Nostalgia - ghosts in the machine...
For the uninformed, I'm spending a few days in Chicago and staying at the Palmer House Hotel, the longest continuously operating hotel in North America. For everyone's info, I did get my stay legnthened, so unfortunately, you won't get a blog entry about my night as a homeless person in Chicago.
I just took a walk around the hotel's lower floors and did a bit of reasearch. The current hotel is the 3rd Palmer House hotel...the first burned down in the Great Chicago Fire (only 2 weeks after it had opened), but was rebuilt across the street. That one was demolished in the 20's and the current one was rebuilt on the same location. Each hotel was more elaborate than the last. I came across a very interesting article in an electricians magazine about the work done on the hotel by the electrical crew - and some of the problems endemic to working in a historic building. The whole place was built with marble and plaster, so there are lots of places where there just isn't a way to run any wire without boring holes through the walls! They have, over the years, dropped a number of the ceilings to accommodate new lighting systems and the electricians note that they've seen up to 3 levels of ceilings above the current ones...some of which are very ornate and worth refurbishing, in their opinion.
Having read this information about the hotel, I now know why the bathrooms don't have exhaust fans in them - how do you create an exhaust system through the plaster??? So, I now forgive them for this and will wipe the fogged mirror without cursing anyone tomorrow morning.
But while walking around through the still very 20's-designed lower floors, the feeling of nostalgia was extremely powerful. This is what I love about old places and antiques...that feeling that these things are a direct connection to the past - a sort-of time machine. When I walked up a spiral staircase at one end of this hotel's immense entry hall, sheilded from most of the hotel guests, I could could sense how someone in the late 1920's could have walked up the same stairway, and there is a connection in time with this simple act since the act itself is exactly the same as performed 85 years ago, but separated only by years. It is a tangible glimpse into the past. The same feeling was felt when walking down empty halls of heavy art-deco wainscot.
These historical moments...they're all so out of place, but at the same time so very welcome. When I think of how Houston (my current hometown) spent most of the last few decades destroying everything old and putting up new, it makes me gag. History in Houston is so very slim, while it stares at you from every angle here in Chicago - and moreso in many other cities (like San Franciso...). Its kinda funny that this US history is so very new, barely 200 years old at its oldest - while in Europe, the tangible history can be of such age, it is difficult to comprehend.
But I wonder at the real use of historical connections of this sort. Are they merely items to induce nostalgia? I walked through Union Station in Kansas City this summer - a giant, beautiful train station that was practically falling down 20 years ago, but that has been completely restored at an enormous cost (and now is in danger of closing since they're having problems funding the place). The restoration is beautiful, but it isn't really authentic...its a close approximation of what was there, but with modern nods to convenience and commerce. The old ticket office, for instance, has become a swanky restaurant. The immense and (strangely) beautiful restrooms have infra-red sensors to turn on the water and flush the commodes. This was false nostalgia.
Just outside of downtown Houston, across from the Amtrak station, is a crumbling building of a style that strikes me as beautiful. Once, when walking around downtown, I happened across a small streetside office labeled "Houston Historic Society" so I wandered in and inquired if they knew anything about the building. They noted that it was an old VA hospital and immediately asked me, jokingly, if I wanted to buy it. They'd been looking for a buyer for some time to save the place. Looking at the building, there's a side of me that would love to see it restored to being a usable entity - but another side of me feels that its current state is far more honest...a true view of the grand thing that it once was. The strikes against it are many - restoration would easily cost millions, it is rather hard to get to, and it is not in the best part of town. I suspect it will remain a crumbling beauty since the land is not particularly marketable in the first place.
But in a town where history is generally considered anything that happened 30 years ago or less, trying to preserve a building from the early few decades of the 1900's seems like something honorable to do. Too many of Houston's landmarks have been destroyed in order to further dubious "progress" while others have been reworked so much that they bear little to no resemblance of their former spectacular selves (consider the Rice Lofts...formerly the Rice Hotel).
A few months ago, while wandering through a resale shop, I came across an unusual divan upholstered in green velvet with light green tassels all around the periphery at the floor level. It was a bit threadbare, but it held a definite aura of nostalgia about it. It was advertised as a divan that was originally in the lobby of the great Shamrock Hotel, one of Houston's over-the-top claims to fame in the 50's (watch Giant to see it...so I'm told), but razed and turned into a parking lot in the mid 80's - I believe the land now sports a rather typical glass and metal office building. This green oddity that stood before me in that resale shop had more power to transport me to the past than any restoration project could. This was the real deal and I let my hand slide across the faded velvet in the knowledge that someone else could have done the same thing 50 years ago. A brush with the past was at my fingertips - much like the brush with the ghosts of the Palmer House Hotel I felt while walking up the spiral stairs this evening. And as far as I'm concerned, if nostalgia is the only reason to save such things, that is reason enough. Its not history, directly - but its power to elicit human emotion is priceless.
Ah, nostalgia.
I just took a walk around the hotel's lower floors and did a bit of reasearch. The current hotel is the 3rd Palmer House hotel...the first burned down in the Great Chicago Fire (only 2 weeks after it had opened), but was rebuilt across the street. That one was demolished in the 20's and the current one was rebuilt on the same location. Each hotel was more elaborate than the last. I came across a very interesting article in an electricians magazine about the work done on the hotel by the electrical crew - and some of the problems endemic to working in a historic building. The whole place was built with marble and plaster, so there are lots of places where there just isn't a way to run any wire without boring holes through the walls! They have, over the years, dropped a number of the ceilings to accommodate new lighting systems and the electricians note that they've seen up to 3 levels of ceilings above the current ones...some of which are very ornate and worth refurbishing, in their opinion.
Having read this information about the hotel, I now know why the bathrooms don't have exhaust fans in them - how do you create an exhaust system through the plaster??? So, I now forgive them for this and will wipe the fogged mirror without cursing anyone tomorrow morning.
But while walking around through the still very 20's-designed lower floors, the feeling of nostalgia was extremely powerful. This is what I love about old places and antiques...that feeling that these things are a direct connection to the past - a sort-of time machine. When I walked up a spiral staircase at one end of this hotel's immense entry hall, sheilded from most of the hotel guests, I could could sense how someone in the late 1920's could have walked up the same stairway, and there is a connection in time with this simple act since the act itself is exactly the same as performed 85 years ago, but separated only by years. It is a tangible glimpse into the past. The same feeling was felt when walking down empty halls of heavy art-deco wainscot.
These historical moments...they're all so out of place, but at the same time so very welcome. When I think of how Houston (my current hometown) spent most of the last few decades destroying everything old and putting up new, it makes me gag. History in Houston is so very slim, while it stares at you from every angle here in Chicago - and moreso in many other cities (like San Franciso...). Its kinda funny that this US history is so very new, barely 200 years old at its oldest - while in Europe, the tangible history can be of such age, it is difficult to comprehend.
But I wonder at the real use of historical connections of this sort. Are they merely items to induce nostalgia? I walked through Union Station in Kansas City this summer - a giant, beautiful train station that was practically falling down 20 years ago, but that has been completely restored at an enormous cost (and now is in danger of closing since they're having problems funding the place). The restoration is beautiful, but it isn't really authentic...its a close approximation of what was there, but with modern nods to convenience and commerce. The old ticket office, for instance, has become a swanky restaurant. The immense and (strangely) beautiful restrooms have infra-red sensors to turn on the water and flush the commodes. This was false nostalgia.
Just outside of downtown Houston, across from the Amtrak station, is a crumbling building of a style that strikes me as beautiful. Once, when walking around downtown, I happened across a small streetside office labeled "Houston Historic Society" so I wandered in and inquired if they knew anything about the building. They noted that it was an old VA hospital and immediately asked me, jokingly, if I wanted to buy it. They'd been looking for a buyer for some time to save the place. Looking at the building, there's a side of me that would love to see it restored to being a usable entity - but another side of me feels that its current state is far more honest...a true view of the grand thing that it once was. The strikes against it are many - restoration would easily cost millions, it is rather hard to get to, and it is not in the best part of town. I suspect it will remain a crumbling beauty since the land is not particularly marketable in the first place.
But in a town where history is generally considered anything that happened 30 years ago or less, trying to preserve a building from the early few decades of the 1900's seems like something honorable to do. Too many of Houston's landmarks have been destroyed in order to further dubious "progress" while others have been reworked so much that they bear little to no resemblance of their former spectacular selves (consider the Rice Lofts...formerly the Rice Hotel).
A few months ago, while wandering through a resale shop, I came across an unusual divan upholstered in green velvet with light green tassels all around the periphery at the floor level. It was a bit threadbare, but it held a definite aura of nostalgia about it. It was advertised as a divan that was originally in the lobby of the great Shamrock Hotel, one of Houston's over-the-top claims to fame in the 50's (watch Giant to see it...so I'm told), but razed and turned into a parking lot in the mid 80's - I believe the land now sports a rather typical glass and metal office building. This green oddity that stood before me in that resale shop had more power to transport me to the past than any restoration project could. This was the real deal and I let my hand slide across the faded velvet in the knowledge that someone else could have done the same thing 50 years ago. A brush with the past was at my fingertips - much like the brush with the ghosts of the Palmer House Hotel I felt while walking up the spiral stairs this evening. And as far as I'm concerned, if nostalgia is the only reason to save such things, that is reason enough. Its not history, directly - but its power to elicit human emotion is priceless.
Ah, nostalgia.
posted by Erik | 9:40 PM
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