855 Ardmore Ave, Akron, Ohio

(I’m strapping my “Building Blocks” carpenter’s belt back on after several weeks away traveling in Ohio and celebrating my daughter’s wedding. It’s good to be back on the job.)

In 1915 the house at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron, Ohio was new and modern. (It had a bathroom off the kitchen!) And the couple that bought it for $4000 was new and modern also, up and coming young doctor Bob Smith and Anne Smith, recent Wellesley grad. The newlyweds had high hopes for themselves and for their new home; into it they would welcome children, neighbors, and a life of purpose helping the sick and saving lives.

But sadly, both the house and the couple had to spend the next 20 hard years in neglect; neglected marriage, neglected repairs, neglected house payments, until finally in 1935, their young dreams of saving lives were finally realized. Children they did have, but instead of neighbors the Smith’s visitors during those first 20 years were bootleggers and police and concerned colleagues. Dr. Bob descended into alcoholism soon after moving into the new house and for two decades his meager and tenuous income from his practice went to booze, and his family and the house struggled and cracked and fell apart.

Dr. Bob tried various ways to stop drinking, including a church group, the Oxford Group, but with no lasting success. But hope for him, and soon after for the house, came in 1935 when a rum hound traveling salesman, who had only recently stopped drinking, came to Akron on a futile business trip, and in his frustration was tempted to relapse at the hotel bar. Instead he picked a minister’s name out of the phone book, called asking for help, and the minister put him in touch with Henrietta Seiberling, who was Bob and Anne’s good church friend. She invited the stranger salesman, Bill Wilson, to come over and talk with her friend Dr. Bob, who was trying to stay sober also. Maybe they could help each other.

Bill and Bob became instant friends and mutual support, and a couple months later, in June 1935, Bob and Anne invited Bill to come live with them at 855 Ardmore. Anne cooked and made coffee and the men sat at the kitchen table and talked. Soon they were inviting other drunks to come and talk at 855 Ardmore, and Anne made more coffee, and offered these loners and losers a bed for a while. Bill lived upstairs in one of the small bedrooms for six months. When he and Bob and Anne weren’t detoxing drunks and drinking coffee with them in the kitchen, they were at the old (then new) Royal typewriter that still sits on the dining room table. Daughter Sue Smith, then a young adult, did much of the typing of what would become the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

When you visit 855 Ardmore, as I did last week on my Ohio trip, it is like going to shrine. This now 100 year old home, lovingly restored and recently place on the National Registry of Historic Buildings, honors Bob and Anne, their lives and work. Which ultimately did become the mission of helping the sick and saving lives, including their own.

And it is a shine that honors the building itself. AA’s love Bob of course, but this is really about the role of the house in this history and mission. The house is like a costar, a character in the drama known as AA. Not just the Smiths, but the house itself welcomed and housed and fed and forgave and encouraged hundreds of alcoholics and their families, for the next 20 years, from that fateful June 1935, until Bob and Anne died in the 50’s.

A shrine and a landmark are not quite the same thing. 855 Ardmore is both. A landmark is supposed to be “authentic” to a certain historical period. You recreate a certain era and sort of freeze the house at that time. I’ve visited Martin Luther King’s boyhood home in Atlanta and it too is frozen in time, the same time actually, the 30’s, for the preteen Martin. You can sort of imagine the lives lived in these landmark homes, but there is something a little eerie about the emptiness, the absence of contemporary life. The past and present meet in the careful clean rooms, and the silence. Although they lived in the house for 40 years, Bob and Anne’s house is today frozen in the late 30’s, with magazines from the period on the coffee table, only 30’s products in the kitchen, etc.

A shrine is more like an altar. It’s a place where visitors come to say thank you for a life lived, and where they might ask for help in the spirit of that life. A shrine is not just a marker of the past but a kind of gateway to the future.

Tourists come to landmarks, pilgrims come to shrines.

I was both, last week. I saw a museum house, a model 1935 kitchen. I saw a holy spot, where lives had been saved. And I saw a living space today, even though no one lives there anymore. The volunteer at the Smith House welcomed me at the door with the AA catch phrase, “Welcome home,” and then invited me into the kitchen. “Are you a coffee drinker?” he asked. “Have a seat where Bob and Bill and Anne sat, have a cookie, tell me where you are from.”

And the house itself welcomed me, with quiet peace, lovely wood, beds and books and Bob’s old doctor bag and Anne’s Bible. It is not just frozen in time, not just a shrine. There is life there now.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Two Hated Buildings We Love to See

Tour Montparnasse Parisians hate the Tour Montparnasse, a 59-story, 1970’s black monolith that towers over their historic, tres charmante city like no other buildings for miles.  The only thing it’s good for, they say, is the incredible view of the Eternal City you get from the observation floor.  And the best part of that view is not the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame, but the fact that it’s the only place in Paris where you don’t have to see the Tour Montparnasse.  

Indeed in this week’s Sunday New York Times there’s a feature piece  “Seven Leading Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings,” where they ask architects (not the original designers, but others with presumably the longer view than preservationists or aesthetes) to reflect on these monstrosities.  And Daniel Libeskind defends the Tour:

“It’s legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It’s not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be.”

So great was the outcry when the Tour Montparnasse was completed in 1973, then the tallest building in Europe, that Paris passed a law restricting all buildings in the central city to seven floors, and sent all future skyscrapers, as Libeskind says, to the outskirts of town.  Medieval Paris or Renaissance Paris or Baron Haussmann 19^th century Paris or whatever époque you think defines Paris, that was to be the standard; modern Paris could not come in and play.

In my town of Monterey, California we also have a building we love to hate.   Likewise built in the 70’s, it was originally called the Best Western Monterey Beach Resort and it’s a typical concrete balconied multi-story hotel built atop the massive dunes right on the shores of Monterey Bay.  Until then the dunes hosted only birds and an ancient sand company. 

Monterey HotelLike Paris’ Tour, this “tower” of gaudy corporate tourism caused such a public outcry, not just for its ugliness, but for the coastal erosion it effects on the dunes and beach, that the Coastal Commission immediately tightened its building code the way Paris did; no other building of its size and style will ever be built again so close to the beach and bay.

So I was checking on the map to make sure I had the hotel’s name right, and –fun with corporations! – the Best Western Monterey Beach Resort has recently been bought and re-branded.  It’s now called the “Unscripted Monterey Bay Hotel.”  That’s right, “unscripted.”  “Write your own script,” it happily invites its guests. 

This international chain describes itself this way: “ We are beautifully designed, accessibly-priced alternatives to the sea of homogenous products in the upscale hotel space.  Contemporary but not trendy, Unscripted Hotels focus on healthful yet lively environments and responsible food choices, with skin-friendly bath amenities and a sleep-to-wake systems that use light to simulate dawn.  By subscribing to the philosophy that travel should be an adventure, not a routine, Unscripted invites guests to write their own story.”

If Unscripted is a weird, ironic name for a hotel, Mont Parnasse is not much better.  The mythological mountain home of the Greek muses, the left bank Paris neighborhood was so named by 16th century Sorbonne lit majors who recited poetry on its hillside above campus.  What do the muses of art and music and poetry think of the neighborhood today?  More irony; the hill was razed, flattened, to build the Boulevard Montparnasse, that was probably Baron Haussmann.  So the “Mont” may be gone, but a phallic tower has taken its place.

Not unlike the irony in Monterey, where free-spirited, upscale tourists, er adventurers, can now stay at an “unscripted” hotel. And here too another hill, this one of sand, was razed and flattened to improve the experience.

Wait a minute, Libeskind would say.  It’s the 21^st century.  Paris and Monterey are not museums.  We need young entrepreneurs and new businesses and sustainable buildings.  Mixed use.  “Vital living cities.”  This is the challenge of urban planning.

These hated ugly buildings do serve a purpose.  They can’t be ignored. We have to see them every day from every corner.  They serve as public reminders, symbols of caution or defeat; Never Again!  Better of course that they had never been built, or later demolished.  But like a war memorial, or those creepy skull and crossbones road signs in France marking traffic fatalities, the buildings say, “Careful!” “Danger!” “”Don’t go so fast!”

Might those words be the “script” the muses of Mount Parnassus would write?

Copyright © 2105 Deborah Streeter

Gird, Girdle, Girder

This week “Building Blocks” wonders if “foundational garments” like girdles, that lift and support our “girth” are like girders that lift and support our buildings.

I’ve always been a little embarrassed, in church, to hear the Biblical phrase, “gird up your loins.” 

As a little girl in the pew I wasn’t sure what loins were but it sounded naughty.  What were David or Job or Sampson really doing when they girded their loins?  It felt like too much information about men’s private parts.  I didn’t want to be thinking about Bible heroes, or my father, walking around with that stuff bouncing around, let alone taking it into battle.

It was the King James Version translators who made up the phrase “gird your loins.”  It does have a sort of 17^th century ring to it, codpieces and forsooth. 

Some modern translations read “And so David prepared for battle.”  That’s how the phrase is used these days, to prepare or brace yourself for an ordeal.  This week’s New Yorker magazine has a (typically) slightly mocking piece about summertime in the ritzy parts of Long Island that begins, “As Memorial Day approached, Hamptons residents girded themselves for seasonal headaches: traffic jams, guys in tank tops, the Kardashians.”  Fearsome foes that would challenge even great warriors like Sampson and require much girding.

Turns out “gird” is a very old word, and it just means belt.  To gird yourself is just to twist and tie up your long Hebrew or Roman tunic, sort of make it into shorts, so you can charge really fast at the Philistines or slay lions without tripping.  And, I am guessing – guys? – to reduce the bouncing?

Check out this handy demonstration by clicking here.

It’s the same word as girdle.  Which originally, like a piece of cloth to tie up your tunic,  was just a belt.  But over time, as women’s fashions changed along with different expectations of what a good body looked like, women started wearing corset and girdles that shaped and squeezed and molded the “loin” part of women’s bodies. 

So just as men girded their bouncy parts, women girdled their flabby parts.  Mercifully, at least in my circles, there is now more acceptance of our bodies as the Good Lord made them.   I haven’t had a girdle in my underwear drawer for decades.

Now I do know that people wear girdles for health as well as fashion. Those delivery guys and gals and construction workers, with the big elastic thing around their midriff, that’s a girdle, good for back and muscles and loins.

So buildings are sort of like bodies, with foundations and trunks.  What holds them up?  Girders.  Same word as gird and girdle. Not so much a belt around, or a binding girdle, but a beam underneath.  A steel girder spanning a building’s foundation can support tons, floors, skyscrapers. 

So as a construction worker’s occupational girdle holds up their gut and protects their back, so a building’s girders keep it strong and true and safe.  I guess you could take a “gird” view of building; girders built by girdled workers.  Who have probably also girded their loins.

It’s all about girth.  Weight, mass, gravity.  If things (buildings and people) didn’t have mass, and tend to push downward, and sag, we wouldn’t need girdles and girders. 

But they do and we do.  I may not have girdles in my bureau drawer, but I have girders under my house. 

So a nod of appreciation to all the things that hold us up, our buildings and our bodies.

Copyright 2015 Deborah Streeter

It's Why We Live Here

(This week we try to describe how water, an essential building block, gets from the ground to our faucets.  And what we do when it doesn’t.)

"'It's why we live here,' Terry said.”  That’s how the poem begins that Ric Masten wrote about the day the pipes broke somewhere in our neighborhood water system.  We framed it and it hangs right outside the bathroom.

We live in a rural area far from town, so we don't have "city water."  Rather we are part of a 20 family, shared system, the Brandon Creek Mutual Water Company.

Key words are "Mutual" and "Brandon Creek."  Here in California, where we are entering the fifth year of a historic drought, "creek" and "mutual" are words that make you nervous.  Is there any water left in the creek (river, lake, reservoir, snowpack, sky)?   And, if I conserve, will it really make any difference on water for the rest of the state? 

Mercifully, so far, the answer to both questions is "Yes."  There is still water in the creek and we actually are being good responsible neighbors and cutting back on our usage. So, SO FAR, the pump is bringing up water from the well and the cistern is full.

 “Mutual” also means that we share in various duties which a big city anonymous water company would hire staff to do, the cost then increasing the bill.  Heidi walks around the dirt roads once a month to check meters, Jon sends out the bills, and Norman fills out the forms for the state, which nominally oversee our little systems and requires testing for e-coli and such.  

So that's why last week I spent a morning digging a small ditch beside a remote (even for our area) road, laying wire down in it and covering it up.  The old wire from the creek pump up the hill to the reservoir is tired and broken in a few spots, probably because it is just laid over rock and poison oak.  New plan - lay it alongside the road, bring it up regularly to a transfer box so in the future we can more easily find the broken spot.

We actually have two sources of water.  Originally it was Brandon Creek site, where decades ago the first primitive water system was just a plastic pipe laid in the relatively clear little pool of the small stream amid the redwoods.  The first neighbors rigged a little pump and the pipe snaked up the hill to the holding tank, basically a covered swimming pool.  When that system became unreliable, we had a neighborhood meeting, voted an assessment and hired a well drilling company.  Great drama and decision-making as they dug and dug and found no water.  Should they keep going?  It would mean another assessment.  Of our 20 families some could write the check, others had no reserves. 

Thankfully we did keep digging and a found a strong source of water.  So now we drink well water, with the creek as a back up.  And now it is mostly fine strong buried steel pipe, with cut off valves for emergencies.  But at the time of this poem there was still some funkier white plastic pipe just laid on the ground, often through poison oak.  Hence the occasional break.  And a break would drain the whole system, thanks to the miracle of gravity. Hence the desperate and happy middle aged men.

 “Mutual” also means we have to get together and decide these things.   One reason many of us live in this sort of remote canyon is that we don’t especially like to cooperate with “the system.”  I sometimes joke that folks chose to live here rather than in town because we don’t have the greatest social skills, but it’s true.  So some neighbors just want their old plastic pipe, or refuse to pay more assessments.  Does the volunteer board just vote to cut off their water?  Especially when these sort of outlaw neighbors could retaliate by turning us into the building department for the illegal addition we put on our house, because we too are sort of outlaws?   It’s a little frontier justice here….. We have to know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, when to walk away, when to run.

If as Thoreau said, firewood warms you twice, once when you cut it up, later when you burn it, so the water system makes you thirsty twice, once when you dig ditches, and later when - no actually, later it does its job and quenches your thirst - well you get the idea.  By the end of the morning of ditch digging I was hot and thirsty, but I knew our water system was becoming more reliable.

Maybe if all of California had to dig ditches for their water they would more readily conserve - water doesn't just appear, it takes work to get it out of the ground, to go against the laws of gravity, to avoid animal poop and broken pipes and just get it to the reservoir, let alone down the hill to my sink.

In some California communities there is now “lawn shaming,” neighbors pressuring and mocking neighbors who flaunt their excess water use.  We have no lawns here in the redwoods, but we do have neighbors with large gardens, and some, I think, growing marijuana, a thirsty crop.  I foresee some difficult neighborhood meetings if the state requires little companies like ours to obey the governor’s order that we all cut back 25% .

Our friends way up the hill, far from our system, the Williamses, have their own well, and last summer, one day, nothing happened when they turned on the faucets, it had just ran dry.  They had to buy water, drive it up their steep dirt road, and this winter collect as much rain water as they could.  Which wasn’t much. 

It’s why we live here, now.  But, for how long?

Copyright © 2915 Deborah Streeter

And God Created Pews

(As we continue Building Blocks, we sit down today on the pew. All building, including churches need furniture, and the pew has an interesting origin and history.  Have a seat….)

And on some random Sunday, God created pews, and called them good.

Actually, God could see that there were both good and bad things about pews.  We’ll  start with the good things, but keep reading – if you take pews out of church, you can put in a trapeze….

Of course pews are never mentioned in the Bible; it’s not until the Protestant Reformation that pews appear.   But since God is always creating (not just at the beginning of time) we can say, “When God, in 1550 or so, created pews, God called them good.”

Because people could finally sit down in church.  Up until then it was everyone standing, all the time, as it still is in Orthodox Churches and was for many more centuries in Catholic churches.

What was different about these new Protestant churches that inspired pews?  Sermons.  They became the focus of worship, instead of the mass, the bread and cup.  And those sermons were long.  Good to be able to sit.  (Even today, if you go shopping for pews, the church furniture companies recommend, when your worship service is more than 90 minutes, go for padded cushions, upholstery.  Less than 90 minutes, plain wooden would be OK, cheaper.  Consider the butts.)

St. Boniface Catholic Church in San FranciscoSo God saw that this was good, to be able to sit for sermons that could be one, even two hours long. 

God also saw that it was good for everyone to be able to sit, not just the bishops and priests and deacons.  Actually, by the Middle Ages, these guys (all guys) had benches along the wall to rest their butts.  Sometimes they even made fancy chairs for the bishop ("cathedra" means chair; where a bishop sits is a cathedral).  But everyone else had to stand.

Come unto me all ye who are weary, and I will give you a pew.

But God didn’t like it when those Protestant church leaders decided to sell or rent pews as a way to make money for the church; only the rich people with their own pew could sit down. Family owned pews got fancier, were included in wills, ownership fought over by descendents. God tried to remind them, “I said ‘ALL who are weary….’”

But pretty soon these private pews started taking up too much room. And since church attendance was mandatory in those days, some churches were running out of room for everyone, with folks standing in the back. So some churches did a radical thing, 18th century now, and refused to allow private pews.  They called themselves "open and free" churches; all were welcome to have a seat wherever they wanted.  Big change and big deal.  God said, “OK, better. Churches should not have steerage.”

Fast forward to the second half of the 20^th century, and pews started to fall into disfavor in some places.  Some ministers wanted to try new more informal styles of worship, sit in a circle, try some movement.  Couldn’t do that with rigid pews, stuck, all facing in one direction.  And since church was no longer mandatory (God approved of that also, I’m sure, free will), church leaders were looking for new ways to bring folks in and to make money.  A big open space might seem more welcoming to visitors. And we could rent it out during the week for Zumba classes!  Let’s take the pews out.

More controversy.  Old timers said, “I thought we said we should have pews so everyone could have a seat?  And this is how my church has always looked - now you want to take out those beautiful carved solid familiar pews and make us stack and un-stack chairs every week?”

Yes, actually, God agreed with this idea also.  God said, “Flexible is better than rigid.  My house is a place for all to be welcome.  Read your Bible and your history.  Hebrew people, early Christians did not sit in rows all facing in one direction.  Be creative, in my image, creative God that I am.”

But God knows not all people and places are the same.  Some times, in some places, those old pews can still be put to good creative use.  When God inspired the US Civil Rights movement and called all those black folks to leave home and march for freedom, where would they sleep?  No hotels would open their doors to them.  Church pews.  And God saw that this was good, a good use of pews.

And God saw St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco, where for the past five years homeless people can sleep in the pews every day from 6 AM to 1PM, even during mass.  The church also gives them food and medical care and social services.  But a safe place to sleep off the street is the greatest gift to these folks, a “Sanctuary of Sleep” they call it.  And God says this use of pews is very good.

Fairfax Community UCC Church in California But churches without pews have so much possibility, and God is all about possibility.  So even though God favors rest for the weary and equal seating for all, God also love trapezes.

So if, like the Fairfax Community UCC church in California you remove your pews, as they did from their old church, in the 1990's, and you start all kinds of other programs, you might just find the winds of change blowing through your newly open sanctuary.   So open are you now that you call a pastor who is also a trapeze artist.  And she might just encourage you to hang a single-point, low trapeze in your sanctuary and offer very popular trapeze classes through your “Center for Embodied Spirituality” that brings in lots of kids.  And she might also include trapeze in the Easter service, preaching that with God we fly into freedom, trust we will be caught, soar with the spirit.

Hard to preach that good news with folks in fixed pews.  God saw the trapeze in the pew-less church, and saw that it was very good.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter