The Riverside

Hannah Lichtenstein stood on the Virginia Street bridge in the last week of the year and watched a young man she did not know carry a canvas taller than himself up the front steps of the Riverside Hotel, and she thought that she had waited her whole short career in this work to see somebody carry something into one of these buildings instead of out.

She was thirty-two. She had come to preservation late and completely and had spent the few years since mostly losing, and the biggest loss of all had happened that same year, in January, eleven months and a lifetime ago, when they had wired the Mapes and brought it down in front of a crowd on a Sunday morning while she stood at the back of the crowd and did not watch. She had promised herself she would not watch and then she had watched anyway, because you could not not watch, and the building had sat down into its own dust in six seconds and the crowd had made a sound she still heard sometimes, a low involuntary sound that was not quite a cheer and not quite a groan, and afterward the town had gone to brunch. That was January. She had believed, in January, that she had learned the final shape of how these things went here, which was that the town said treasure and meant parking lot, every time, forever.

And here, in December, at the other end of the same bad year, was the Riverside, and the Riverside was going the other way.

She knew the building down to its terra-cotta. That was her occupation now, knowing buildings the way other people knew their own families, and she had spent the fall reading this one. George Wingfield had put it up in 1927, on the ground where there had been a hotel before it and a hotel before that, all the way back to a log roadhouse at the river ford when there was no town at all, only a place to cross. He had hired Frederic DeLongchamps, who had drawn half the Reno that anyone thought was worth looking at, the courthouse across the street and the post office down the way and the bank and this, six stories of red brick with cream-colored Gothic detail laid over it like piping on a cake, and for a few years it had been the tallest building in the state and for a great many years after that it had been the beating heart of the divorce trade, the place the eastern women came to wait out their six weeks in a corner suite with a little kitchen, next door to the courthouse where they got free. Local men had riveted it up in a single hard year. Hannah had read that and thought about it, the ordinary hands that raised the thing the rich man got the credit for, and had filed it where she filed such things.

Then the divorce trade ended, because everybody’s divorce trade ended, and the casino had closed in the eighties and the hotel a year behind it, and the building had stood empty on its beautiful lot with the river going by for a decade and a half, which in this town was a death sentence with the date left blank. By 1997 they were talking demolition. And then, instead, a strange coalition had formed, the sort of thing that did not happen here, a nonprofit developer that came all the way from Minneapolis and made an art of turning dying landmarks into cheap apartments for artists, and the local arts foundation, and the city itself, which had bought the building to keep the wrecking ball off it and then found partners who knew how to do the thing the city did not. Thirty-five apartments, up in the floors where the divorcees had waited. Studios you could live in and work in and afford. The arts foundation downstairs where the lobby had been. And artists, actual artists, moving in the week between Christmas and New Year’s with their canvases and their crates and their secondhand couches, up the front steps of the DeLongchamps hotel, into a building that a year ago everyone had assumed would follow the Mapes into the air.

Hannah had had almost nothing to do with it. That was worth being honest with herself about, standing on the bridge. The preservation society she belonged to was three years old and mostly gave walking tours and showed up at council to lose; this had been done by the city and the developers and the foundation, by money and zoning and tax law, the unglamorous machinery she was still learning to respect. She had come down today not as anybody official but as a person who wanted to stand near it. She had spent a year and a half now measuring a rescued church up on Riverside Drive, the theater that was going to happen, that everyone swore was going to happen, and she had a bad private feeling about that one, about how long a saved building could sit saved and empty before saved stopped meaning anything. The church haunted her a little. It had been given walls and no life yet.

But the Riverside was getting its life the same week it got its walls back. That was the difference she had come to feel in her body. The young man reached the top of the steps with his enormous canvas and turned it sideways to get it through the door, and a woman inside held the door for him, and the two of them wrestled the thing into the lobby laughing, and behind them a truck was double-parked with its flashers going and more of it stacked in the bed, the whole clumsy joyful freight of people who make things arriving to live inside a landmark. Nobody was carrying anything out. In every scene Hannah had trained herself to expect, somebody was always carrying something out, the light fixtures, the good doors, the copper, the building leaving itself piece by piece before the end. Not here. Here the direction was reversed, and she stood on the cold bridge over the green winter river and let herself feel the whole size of that reversal.

She thought of her father. Benjamin was nearly sixty and had spent his life doing other people’s books and carrying, without ever setting it down, the grief of one building, the temple his own grandfather had helped raise and the city had torn down when Hannah was too small to remember. She had built a profession out of his grief. She would call him tonight, she decided. She would tell him about the young man and the canvas too big for the door. Not the Mapes, not the church she was afraid for, not the long ledger of losses he already knew by heart. Just this one, this once. A building where the trucks were pulling up full and leaving empty, and the people going in intended to stay.

She left the bridge and walked toward the steps, because she wanted, before the light went, to hold the door for whoever came up next.

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