old desk clerk and his young apprentice pass the time in the lobby of a hotel on the Des Moines riverfront.

“Tell me the story, old dude,” says the young man. “You promised you would reveal how this place came to be.”

“All right. It went something like this,” his elder replies. “Back in 2012, this was the site of the great and terrible Battle of the Bricks. Oh, many a hard skirmish was fought, I guarantee you. When you mix tax increment financing with masonry, there’s no shortage of fascinating points to be settled.

“On one side, you had folks who wanted to use thin bricks, just an inch or so across. On the other, the traditional types who wanted full bricks, a good 3 5/8 inches from side to side.”

“What am I, a civil engineer? Get to the human drama.”

“Well, it seems that the good citizens who lived around here didn’t want a hotel at all. They wanted to see solid, respectable people living in condominiums, instead of conventioneers interested only in debauchery and free tote bags. Or if it had to be a hotel, they wondered why the guests couldn’t arrive via thin air, instead of Second Avenue.

“All in all, they preferred to keep what was already there.”

“What was already there?”

“I think it was an educational exhibit on urban blight. Anyway, they weren’t happy, no matter how thick the bricks. They wanted to wait for a better idea to come along.”

“So why didn’t everybody just wait?”

“The owner of this property had been waiting 30 years already. Three times he thought he had a deal with residential developers, and three times it fell through. Then along came this young fella, name of Ravi Patel.”

“Doesn’t sound like a traditional Des Moines business name.”

“Nope, he was from the East. Iowa City, I think. He rolls into town and decides to buy the land and put up a hotel like the ones he and his dad were building in Muscatine and Clinton, burgs like that.

“He had a simple plan, but back in those days nobody did big projects without getting help from some level of government. It got to where the government would send you a check every so often just in case you had something in mind.”

“Was that before the United States went broke and had to raffle off its aircraft carriers?”

“Just a little bit, yes. So when the city of Des Moines decided to chip in some money, the city leaders said, if you want our help, you have to do things our way. Build us two hotels instead of just one, and while you’re at it, throw in a parking garage.

“‘Fine,’ says Ravi, and he set out to make the neighbors happy. He changed the design, moved the buildings around like a kid with a set of Legos and tried to find a way to turn garbage collection into more of a spectator event.

“Well, the neighbors never were satisfied. Their dream had been to move into a dynamic, growing downtown in which the view from their windows never changed.

“But finally the hotel got built.”

“What about the bricks? Did they use thin ones or thick ones?”

“No one knows. So many of the records vanished on Dec. 21 of that year, the day the world nearly came to an end.

“Believe me, you do not want to be standing in the wrong place when there’s a rip in the space-time continuum — I can still see my brother flying straight up like a rocket. But that’s a story for another evening.”

“Well, you sure can’t tell about the bricks by looking at the hotel now.”

“Nope, not with all of these 500-year floods,” says the old man. “With that coat of mud, the place looks like it was made out of adobe, doesn’t it?”