The Church on Riverside Drive

Hannah Lichtenstein had the key in her pocket the whole time she stood on the sidewalk looking up at the building, because she was not quite ready yet to go in and own the fact that it had been saved.

It stood where it had stood since 1939, on Riverside Drive above the Truckee, a pale Neoclassical church with a curved portico and tall columns that a person could walk past a hundred times and file under handsome without ever asking who had drawn it. Hannah knew who had drawn it. That was more or less her whole occupation now, knowing who had drawn things, and she had spent enough of the last year on this particular building to know it better than she knew some of her relatives. First Church of Christ, Scientist. Completed the autumn the war started in Europe. Six hundred seats in the auditorium, a nursery, a caretaker’s apartment, all of it laid out by a Los Angeles architect named Paul Williams, who had been the first Black member of the national architects’ institute, who designed mansions for movie stars up and down California, and who had come to Reno in the thirties at the invitation of a determined woman on the building committee and left behind four buildings in a town that, in the year he was drawing them, would not have been guaranteed to serve him lunch.

Hannah found that fact impossible to hold and impossible to put down. She was thirty and she had come to preservation the way some people came to religion, late and completely, and it was the buildings that talked to her, the way they carried the whole argument of a place inside their walls if you knew how to read them. This one carried Williams. It carried the woman who hired him. It carried sixty years of a congregation that had now, this year, moved on to a newer building, leaving the church empty on its beautiful lot with the river going by, the exact condition in which buildings in this town got themselves knocked down.

And then it had not been knocked down. That was the thing she was standing on the sidewalk trying to absorb. An aviator’s widow, a member of the congregation, a woman whose late husband’s name was on jets all over the world, had put up more than a million dollars and bought the church outright and handed it to a coalition of the town’s theater people, who were going to make it a theater, and who had already started, in gratitude and in a hurry, calling it by her name. The Lear Theater. A church that would be a stage. A landmark that would go on standing because somebody with the means had simply decided it would.

Things like that did not happen here. Hannah had been doing this work barely long enough to have a track record and the track record was mostly losses. The preservation society she volunteered for was one year old, a scrappy new outfit of people who loved old Reno and kept showing up at council meetings to lose, and the great looming loss was a half mile east and everybody knew it, the Mapes, the grand dead hotel downtown that the town could not decide whether to love or resent, and the fight over the Mapes was not going well, and Hannah had a bad private feeling about how it would end. You learned, in this work, to expect the wrecking ball. You learned it fast. You learned that a town would call a thing a treasure right up until the morning it was cheaper to erase it.

So she had not entirely believed the church was safe until she was handed the key, and even now she stood outside with it warm in her fist.

She thought about her father. Benjamin was almost sixty now and he had spent his working life keeping other people’s books, but the thing that had marked him, the thing Hannah had grown up hearing about at the table, was a building coming down. The old temple on West Street, the one his grandfather had helped found, dedicated when the century was young, torn down in 1971 when Hannah was a small child, so long ago she did not remember it and had spent her adulthood remembering it anyway on her father’s behalf. He had been the young man doing the numbers when they built the new one out on the south side, and he was proud of the new one, genuinely, and he had also never gotten over the old one, and Hannah understood now that she had inherited that ungotten-over grief the way you inherit a nose. She had turned it into a profession. Her father had watched his family’s building die. Hannah had decided, without ever quite saying so, to spend her life on the other side of that, on the saving side, and most days the saving side lost, and today, on Riverside Drive, it had won.

She went in.

The auditorium was dim and enormous and full of the particular silence of a room built for a congregation and emptied of one. Dust hung in the light. The windows along the sides ran floor to ceiling and the afternoon came through them the color of weak tea, and Hannah stood in the center aisle where the seats would be, where the seats were, six hundred of them waiting, and tried to see the stage that was coming. It was going to be difficult. She was clear-eyed enough to know that already. Saving a building was only the first of the arguments; then came the money to fix it, and the money to run it, and the years of committees and grants and good intentions that could leave a rescued building sitting rescued and empty for a very long time. She had a bad private feeling about that too, if she was honest, standing in the dust. The gift had bought the walls. The walls were not the theater. The theater was decades of work by people not yet in the room.

But the walls were standing. Williams’s walls, and Williams’s columns, and the curve of his portico over the door she had just come through, and the river going by outside the way it had gone by while the congregation sang and while the city forgot to look. In a town that had spent Hannah’s whole life proving it would tear down anything, somebody had reached out and stopped one hand from falling, and Hannah Lichtenstein stood in the long light in the middle of the saved room and let herself, for the length of one held breath, believe that it might be the start of something and not the exception that proved the rule.

Then she took out her notebook, because the light was good and the measurements had to be done and the work, as her father could have told her, did not care how you felt about it. She walked to the tall windows and began to write down what was there, so there would be a record of the church on the day it became a theater, whatever happened to it after.

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