Liberty Street

Benjamin Lichtenstein had spent forty years doing other people’s arithmetic, and he did not entirely trust a building he could not add up, so he had put off going to see the new museum until his daughter stopped asking and simply drove him there on a Sunday in the spring of 2003, parked at the curb on Liberty Street, and waited, which was how he came to be standing on the sidewalk at sixty-two years old looking up at a four-story building the color of a thundercloud with no clear idea of what he was supposed to feel.

It was not brick. That was the first thing. He had grown up among Reno’s brick, the good red commercial brick his grandfather’s dry-goods store had been built of on Sierra Street, the terra-cotta on the bank and the courthouse, the whole downtown a catalogue of masonry a boy could learn by hand. This was not that. The new home of the Nevada Museum of Art was sheathed in dark metal, charcoal-gray panels lapped and seamed at angles that did not repeat, the walls leaning slightly as if the whole mass had been shouldered by a wind, and the museum’s own literature said the skin was meant to call up the black rock of the desert north of town, the burnt geology of the playa where the Sierra ran out. Benjamin had read that in the pamphlet Hannah pressed on him and had thought, privately, that only in the last few years would anyone in this town have built something on purpose to look like the emptiest place in the state.

“You are making the face,” Hannah said, coming around the car. “The ledger face.”

“I am reading the building.”

“You are auditing it.”

She was thirty-five now and had come to her work late and completely, and Benjamin had built a whole second understanding of his daughter out of watching her fight, mostly without winning, for buildings the town wanted gone. She had stood at the back of the crowd three years ago when they dropped the Mapes into its own dust on a Sunday morning, and she had spent a year and a half after that on a rescued church up the river that still sat saved and empty, and Benjamin knew the exact weight of what she carried because he had handed a good deal of it to her himself, without meaning to, across a childhood in which the great fact of his own life had been a building that came down.

He had been thirty-one the year they tore out the temple on West Street. His grandfather Jakob had come to Reno with a bolt of cloth and a ledger and opened a store; his father Aaron had sat on the board that raised the synagogue in 1921 and had been proud of it in the plain way of a man who had helped pay for something permanent; and Benjamin had stood on West Street in 1971, an accountant with a young family, and watched a crew take the permanent thing apart. The congregation had built another, out on Manzanita by the lake, a fine building, and he went to it and was grateful for it, and still some fixed accountant’s part of him had never gotten the entry to balance. A thing had been there and then was not, and no ledger he knew how to keep had a column for the difference.

So he had learned to expect the town to subtract. That was the truth he had carried down Liberty Street. In his lifetime Reno had been a place that took things away, the temple and the old post office and the Mapes and Harolds and the whole erased skyline his daughter recited to him like a list of the family dead. He had assumed the new century would go on subtracting, more quietly, with parking structures. And instead here on a downtown lot stood this, a strange dark ship of a building that the town had argued about and paid for and put up, a building that intended, you could feel it in the canted walls, to be here in a hundred years.

“They started it in 1931,” Hannah said, following his eyes up the metal. “The whole thing. It was a little art gallery, a few people, no money. It lived in that mansion on Court Street for years, the Hawkins house, you remember, above the river. Now it is the only accredited art museum in the state and it built this.” She said it the way she said very few things anymore, without the brace she kept up against disappointment. “The architect is from Arizona. He wanted it to look like the desert got stood on end.”

Benjamin looked at the building and made himself do the sum honestly, the way he would for a client he liked and did not want to flatter. It was not beautiful the way the courthouse was beautiful. It did not ask to be loved. But it was not afraid, and it was not cheap, and it had been built to keep things, which was the entire point of a building and the thing his profession and his people both came down to in the end, the keeping of what was worth keeping so that it would still be there when someone came to check. His father had helped keep a congregation by raising walls for it. Hannah kept buildings by refusing to let the walls fall. And here was a town that had spent his whole life pulling things down, deciding, once, on Liberty Street, to raise a dark permanent thing and fill it with what it wanted to save.

“You could go in,” Hannah said. “I did not bring you here to appraise the outside.”

“I know why you brought me.”

She did not answer that, which was answer enough. She had brought her father, who had watched a building leave the world and never quite forgiven the world for it, to stand in front of a building that was not leaving.

Benjamin turned up the collar of his coat against the spring wind coming down off the Sierra and looked once more at the leaning charcoal walls, and he thought of Jakob’s bolts of cloth and Aaron’s board meetings and the West Street lot with the grass grown over it, and he found that the column he had never been able to balance had not balanced now either, that a new building did not pay off an old one and was never meant to. But it did something the arithmetic had not prepared him for. It stood there. It went up instead of down. That was not nothing, in this town. It was, he thought, closer to the opposite of nothing than anything he had watched the town do in thirty years.

He put his hand on his daughter’s arm and went up the steps, out of the wind, into the building they had decided to keep.

---