Reaching Out

"Hi. My name's Gregg.  Did you get my letter?"

"Yeah. I'm unclear on exactly what you're asking.  You want to take pictures inside the Morgan Building?"

"Yeah.   Mostly, though, I'd like to photograph the inside of the top storage area, above the rear of the top floor."

"Wait.  You want to get on the roof?"

"No.  Not the roof.  The large structure on the roof.   It used to hold scenery and backdrops and maybe lights and stuff."

"Why?"

"I'm building a model.

[Silence]

"A computer model."

[Silence]

"Of the building."

[Silence]

"When it was a theater."

"Yeah.  Okay... and what is this for?"


Uh-oh.  I'd never anticipated this question.  For some larger reason, I've never asked it of myself.  At this point, I've spent a couple of hundred hours working on a very specific thing, trolling through libraries and courthouse files without really examining the fundamental principals that compel me.  I'd better construct this answer very carefully before I--


"Oh, you know. Just because."

Well... crap.

"...oookay.  I see.  Well, I have your information.   Let me get back to you."



To my recollection, that's the conversation I had with the building's current owner.  It was rocky, to say the least, and not very productive.  I don't blame her.  If I owned a building and someone called out of the blue asking to poke around in some remote area of it, this would certainly be my reaction.  And that's why I'm always hesitant talk to people about things I'm curious about.

But, it doesn't have to be that way.  Not when you have a question about local history.  Not when you live in Canonsburg.

I spent an entire evening writing, editing, rewriting, abandoning and redrafting a single email to James Herron of the Jefferson College Historical Society.   I was worried about tone.   I don't know why.  'Hey, I'm interested in this interesting thing that you're interested in' seems like fairly benign way to reach out to a stranger, but sometimes things go astray.  My interest was fever-pitch, and I felt like it should just be casual.   At 11:04 pm, I sent it and went to bed.  The next morning, I checked my mail and saw that he had responded at 11:26.

With attachments.

Look at this.



This is the lobby of the place. It's almost exactly the same as it was during the time I lived there, except the stairs and the ticket booth.   This is a place I've walked through with in a bathrobe and long-johns, checking the mail, getting laundry out of the dryer, and here it is the day after the disaster.   The floor is trashed.  It's a muggy, hazy day and they're all wearing jackets.  

I'm equally fascinated with the things that are happening out of view.  Out front, they are hosing off the stairs and sidewalk.  A crowd is milling around outside of the front entrance.  People are claiming the bodies of victims and falling to their knees in grief I'm afraid to imagine.  And up on the stairs, where the girl with the blurred face is standing, my son and I, eighty six years in the future, are trying very, very hard to coax a slinky into walking more than three steps.

The theater is just on the other side of those doors on the right.



I'd spent a lot of time staring at the photocopy of this picture, but this was my first time seeing a decent version of it.  There was good news. My approximation of the balcony location was pretty close. There is an exit evident on the left and it lined up with the window where they installed a fire exit.

The perplexing thing for me, for a long while, was how they packed 900 people in there.

"The seating capacity of the theater is, on the first floor 552, balcony, 132, and gallery, 200."

Canonsburg Daily Notes -- August 28, 1911

I spaced the rows of chairs to where they seemed reasonable, and I came up way short. The seats on the floor were original, from before the expansion, and there should have been 552 of them. What I hadn't taken into account is that the theater was built in pre-Kentucky Fried Chicken America. You could really pack a space with paying customers when they were kinda-sorta undernourished.

We were at a band performance at the middle school, the auditorium of which was built in 1931. When you sit down in that place, there's always a little bit of grumbling about the leg room.  It occurred to me then that my estimate was clearly off.

I measured the space between the rows using my wife's purse strap, tying a knot in it to mark the distance.  

Yeah, she was delighted.



I pushed the seats together, allowing 24 inches from backrest to backrest.  Then I installed seats in the balcony.

Don't count them.  I'm still ballparking the numbers at this stage of the game -- the model has 647 seats instead of 684.

I'm still short about 240 seats.

There are these shape in the upper right of the auditorium photo that look like steps. I dismissed them as an optical illusion initially, because... where would they go? We were sort of at the limit of the building's height.

It's the folly of human beings that we identify patterns so well.  So well, that we see then where they don't exist.   If you throw this image into a photo editor and play with the contrast, the brightness, and any other available filter, the cloud of random pixels will give you anything you want.  You'll see Jack Ruby back there.  After hours of making constellations out of photo-optical noise, I felt kind of confident in these shapes.



The horizontal arrow seems to be pointing at the lower edge of a structure above a support beam, and the other arrow are pointing at the things that seem to be stairs.  Maybe.  But, more evidence would help.

James Herron invited me to his house to talk about the building and the disaster. I met Gina Nestor, whose father had been in the building on the night of the disaster.  I can't tell you how strange it is to think about something privately for ten years and then to be in a room where people are talking about that thing out loud.  It's a little surreal.  They shared a ton of material with me, including transcribed interviews with survivors of the tragedy conducted by Joseph Solobay.  

There was this:

From the Recollection of Oliver Perrine

"Charles Mawhiney and I went up to the Gallery, which was called 'Peanut Heaven' by many people at that time, to sit and watch the movies. We got seated on the long bench-like seats that were furnished in the Gallery, the cheapest seats in the house..."

So, with the photograph and the eyewitness description, I felt confident enough to do this.



And now... I think I'm wrong. 

The problem is this line from the same transcription.

"I was seated next to the walk space that came down the center of Peanut heaven.  On the side toward the walk space the aisle had a board wall about three feet high, and I just stepped over this and took off, leaving Charlie Mawhiney sitting there."

Clearly, he's just talking about the other area, the one just in back of the five rows of balcony seats.  But that excludes a lot of seats from the total count.  Maybe he is misremembering which seats were dubbed Peanut Heaven.

And when did this dawn on me?  The day before I published this entry.  That's when.   I've been convinced that there was an upper level for something like six years, and now, instead of brushing my teeth and turning in, I'm back to staring into the fuzzy darkness of an old photograph and drawing conclusions through the same intellectual processes as the people who think there's a face on Mars.

But to be honest, this is the root of the thing I love.   You have this base amount of information and you keep twisting it and squinting at it until it you get just one more tiny particle of truth out of it.

Again, there's a threshold.  Sometimes, the answers are just sitting there in a place within reach... whether you're invited or not.


Opera House Month continues next week.