The Nostalgia Whore Strikes Again

Other pictures here.

Years ago I built a house in the woods in central Minnesota. Well, I undertook a range of tasks to that end, though a lot of key pieces of the process—framing, concrete work, siding, roofing—were done by others. Anyway, that’s a long time ago; the house by now has belonged to others for much longer than I owned it.

But one of the things I learned from that time came from the many weekends my then-wife and I spent clearing the lot before the proper house building began. The building site was a wooded 1.3 acre lot on a small lake, a typical Northern Minnesota plot of ground. And this is one of the things I learned: the forest contains much more dead stuff than you think from a casual look. We needed to clean up the lot and clear some trees for the house and driveway. In the end I estimated that fully 1/3 of the stuff on our lot (and on the surrounding lots) was dead and in some stage of decay; another 1/3 was past its prime and in the process of dying; and the final third was alive and growing and thriving. This was not at all what I felt intuitively, even though I had grown up in exactly this environment and had spent a fair amount of time in the woods (admittedly, riding dirt bikes or bicycles and not, as my brother had done, studying the forest or its animals).

This isn’t really what’s on my mind, but I’m reminded of this time almost 30 years ago by my current situation.

After giving up our crash pad apartment in Louisville last year, I now have no place to stay when I'm on reserve. With increasing seniority, I can generally avoid reserve nowadays--as a group we found ourselves on reserve so rarely that after a dozen years we let the crash pad go as an unnecessary expense. But I can't always avoid it, so where to stay? One solution is to look for a cheap hotel. $70 is a pretty good nightly rate for a nearly-new Holiday Inn near the airport, but I had to spend a full two weeks on reserve in June and I felt I should look for something even cheaper. The solution: the FORMER Holiday Inn, which is now in private hands. Cost: $55. Cool. (My hope is that I'd be assigned flying for most of this time, and would not spend two weeks sitting in a hotel at my own expense. As it happened, of course, I was called only once during this period to fly, and then just a mid-day out-and-back. So I had to pony up for the whole two weeks.)

A cheap hotel is nice for the wallet, but the savings have to come from something. And after a few days here I’m reminded of my time clearing deadfall on my wooded Minnesota lot. While the new Holiday Inn is a single building of, say, 200 rooms, the old place is considerably larger. The unavoidable sense is that Holiday Inn abandoned the old place when its upkeep became problematic, and evidence of the maintenance free-fall is everywhere.

I have a particular soft spot for the decayed and abandoned, and infrastructure stuff in particular exercises a perverse hold on me. I love old buildings waiting for the wrecking ball, unused railroad tracks, abandoned stretches of roadway, the things that correspond to the 1/3 of the forest that’s dead and decaying. And everybody is aware of (and many of us are infatuated with) the new and growing, new construction and development with its attendant anticipation and promise.

But what of that middle third, that segment that is past its prime and headed rapidly downhill? Well, that’s this hotel. If I have an unaccountable love for the decaying, then this should be my kind of place.

I’m guessing the place has 600 rooms [460, I learned later]. It’s billed as a “conference center,” though I can’t imagine too many conferences wanting anything to do with it. The hotel is split into two large buildings separated by a roadway. There is an enclosed, elevated footbridge that connects the two buildings. Evidently one building existed first, and the second was added in a burst of deluded grandeur (or was built as a rival hotel and then incorporated). Both buildings are now quite tired. I’ve only stayed in one of the buildings, the newer one as it turns out. The original building dates from the 50s or 60s, and the newer one from a decade or so later. The main office and a couple of mostly-closed restaurants and the pool are located in the other building; my building has a number of public rooms as well, but they're rarely used. My building especially seems quite isolated (tonight mine is the only car in the parking lot on this side).

I’ve stayed here now on three or four occasions. One of the things that first struck me is the large meeting room in this building that is covered by a glass dome. Nothing special there, except that the entire dome is now covered by a huge tarpaulin. I’m guessing this room used to be the building’s swimming pool, but first it was filled in and made a convention hall, and then the roof, when it began to leak, was just covered over. A couple weeks ago there was a big gathering in there and it seemed a little… spooky. What is supposed to bring a flood of natural light instead brings a kind of black hole effect.

Nothing lasts forever, of course, and other little signs of decay are everywhere. I went to walk across the elevated footbridge yesterday, and I found it’s been sealed off--though ventilation windows along its plexiglass-domed length are tilted open. It's a concrete walkway covered by an arched plexiglass top like a long covered wagon. Doors have been haphazardly installed on both ends, held shut on my end with a couple of long wood screws pushed through the door into the jamb. Both sides' walkway entrances are via staircases that lead to nothing else, and one walks up the steps--the hallways and carpets now unused and filthy--to find blocked passages. No signs indicate that the walkway is there, or that it's closed. Elsewhere the carpets—there’s a lot of carpeting—are stained and puckered and threadbare in places. All the doors have numerous coats of paint on them, walls have holes from missing fixtures, wallpaper seams have begun to separate, the elevators are slow and show signs of years of hard use. Everything smells a little damp. My building is mostly empty—looking at it at night, one sees just a couple lights burning among its eight stories. Most guests are in the other building, though even that is sparsely-populated. Hard to see a workable business model in all this.

It's not that the place is ready for the wrecking ball: that would augment the tragedy, as it's certainly still a legitimately functional facility. But the vector is undeniable. The parking lots are heaved and veined with cracks sprouting all manner of weeds, and there's clearly losing battle being waged against entropy to keep the outsides looking fresh. Maintenance crews dance either side of a line between things needing paint and things looking like they've been painted too often. And the facility isn't generating anything like the money needed to fix any of it.

I can’t help wondering what it is to stand watch over a decaying relic like this. There is an occasional maintenance person in the halls or roaming the grounds in a golf cart; yesterday there was someone working on one of the two elevators in this building. There is a "Sales and Catering" office in my building, the only managerial presence on this side. The office is mostly empty, though lights are on during business hours. I've talked to a manager on occasion (usually about ensuring a special “pilot rate” they offer) and I have to wonder: what is it like to spend one’s working years managing a thing on the downslope, a thing which is not long for the world? I can’t help thinking that a bad storm that goes thru and breaks a bunch of windows, or a flooding of the nearby creek would be all it would take to seal the fate of the place. (Interestingly, the original building is built on a drainage creek, and there's a flood wall not around the building, but separating it from the rest of the world. A flood would take the building but save everything else. One must drive one's car in and out of huge, swinging steel flood gates, silently waiting for the next apocalyptic spring thaw.)

On my drive to and from KY, I pass an abandoned hotel off the freeway in Lafayette, IN. I've been passing the same hotel now for 13 years, and it's been abandoned the whole time. It's amazing how quickly the rot takes over. Over that time the pool house has developed several large holes in its roof, holes that get worse and worse each year. Most of the windows are broken, and the parking lot is sprouting trees through cracks in the pavement. What once looked perhaps temporarily closed is now unquestionably beyond redemption.

I can't help thinking my current abode will soon sing a similar tune.

Within These Walls

Though it has to have been quite recently, I don’t remember when I first heard of the Kowloon Walled City. But it was a place custom-made to capture the imagination. Mine, anyway.

Demolished by the Hong Kong government in 1993-4, the Kowloon Walled City was a collection of some 350 buildings constructed on a couple city blocks’ worth of land in Kowloon near the now-defunct Kai Tak airport. Though it began as a military fort, it grew in recent times into a dense community, a kind of city within a city that, legend had it, existed off the grid, outside regular law and order. At the end, at least, the City was said to be controlled by the Chinese organized crime syndicates known as the Triads (though like many legends of the Walled City this is now disputed). With an official population of 33,000 residents (some estimates put the number as high as 50,000), the Walled City notoriously sported the highest population density on Earth (extrapolated, some 3.2 million people per square mile; that’s considerably denser than the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side, previously thought to take the prize).

I first flew into Hong Kong when I came to the MD-11 in 2009 or so. The Walled City was long gone by then, but in historical terms I feel like I just missed it. From my first visit to this place I was taken by the grimy back streets and chaotic, ramshackle construction (as my tedious - photos - attest), and in truth there’s a lot of Hong Kong that looks very similar to pictures of the Walled City (our old hotel on Nathan Road is right next to a similar conglomeration of buildings called the Chungking Mansions—I’d never heard of that place either until researching the KWC). There’s a lot of crumbling masonry construction here, and many old residential buildings seem to be kept going by improvised repairs. By our standards, many seem on the verge of collapse, or at least well on their way. So it’s not the construction of the Walled City itself that is odd: it’s how tightly packed it was. You might say the Walled City was Hong Kong only more so. The pictures remind one of the city of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, incredibly dense and dark and wet and tangled. 

The Wikipedia article details some of the history of this plot of land, and though there was a residential presence for much of the last 80 years most of the construction that housed such a density of people dated from the 1960s-80s. Though Hong Kong was ruled by the British, the Walled City was exempt, an area still under Chinese control. At the end of WWII, Chinese squatters flocked into the City under Chinese protection. The British tried to dislodge them, but eventually washed their hands of the place. Keeping order there was more trouble than was deemed worthwhile. This situation—governance by in-absentia Chinese, and abandonment by the Brits—allowed the drugs and gambling and prostitution businesses to grow unchecked. It also meant that nobody was governing the construction process as more and more buildings were erected (though, interestingly, Wikipedia says that the proximity of the Walled City to the Kai Tak airport meant that no buildings could be built above 14 stories in height; I wonder who agreed to and enforced that rule?). Structures were built wherever they could be made to fit. 

Yet the vice and mayhem existed cheek-by-jowl with pensioners and thousands of families, all crammed into tiny spaces (the article says most apartments were only 250 square feet). It became very nearly a self-contained ecosystem, as most everything a person wanted or needed could be had within the City's walls. Numerous unlicensed doctors and dentists operated there--that is, medical professionals who wanted to avoid the exorbitant licensing fees of Hong Kong (a unique subculture that would be a fascinating study in and of itself) and there were many restaurants and a motley assortment of schools and daycares. There was mail service, though very few people were able to navigate the compound in any comprehensive way (I love the story of the old woman who lived there for years but said she never went anywhere but directly to and from her residence, so she didn’t know the rest of the place at all). Though it seems that several water mains were eventually routed to the City, there were no regular utility services since the city was not involved in the construction. And yet the residents seem to have cobbled together utilities, as the many pictures of bakeries and small factories and tiny apartments with a tap and bare light bulbs attest. But in most cases ad hoc means improvised: pictures show an unruly tangle of wires and pipes and hoses in all the alleyways, many of which leaked so that the dark passages were frequently damp. The alleyways themselves were originally open passages between buildings, but most of them were covered and structures built atop them, so that there were hundreds of internal passageways known only to the residents of each particular section. The rooftops were public outdoor spaces, frequently used by children and by the residents of the upper floors.

I’ve taken pictures in Shanghai of an old part of the city that reminds me of the Walled City, but without the verticality. Many of the structures in this part of Shanghai look to be uninhabitable, and yet clean and smartly-dressed people can be seen incongruously issuing from them. And so it must have been with the Walled City: thousands of children were raised there, leaving their residences inside the walls to walk to school like all other kids. It’s the juxtaposition of these extremes—normal family life next to brothels and drug dens and cookie factories and Chinese bakeries and illegal doctors, all piled on top of each other in incredible density—that the pictures bring home to you. Pictures do so much better than words here. The photos of the exterior show a chaos of birdcage balconies and rooftop porches and a forest of antennas, all crammed together higgledy-piggledy without adhering to any master plan.

At least in theory—setting aside the whole organized crime angle, which would be quite beyond my ken—I would give my eye teeth to explore such a place. Well, there exists the next best thing: I learned that a book of photographs and stories about the Walled City by Britons Greg Girard and Ian Lambot had been published around the time of the City’s destruction. The stories of the people who lived here and the small factories that operated here, all under the radar, in the midst of one of Asia’s premier and most bustling and cosmopolitan cities is one of those stranger-than-fiction things. The book—City of Darkness—is out of print and the few copies available on Amazon were asking some $900. But as luck would have it, the authors are producing a 20-year anniversary edition with substantial updates—City of Darkness Revisited. The reissue project was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign, and though I missed the campaign I was thrilled to find that I could pre-order the new book from London. Deliveries are expected in September.

I went through a period where I was infatuated with the Kai Tak airport. It was another of those places that could only have existed here, an incredibly busy one-runway airport in one of the world’s densest and most vibrant cities, an airport built on created land which required huge jets to fly very close to—and in some cases below—the skyline of the city. (Do a search on YouTube sometime for “Kai Tak” and you’ll see some spectacular airplane footage.) The spit of land is still readily visible jutting out into Victoria Harbour, now converted to a cruise ship dock and terminal. The Walled City was situated right off the end of the runway, and much of the footage of airplanes scarily close to buildings was doubtless taken from the rooftops of the Walled City, jumbo jets passing in a steep bank, so close you could read the writing on the fuselage. (Many of our pilots have stories of flying in and out of Kai Tak, though it was closed by the time I got hired here.)

About a year ago I walked the five or six miles from our hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui over to look at the remains of Kai Tak (alas, not being able to see much). At that time I had not yet heard of the Walled City, or I would certainly have looked for its remains. Though the Walled City is gone, the city of Hong Kong put up a park on the exact footprint of the old Walled City, called, appropriately enough, the Kowloon Walled City Park. That was the destination for today’s walk. Only a few artifacts remain of the settlement. Several of the entry gates are still there, and there are maps and diagrams throughout the park showing the former locations of things. But knowing it was here is a far cry from seeing it in person. My loss, but luckily a good record of the place exists.

(In addition to Wikipedia, much of this information--and most of the photos--come from Greg Girard and Ian Lambot via their website, and from a Daily Mail newspaper story using the same source.)

Requiem for a Crash Pad

This post belongs in the Things That Cannot Possibly Be Interesting To Others category, but for my own purposes I feel I should document this little bit of my history as it passes.

***

I was hired in this job on September 6, 2001, five days before the events of 9/11. This working life began with a couple days of orientation followed by six or eight weeks of classroom and simulator training. All new-hires--my class had 16 pilots--are put up in a hotel for our first couple months to give us time to settle in and to help us avoid distraction during the hectic training period. But eventually we needed to figure out our living situation vis-a-vis this new (and hopefully final) job. Airline pilots traditionally commute to work in pretty high proportion, but this is our choice; the company expects you to live in domicile, and if you choose otherwise it becomes your burden to accept. Over half of my class picked up their lives and moved to Louisville. 

This was an enticing option; I had at that point been an airline pilot for almost eight years, and I had commuted to work for all but a year of that. (My one-year exception to the commuting rule had been my first year at Air Wisconsin, when I lived in, and worked out of, Appleton. Having a 15-minute drive home at the end of a flying day was a luxury I could hardly wrap my head around. Alas, it was not to last; they closed the ATW base and moved us all to Chicago within a year of my being hired.) The idea of spending the rest of my flying career operating in and out of my home city was really attractive. But a pilot commute is pretty standard, and Susan was well underway with her own career--which was not, like mine, portable. (It's also a great thing that her family and lifelong friends are all right in ATW. If I'm going to be gone half my life, this is a great setup for her--and, by extension, for me.) 

So as I had done at my other airline jobs, I set up a crash pad apartment for use when in Louisville. Talk to any pilot for a commuter or regional airline and you'll get hours of lurid crash pad stories: grown adults--men, mostly--living in squalor and giving vent to their basest urges (like, say, not decorating or cleaning or washing their sheets, to say nothing of social activities). I'm lucky in that my crash pad experiences have been mostly tame and peaceful (though I did share a one bedroom apartment off the Blue Line Cumberland stop in Chicago for a while with 18 other pilots and flight attendants). When I got based in Escanaba, MI for my first airline job, I found a cute old little house that I shared with a couple other guys, while much of the rest of the domicile stayed at "the mansion" a couple miles out of town on Lake Michigan. I could write a book about the Animal House hijinx of that place. Alas, that's another post.

The rigors of training naturally cause classmates to pair up, and a group of four of us quickly became friends and began driving together between the hotel and the classroom, four late-thirties guys in my hulking 1981 Cadillac Seville. As new-hires, we were all slated to have reserve schedules, which meant we would all need a place to stay in town long-term. When it came to looking for a crash pad, the four of us naturally threw in together.

I still remember the process. Of the four of us, another guy and I came from the regional airlines. The other two guys were corporate and military, respectively. These two guys were not familiar with crash pads, and since we commuter dudes had been down this road many times we were given license to secure something for all. In what now seems a most unlikely bit of serendipity, this other commuter guy and I had almost identical visions of what to look for, and we quickly agreed on a location: the Bardstown Road area of Louisville was the city's nexus of creativity and diversity, a couple-mile stretch of restaurants and coffee shops and movie houses and bookstores and tattoo parlors and art galleries. And the area is adjacent to a huge Frederick Law Olmstead-designed park, Cherokee Park, which was good for daily walking / jogging. My kind of place.

I remember us setting aside a day for the search, and, local paper in hand, we headed out to the Twig and Leaf (still extant) and made phone calls over breakfast. It took two calls. Our second call inquired about a converted "carriage house" in the historic Cherokee Triangle section of town. Two bedrooms, $600 a month plus utilities. We called, she sounded friendly, and we arranged to meet in half an hour. When we met, she expressed skepticism that we fancy airline pilots would be happy with such… modest accommodations. The place was kind of a dump. The previous tenants, last in a long line of itinerant visitors--had been a couple college-age girls. My buddy and I took a quick look and said "It's perfect!" She was doubtful, but we insisted.

That was 12 years ago, late October of 2001. 

Junior pilots at most airlines bid reserve schedules, meaning that for our assigned days (generally week on / week off) we were not assigned specific trips in advance, but had to sit around waiting for the phone to ring with an assignment. On any given day we may fly and we may not. On these days (and for a specified number of hours) we had to be contactable by phone and be no more than 90 minutes from the airport ready to fly. Over the first three or four years we probably few something less than 50% of our assigned days, so we got lots of quality time together sitting around in the crash pad. We assembled a ratty collection of Goodwill furniture, an old TV, and various odds and ends that we collected from our houses to flesh out kitchenware and towels and so on. We bought an X-Box. We spent our free time walking in the park or along Bardstown Road, going to baseball games or tossing a baseball in the backyard, test driving cars, lurking in the nearby bookstores, using the local library's computers, going to movies, grilling out, fixing our old airport cars. And swapping flying stores from past and present days. Those were great times, and even seemed like it at the time. We cemented friendships and got to know Louisville, which is an interesting and multifaceted city. 

The inmate roster changed a bit over the years. We began with the four of us, and then one guy left to fly an airplane in the Iraq War; he was replaced by a woman who had helped my commuter buddy and me get hired here. She left when the military guy came back (no loss for her; she never took too kindly to the place, as one can imagine). But as we got more seniority we bid schedules that let us fly more and sit less. And the crash pad got less and less use. We brought in a couple more people, since nobody was using the place much and more bodies meant cheaper rent. But the place was crowded with four; having six would never work except by there never being more than two or three folks there at a time. Time passed, and our usage continued to dwindle. Finally, a couple guys pulled out and a couple others expressed interest in doing the same. (You can't really get here except by car, and as our old junkers would break down and get sent to the crusher we had to decide whether to shell out another couple grand for a different car or just spend that money on an occasional hotel room instead.)

We hung on in this tentative state for about 18 months, and now it's recently been decided that it's time to pull the plug. And I find I'm in mourning about this. Part of it is just simple nostalgia: a lot of water has passed under the bridge in these dozen years, and this is (to borrow Hemingway's phrase) The End Of Something. Though the place is really a dump, I've grown fond of it and comfortable with its quirks. It's hot in summer and cold in winter, but it doesn't leak. And it's in the best inner-city location imaginable, I'd say. Plus, our landlords--who live in the main house for which this carriage house was once the garage--are really first-rate people. We've become fast friends, the guy and me, not least because we're both drummers and movie buffs and we both despise what has become of political conservatism in this country. I could always count on Scotty to bring me back to sanity after a week-long trip with a bunch of Faux Noise devotees. I've lived in four different houses in Appleton in the time that I've been in this one crash pad, so in a sense it represents a continuity that even my main domestic living arrangements have not matched. I've had the same foam mattress (on the floor) with the same bedside clock radio and rickety floor lamp for a dozen years, while almost everything else in my life has changed. It's hard to just let this go. I've walked around this block or up and down these brick-paved alleys while talking to my wife on the phone hundreds of times. I've walked into Cherokee Park or Cave Hill Cemetery and around their meandering trails countless times.

Of course, I can drive my car over here (if I should have my car in Louisville) anytime and walk the streets and the park, but that's a whole different matter than living amongst these things. I feel a certain sense of ownership, of belonging, that I will lose when I drive away for the last time. And I just don't want to accept this; I have no desire to be done with it. It serves a practical function for me, allowing me to bid reserve to ensure getting specific days off. But more than this, it gives me a handhold on another place in the world. For one who loves to travel, this little rathole makes me feel invested in a place that is not my home. And my life feels richer for that--and will feel poorer and smaller for its loss.

But there it is. I will try to avoid bidding reserve--all the other guys at the crash pad manage to do it--and if I cannot I may have to look for a new crash pad. I could look into buying a small condo here (an option I actually find very attractive--maybe more so than staying here) or I could find an established crash pad that would take me in. But maybe not surprisingly I have little desire to spend MORE time with pilots than I already do. This is one of the reasons this place has been so remarkable: my roommates have been quite atypically congenial.

Life goes on. This will all sort itself out. But Monday afternoon I will pack the last of my junk in the car--that which I did not throw away or donate to neighbors or take to Goodwill--and turn in my key and leave this place.

It's a sad day.

Mostly disassembled, though it never looked much better than this. Microwave on top of the fridge, shelves groaning with junk; these pictures are about two weeks too late to catch the full glory.

There used to be three sets of cockpit posters on the walls--DC-8, MD-11, B-757.

Only the B-757 posters remain.

The upstairs layout has always been a bit of a mystery. Hallway with bathroom at the end and two bedrooms. But the doorways don't really make sense. Nobody seems to know the building's history.

One bedroom. Air mattresses, makeshift curtains, no storage (ergo, air conditioner sitting on the floor until summertime).

Other bedroom. Two dressers just departed for the neighbor's. We pulled the louvered closet door off and put it over the narrow opening coming into the room (far too narrow for any normal door). Awkward to open and close, it managed to keep the air conditioning in reasonably well.

Louisville, February 2012

Just a post of some photos I snapped while driving around Louisville this morning. I've often noted that Louisville feels old in that major thoroughfares tend to follow geographical features or ancient footpaths rather than obey a grid system. Downtown does have a grid, or rather a collection of grids which are joined higgledy-piggledy, betraying the lack of any master plan for the city.  The lack of consistent straight lines gives it a certain charm, but also makes it a pain in the ass to try and get from point A to point B on intuition alone.

I spent a couple hours this morning driving around the old city to the West and North of downtown. This area contains poor residential neighborhoods and the detritus of light industry nestled in the crook of the Ohio River to the North and West as it bends Southward. Much of this neighborhood feels unchanged from what it must have been 100 years ago. Well, apart from 100 more years of degradation. There are a lot of intriguing old industrial buildings here in a variety of conditions: some are still in use (though almost never for their original purpose), others abandoned and dilapidated beyond recall, and a whole bunch sitting empty but imploring. The desirability of these properties hinges on what one wants to pay for rent and how far out of the zone of fashionability one is willing to go. On the East side of downtown to the South of the river these industrial buildings and warehouses are gradually being converted into hip loft spaces and shops and restaurants. But this development is a long way from the West Side as of yet.

The semi-famous Ouerbacker Mansion. I did a post about this place a few years back. Despite numerous attempts to salvage it, or even to protect it from further degradation, it seems like it's now being left to the elements. It's now in too rough a neighborhood for anyone to put the million-plus dollars into rescuing it. Such a shame. (A Google search for "Ouerbacker Mansion" yields a treasure trove of photos--like these of the interior that make me kind of tear up.)

A big factory of some sort, knocked down but not yet cleaned out. This takes the better part of a city block.

Portland Printing and Fax Service. Sitting alone now on a forlorn lot in a decayed neighborhood by an elevated freeway.

A very intriguing old house on the corner of Portland Ave. and 20th St. 

Toilet Articles. The Google Street View pictures from August, 2007 show the building in considerably better shape, though still boarded up. I wonder how much is vandalism and how much is just five more untended years in the elements. It's clearly beyond any redemption now, but didn't necessarily look so five years ago (though of course I don't know).

The garage.

"No copper." 

An old building right on the edge. Any day now the heat and water will be turned off and the door will be locked for the last time. The area is rife with buildings just on either side of this line.

Dancer Exotic Wear.

A Pointless Conglomeration of About 15 Posts

Every time I write about motorcycles I seem compelled to note how riding engages all the senses. This all-sense perception makes it fundamentally different from car travel (or from planes and trains for that matter). And I think it's the sense of smell that delivers most of the impact.

Your sense of smell isn't really engaged when driving your car, except to note that the diesel-belching monstrosity you're stuck behind in traffic is giving you lung cancer. But on a motorcycle the smells are immediate and engulfing, and they acquaint you with so many things about the environment through which you travel: a freshly-plowed field or recently-mowed lawn, livestock in the vicinity (or manure spreading going on), someone cooking meat on a charcoal grill, passing a lake or river, the leaves falling in autumn, freshly-laid tarmac--you'd miss most or all of these things in your car, but you can't avoid them on a bike. You smell rain and can feel the change in the air on your skin before the rain actually starts. There's a certain profundity to this experience; the vulnerability intrinsic to riding a motorcycle makes one more alert, and the heightened assault on your senses leaves an imprint. You simply feel you're living the experience more fully this way. Maybe it's that (as I know I've said before) the sense of smell is supposed to be closely linked to memory; whatever the reason, I find I'm in a more emotional state when riding the bike, and this in turn gives a fullness that I never experience in a car (I wonder if taking a trip in a convertible would replicate any of this sensation?). Surely this is a big part of why people ride bikes in the first place.

I rode the Buell over to Minneapolis Monday afternoon to meet my friend Chris for a long walk. This is a tradition we began 25 years ago when I was living in Stillwater, which was a beautiful place tailor-made for exploration on foot. What began there as a lark became a regular activity in the ensuing years. Ever since that first walk we've made it a priority to meet up two or three times a year and spend the day on foot catching up. We've always had the kind of relationship where where we openly discuss any and all subjects, and these walks have given the perfect opportunity to bring each other up to date with the most minute details of whatever has been on our minds or going on in our lives. Most of our walks have taken place in the Twin Cities, initially because one or both of us lived there, and now because it's a convenient middle ground for both of us. But we've also logged many miles in other places: our home town of Brainerd (where Chris still lives), Chicago, New York, even several days of walking in Paris in the late '90s. In the decade I've been in Appleton we've managed a couple long walks here as well. We've walked in all seasons and weather, and there's always food involved. Sometimes we structure our walks around where we know the good food is, and other times we just sample whatever comes our way. Over time we've tacitly established the 20-mile mark as connoting a 'proper' walk, though we're both older than we used to be and circumstances don't always allow for it. Our longest have been in the 25-mile range, and we rarely manage less than 10.

Yesterday's tally ran to 13 miles before we needed to make our ways homeward. We started at our hotel down South of Edina and walked Northward through several South Minneapolis neighborhoods to the vibrant Lakes and Uptown areas, and thence Northward along Hennepin Ave. into downtown. After making a quick survey of the new Target Field (home of the Minnesota Twins--a fabulous new facility) we continued toward the University, where we met up with our own Jeffy, who gave us a ride back to our hotel. We could not have had better weather--sunny and about 70° with a light breeze.

With each passing year these walks take on a more nostalgic aspect for me, especially the ones in Minneapolis. This in turn dovetails with my weirdly emotional state from the bike ride into town (and back home again later) to make this seem an especially full experience for me. I spent 20 years in Minneapolis--my whole adult life, really, before I moved away to WI--and I have so many memories and experiences hidden in the cobwebs from that time. But the city has changed so much since I lived here, and these walking days now are a combination of rusty attempts to remember what is where and what streets and businesses are called, and of wonder at how much has changed since my time here.

It's really this latter that marks the passage of time for me. It would seem easy at first glance to imagine erasing all the intervening years with a wave of the hand, except that so much of the place I called home for 20 years--most of it, I'd venture--has changed. On my ride into town I detoured down into the St. Paul airport where I did my flight training and where I instructed students of my own before embarking on an airline career. My last couple of MN residences were a stone's throw from the airport in downtown St. Paul proper, and this setting is the most recent and vibrant in memory. But most everything has changed here. My old flight school is gone now, not just the business but the the very buildings have been demolished and the setting paved over--not a trace of it remains. A new flight school under the same name reopened a ways down the road shortly after my school closed, but even that is now boarded up.

To go further back in memory than these last MN days feels almost like visiting another person's memories (despite three houses owned and 13 years of marriage and 9 years at the University of Minnesota and a 10-year career driving a city bus). These days spent on foot become a kind of continuous inventory of all that has changed.

After a perfect day walking (hampered only by having to forego a Twins game in the new stadium--we both needed to get back home), we got back to the hotel and collected our things and headed homeward. I rode a much-altered freeway system through rush hour traffic and Eastward out of town and onto the rural interstates of WI, riding with my back to the setting sun. All the senses register the ebbing of the day's warmth and the encroach of nightfall. I noted a hundred passing scenes as I rode: people out walking--some with dogs, others not--along a quiet dirt roads out in farm country, families and friends collected for a cookout, campgrounds being spruced up in anticipation of the travelers to come (the school year would soon be done). Each setting is familiar home turf for someone yet I'll never know these places--so very little of the world do we ever get to experience.

I stopped for gas in the little town of Thorpe, WI, a chance to stretch my legs and take my helmet off for a few minutes. At the little gas station / convenience store / restaurant, a couple cars pull up and out jump a bunch of boys, maybe 11-14 years old, all in their pinstripes after a ball game. Their parents are with them plus friends and other family members, and everybody tumbles out for ice cream. A letter-perfect night for baseball, I thought. All the boys in their uniforms, still kids but just barely, the men they would become visible. Life goes on.

I rode the last couple hours in darkness, stopping occasionally to wash and squeegee the bugs off my visor. Spring is here early. (I wonder for all the people who confuse climate with weather, those who dismiss global warming as a hoax; I've heard the caustic dismissals that follow each snowfall, but what do they make of the early spring? Alas, that's another post.) I must be extra vigilant for deer in the darkness. Deer and motorcycles don't mix very well. I rolled into town, saddle-sore but filled up, about 10:pm. Bedtime.

***

As a postscript, I spent the next day giving the bug-splattered Buell a thorough cleaning. And I find myself infuriated and depressed all over again at the utter stupidity of Harley pulling the plug on Buell. With another 600 miles in the saddle, I'm reminded that even if it's not a perfect motorcycle it's remarkably good at what it's trying to do--and as close to perfect as any bike I've owned. It's lovely to look at, nicely constructed and it just works really, really well. It's nimble and responsive and it has eager and very usable power, with an emphasis on what gets you quickly around town (rather than the racetrack). Looking at things up close with my cleaning rag, I'm impressed at how nicely-sourced the components are, and at how well-thought-out everything is. This is not something thrown together by some yahoo in his garage; it's really a world-class effort that is frankly more successful than I would ever have expected from a little shop in rural Wisconsin.

And to stoke my malaise, the latest crop of motorcycle magazines reveal that Bombardier (who were contracted to build the 1125cc Helicon motor for Buell) wanted to purchase the two machines that used the new motor and sell those bikes under the CanAm brand. Refused by HD. Then it's said that Bombardier offered in the vicinity of $125 million to buy Buell outright. Refused again. Instead, Harley spent about that same amount shuttering the company. To my mind that looks like a quarter billion dollars that went the wrong way. It makes me want to axe-murder the whole board at Harley (instead of writing ineffectual letters). I'm ashamed to say that their current financial woes give me a bit of schadenfreude. Their treatment of Buell was stupid, a boneheaded mismanagement that someone should pay for.

OK. I'll stop now.

Old Movie Review XXI

I haven't been seeing too many movies lately in the theater. I feel a little bad, since I saw many of last year's Oscar contenders. But this year I just haven't seen enough to be able to offer an informed opinion. I do enjoy seeing a movie in the theater, though less than I used to. I very often wait for a film to come out on DVD, and I rent or buy instead of seeing the show in a theater; the cost is about the same, and my popcorn is better. (Plus, if a movie is good I'll want to see it more than once, and with the DVD I can back up if I miss something, which I often do.) But my movie reviews are as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, and so I find myself wanting to write a little essay about whatever I'm watching, whether it's topical or not.

So here we are. I find myself reviewing decades-old films.

In this case, I've been watching the great 1964 John Frankenheimer film, The Train. One of the last adventure movies filmed in black and white, it tells the story of the French Resistance during the final days of the Nazi occupation of Paris trying to prevent the Nazis taking a trainload of valuable "decadent art" out of the country as the Allies approach. The Wikipedia article says the story is not based on factual events, but that there was an attempt by the Nazis to take decadent art out of the country, and the Resistance did mount an effort to prevent it (even if the events did not follow those of the movie).

This movie doesn't belong on a short list of history's greatest films, but there's a lot of really good, worthy film art that misses that list. The Train is a compelling story deftly told, a solid moviemaking effort that rises above the mean. Burt Lancaster (whom, it strikes me, stands out here as the lone American in a cast of British and French actors, much like Tom Cruise in Bryan Singer's recent Valkyrie) is fabulous as the exhausted, ultra-cynical French railway man Paul Labiche who quietly works to sabotage the Nazi effort and keep the art train within French borders. Labiche initially refuses pleas for Resistance involvement, knowing from hard experience that every effort costs lives; with so many already dead from defying the Germans, he is unwilling to put more lives on the line for paintings. But he changes his mind--with a little help--when the importance of the art in the country's collective psyche sinks in.

Spearheading the plunder effort on the Nazi side is Colonel von Waldheim (British actor Paul Scofield), a civilized man and art lover who makes the fate of these particular paintings his chief obsession. He wants to possess the paintings and he uses an economic argument--collectively the paintings are almost unimaginably valuable--to get his oblivious higher-ups to authorize his commandeering a train and crew for the purpose, this just as the Germans are crumbling before the Allied advance and can least afford to divert resources away from the war effort. Scofield's characterization is fantastic. His Colonel von Waldheim is part cultured aesthete who grasps the beauty and artistic merit of these paintings (which the club-footed Nazi regime has declared "degenerate") and part ruthless Nazi thug who is accustomed to total obedience and refuses to be thwarted (particularly by the French, who don't have the good sense to stay conquered).



The other key roles are well-cast, though some of the voiceover work is rather dubious, looking at times like an old Chinese movie with English badly dubbed in.

The story cracks right along, and the black and white is both gloriously noir-ish and gives an air of authenticity. Though called "The Train" (a title guaranteed to throw a bucket of water on my wife's enthusiasm), the story is really about the horrors of war and the valiance of resistance, and secondarily about the value of art.

But the train itself plays a strong supporting role, and here's one of the things, bona fide machinery geek that I am, that I love about this film. Great care is taken in showing the operations of the railroad, and of the locomotive particularly. Frankenheimer has clearly made this one of the film's priorities, and what results is part historical document about job descriptions that are all but gone now. Most of the movie was shot on location, so that much of what might have been simulated (like a non-musician pretending to play a piano and his hands are never shown, yet his body motions are subtly wrong) is in fact real footage. The actors were trained to operate the real machinery--locomotive engineer and fireman and railyard switch tower operations, etc.--and Frankenheimer films their actions closely, making for some of the best footage of this kind on film. Don't get me wrong: he doesn't dwell overly on these details, but neither does he simply delete them from the story, and the effort yields dividends of authenticity.



[geekout] One scene in particular involves a train being assembled in a yard. Everything is done according to a schedule, and the operation--the compiling of an armaments train destined for the front--is given the highest priority. As soon as the assemblage of cars is complete, the yard engine is switched out for an armored over-the-road locomotive, and we're treated to a few minutes of the locomotives switching in a freight yard. The yard engine is uncoupled and driven away and then switched onto an adjacent track, while the replacement engine approaches from yet another track and is switched over to where the armament train is waiting. (Frankenheimer lingers here because it is an activity that can't be rushed, and the Resistance seeks to force a delay as an Allied air raid is scheduled for that rail yard at about this time.)

In reality, this would be a routine operation, but still one which would involve a number of people working in concert through a sequence of individual steps. Frankenheimer films the train crews in the cab stopping and reversing direction and starting up again several times, while the switch operator, following the commands of his supervisor who is observing events with a pair of binoculars, configures the tracks from the switch tower--all of it supervised by a Nazi officer, who is on the hook to make sure it all goes smoothly. In the locomotive cab we get to see the operation of throttle and brakes, and all the myriad wheels and valves that were used in running this fascinating piece of machinery. A fireman is there in the cab, throwing coal into the firebox in regular scoops, and the coordination between the two crewmembers is eerily like my own work environment: the same but different, in the same way as horse-and-wagon teams delivering kegs of beer a century ago share kinship with today's beer truck driver.

This trainyard footage beautifully evokes a lost period of history, and the details give us a sense of what these jobs were like. These tasks once constituted a legitimate, solid career for thousands of people in this country, and now they are mostly lost to history. The actors have mastered the skills, and toss them off in the offhand manner of a professional, as though the motions had been done thousands of times before. We passed through this brief period of history, just over a hundred years' worth, where this technology, now so rudimentary, was the leading edge of human science and progress, a technology that featured prominently in the transformation of human civilization during a period of explosive development never seen before.

A steam locomotive is almost a living thing, a crude but immensely powerful collection of heavy steel valves and piping and tankage, all designed to create great pressure and heat and convert it into forward motion. Even sitting idle (as this movie shows us), the engine creaks and groans and spits water and steam and radiates heat and smoke, air pumps thrum away; the machine is never still. When the throttle bar is pulled back, routing steam pressure to the huge cylinders, thousands of rolling tons begin to creep forward with a sense of awesome weight and power and an absolutely characteristic soundtrack--especially the deep CHUFF as the expanding steam escapes the cylinder at the end of each stroke. This sound especially is identifiable to almost anyone, even 60 or 70 years after the last steam locomotives were retired: four chuffs to each rotation of the drivers, increasing in frequency as the locomotive gains speed. I'm hopeless, I know, but I could just put these sounds of an operating steam locomotive on my iPod and listen at night as I fell asleep. [/geekout]



Again, this stuff is just what gets under my skin with this movie. But it isn't too much of the film, really. Even if it's one of the high points for me, all the train stuff is incidental to the essential storyline. A person could easily find trains and mechanical stuff distasteful and still find the movie compelling and well-made. But if one doesn't care for war movies, and Nazi-themed movies especially, this is not the film for you. There is no actual footage of the battle front, but the story very much involves the Nazi military bureaucracy and soldiers tasked with the occupation of Paris.

For my part, this is a movie that combines a bunch of tasty genres, a story well-written and well-acted, a film well-crafted. It shows its period a bit, being a product of the '60s; but the bones are still good. And it's like an opiate for the whore nostalgíque!

Grade: A-

House Haunting

Out for a drive around Louisville last summer, I was on the impoverished West side and ran across a spectacular old house--really spectacular. But it was practically a ruin, hugely neglected and nearly falling in on itself. There was, incongruously, a tax service operating out of the ground floor (I thought at the time that the business was still functional, but now I'm skeptical), while the upper floors had broken windows and the roof was missing sections of shingles, and the whole structure looked like decades had passed since the last time anyone put a penny into the place. The idea of a structure like this one getting away from someone, of this encroaching gangrene forcing the owner to gradually close off more and more of an old mansion as the earth began to reclaim it, gave my nostalgia whore nerve a hell of a tweak. What a demonstration of entropy in action.

Unfortunately, I didn't pay very close attention to my location, nor did I take any photos, and on subsequent lazy drives I could never find the place again. But the memory of the house haunted me. Over this past winter I read something in the local paper about an old mansion slated for demolition and the hubbub to try to save it and I wondered if it might be the same building.

Well, driving around yesterday (we do a lot of this, as there is quite a bit of free time to fill), I finally happened upon it again. If it looked 75% gone before, it was 90 or 95% gone this time. The tax service, whose sign was still there, was long closed, the ground floor windows now covered in plywood. The yard was like an Aztec ruin and, when you got up close to it the place just seemed heartbreakingly beyond redemption. It would take an obscene fortune to restore it, if it could even be done. Every single element need a complete overhaul. It would require a renewal to the last brick, but complicated by needing to retain what was left. But man, what bones. It's just not the kind of house anyone would build today. I snapped a few photos, and then came back to the apartment and searched online to see if I could figure out what it was.

Turns out, the house is quite famous around town and beyond, and that newspaper article I remembered was indeed referring to this house--one of many references listed at the Louisville Courier-Journal. Owned by the city, the 1860s "Ouerbacker mansion" was offered for sale for $1 to anyone who was willing to restore it. And apparently in late June a Louisville architect, Scott Kremer, stepped in right before the wrecking ball swung. From the local paper:

The grand but deteriorating Ouerbacker mansion at 1633 W. Jefferson St. — described by the city as one of the finest residences ever constructed in the Russell neighborhood — could be saved. It was built in the 1860s and was used for a tax business for about 70 years, starting in the 1930s. It was taken over by the city because of unpaid taxes and has been included for the last two years on the Louisville Historical Leagues list of most endangered properties.

The mansion is named for a prominent coffee merchant, Samuel Ouerbacker (1841-1922), who lived there. Ouerbacker was the son-in-law of Alexander Gilmore (1826-1891), a steamboat captain who also lived there. For part of the 1920s and 1930s, it also was the home of the Rev. George C. Clement, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

The Louisville & Jefferson County Landbank Authority's request for proposals says that it is "one of the relatively few remaining examples of the Richardsonian Romanesque style of architecture" in the region and that the "distinguished Louisville architectural firm of Clarke and Loomis designed the building's facade."

The wrap-around facade is thought to have been added later, Wiser said. Arthur Loomis also designed other well-known Louisville buildings, including the Conrad-Caldwell house on St. James Court in Old Louisville, the original University of Louisville Medical School building on Chestnut Street and the original J. B. Speed Art Museum building.--

A Google search for "Ouerbacker mansion" yields quite a few results, including the new owner's plans to restore it and donate it for public use. In addition to donating the property to Mr. Kremer, the city also ponied up $100,000 to stabilize the structure, as its dilapidation caused the cautionary shutdown of a day care center next door. A writer on the Save This Old House blog opens his post this way: In the three and a half years I've been writing the Save This Old House column, I've never come across anything as jaw-dropping as the Ouerbacker mansion in Louisville, Kentucky.

One of the strikes against the house is that it's no longer in a swanky part of town. Louisville's money all went elsewhere a century ago, and now the mansion is conspicuous amid warehouses and rotting churches and abandoned frame houses and trash-strewn lots. Given that a restoration of the house will not in itself resuscitate the neighborhood, I can see why someone would not want to throw their personal $2 million at the place. Well, here's hoping it all comes good.

For other lovers of decay and dilapidation and abandonment, here's your treat for the day.












There are a couple interior photos here and here.

And here's a fun almost-hundred-year-old photo with the house in the background:



Let's hope I can do a follow-up in a year or two with the place gloriously restored.