I’ve walked past the Central Building at least a couple hundred times but I had never smelled it.

The historic building did not emit a noticeable aroma, so far as I can recall.

But on the sunny afternoon of Memorial Day, as I walked east on Broadway Street and looked south across the Baker Middle School football field at the imposing three-story structure, the mild south wind carried, along with the pleasant soft scents of lilac and mown grass, an acrid odor.

Five days earlier the Central Building was on fire.

Smoke billowed from its windows and its roof, forming a foul plume visible for many miles around.

Even most of a week later the heat had not quite dissipated.

Nor had the smell.

It was also palpable a day later, on May 28, when I walked on Court Avenue, just south of the Central Building. The wind had swung round to the north.

It was unpleasant, that smell, lacking the qualities of, say, a campfire kindled in chunks of pine or tamarack.

The chemists who concoct ersatz versions of scents, to infuse cans of air freshener or pieces of cardboard hung from rear-view mirrors, do not seek to replicate the aroma that lingers after a venerable building has been charred.

The Central Building still stood as I walked by, as it has for 108 years.

Anyone who was not familiar with it, and who looked only briefly, might not have connected the smell to the structure, or recognized that anything was amiss.

But even from across the field, a distance of a few hundred feet, I could see the damage.

Broken windows.

Gaps in the line of tuffstone blocks that form the parapet around the collapsed roof.

As of this writing, investigators haven’t figured out what caused the fire.

The Central Building’s future hasn’t been officially decided, but it seems all but certain that it will be torn down.

Casey Kump, a deputy state fire marshal, told me on May 27 that he doubts the 57,000-square-foot structure can be saved.

Betty Palmer, interim superintendent of the Baker School District, and Doug Dalton, president of Baker Technical Institute, which had been overseeing removal of asbestos from the building and the recent replacement of a roof that’s now gone, concurred with Kump.

The intense heat damaged the steel frame hidden behind the exterior wall of tuffstone mined near Pleasant Valley.

In one important sense this fire is nothing like as significant as the blaze that destroyed much of Baker High School in February 1989, an event that naturally occurred to people who experienced both disasters.

That building, at 2500 E St., housed more than 500 students. The 1989 fire caused considerable upheaval.

The Central Building, by contrast, has been closed since 2009.

This fire won’t displace BMS students, who attend classes in the nearby Helen M. Stack building.

But this isn’t a matter that can be measured solely by short-term effects.

The destruction of the Central Building constitutes an irreplaceable loss for a city which celebrates its architectural history.

Although not quite the oldest surviving school in Baker City — the former North Baker School, now the Baker Early Learning Center, was built in 1909 at 2725 Seventh St. — the Central Building is noteworthy.

It has a formidable presence.

When I walked along the sidewalk on the building’s north side, past the steps that lead to its entrance, with “Baker High School 1916” etched into the stone, I thought often that such a structure speaks more strongly to the stability and prominence of a community than any number of promotional slogans can do.

A new town, freshly hewn from the frontier, typically builds most of its structures, including its schools, from wood.

But once a city has established a more robust foundation, in economic and political and cultural terms, its residents tend to favor public buildings that reflect a sense of permanence, and confidence.

Stone or brick structures.

These need not be graceful.

It is not an adjective I associate with the Central Building, to be sure.

But it has gravitas.

A palpable eminence that I felt every time I strolled past.

I gained a greater appreciation for the Central Building, and for its place in Baker City’s legacy, a few years ago after reading the 1926 edition of The Nugget, the yearbook for Baker High School.

The building was constructed as the high school and served that purpose until 1952, when the school on E Street was finished.

In later decades the Central Building housed elementary students and, more recently, BMS classes.

I watched my older son, Alexander, perform in band concerts in the auditorium.

But after I had leafed through the 1926 yearbook pages, and marveled over the sepia photos, I understood, as I had not before, that the building, through two world wars and a terrible flu pandemic and a great depression, was an integral part of life in Baker City.

The Central Building no longer seemed to me so forlorn, bereft, as it was, of the energy that youth bring to any structure they inhabit.

It had gained in my eyes a certain dignity even as it stood silent, with no agile feet clambering up and down the stairs.

As I stood on the morning of May 22, where I had so often walked, and watched smoke waft from the building as the first of the many fire trucks arrived, I wondered about its fate.

I didn’t anticipate — or perhaps I just didn’t want to believe — that the damage would be so dreadful.

I can scarcely imagine seeing that block, between Washington and Court avenues, and Fifth and Sixth streets, empty.

It has not been so since 1916.

Which means no one living here today has ever seen such a sight either.

It seems likely that we will be left with nothing but photographs and hunks of tuffstone that might be salvaged.

This seems to me a paltry yield for more than a century of history.

Photographs can’t cast a welcome patch of shade across a sidewalk on a sweltering August afternoon, as the Central Building did for me so many times.

I’m saddened even to contemplate my future walks. To think that, in the chill of January, when the cold and the dark come early, I will no longer look up at the empty windows and conjure a vision of those same spaces, warmed by soft light as, behind those thick heavy walls, teenagers, with most of the 20th century ahead of them, attend to their studious tasks.