Left behind
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
I’m thrilled when I see a small but thriving Kansas community, one with occupied storefronts, a café, a colorful downtown and maybe a few pieces of public art.
Yes indeed, I love it when a town lives up to its potential.
And yet, I’m also drawn to the not-quite-making-it towns, the places with crumbling buildings, with brick and stone structures that have no roofs, the towns with an imploding wood-frame general store whose exterior walls haven’t seen paint since the Eisenhower Administration.
While I appreciate well-maintained buildings, I’m really fascinated by these neglected ones because the scene is often as the owner left it. There’s an incomplete but authentic history here, and stories from the old days seem to linger in the air.
I’m not sure why I’m drawn to these buildings — maybe I’m trying to connect with lost parts of myself that I’ve abandoned over time. Or maybe these places just feel so familiar because during my childhood years, my hometown produced more and more empty structures.
As youngsters, my friends and I crawled around in a two-story brick building which once housed the Pawnee Rock Herald. We explored an old cabin that was moved into town. Down by the river, we toured the round barn, it still smelled like horses, and we investigated the adjacent unlocked farmhouse. As I looked at the wallpaper, the curtains, the dinette table, I wondered who the people were that had lived there and wondered why they had left.
While visiting small towns, I photograph these decaying structures because some day these buildings will go. They will fall down, blow down, burn down, and I want to document as many as I can before they vanish, before these particular architectural forms disappear from the landscape.
Peering into old buildings, you may be able to spot a few remaining items: a 1974 calendar on the wall, the Rainbo Bread push bar on the grocery store door, a sticker on the old post office window in which Mr. Zip says, “Use Zip code, the last word in mail address.”
These buildings have a well-worn character, they retain the energy of the personalities who lived or worked in them. The tin ceilings, the dust-covered display cases, the rusted tools are the keepers of first-hand history. Stories are held here in escrow.
As a person sheds a storefront, they may leave pieces of their work days behind, a broken chair, a bench with saw marks, hand-written receipts. The shades of paint on the walls give a sense of the aesthetics of the ’40s or ’50s, as do the style of light fixtures, and the woodwork, which may be either rustic or well-crafted.
The barber shop door may have a hasp and padlock on it, but the windows have been gone for decades, the roof for a dozen years.
Standing on shards of broken glass beside the faded barber’s pole, you might be able to feel the presence of the man with the clippers – and even imagine the chatter in his shop, the gossip passed on during the course of a day.
At these downtown businesses, I try to picture what kind of people the owners were. Did they enjoy their work? Did their children skip around in the aisles of the dry goods store while the shopkeeper helped a customer with her selection of fabric or buttons or thread?
And I’m curious about those customers of years gone by, I wonder what kind of concerns they had on a January morning a hundred years ago, while outside the breath of their horses rose like smoke in the wintry air.
While some people may consider these dilapidated places to be eyesores and even though the town may be enhanced - and made safer — by their removal, I appreciate the structures for the cultural history they offer.
Building styles and materials change. Small town businesses now often construct metal buildings which don’t seem as permanent or as inviting as the old ones made of wood and brick and stone. Classic wooden barns are being replaced by metal barns and sheds.
Architecture from the early 1900s is a part of our collective history. Many of these buildings are collapsing, yet surely the stories of our ancestors hang from the corners like cobwebs. Next time you come across an abandoned building, take a moment, lean against the outside wall, and have a listen.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.