Elegy for the LaSalle
By George Bilgere

Last summer I was driving down Euclid Avenue near the sprawling termite tower that is Cleveland Clinic. It was a hot, sunny day, and in the distance I spotted a black sun, swinging on the horizon-- a wrecking ball, suspended from a tall crane.
A building was going down.

So I pulled over, out of curiosity, and parked in a Rite Aid Drugstore parking lot across the street from the demolition site. An enormous yellow Komatsu Crane stood only a hundred feet from me. The operator, inside his little glass cage, was dwarfed by the size of the machine he controlled. And I sat down on a little square of carefully tended grass, some of the only real, authentic grass remaining in the city of Cleveland, and watched him as he worked.

He was facing an old apartment building. Brick and delicate terra cotta. Three floors high. A keystone at its base said it had been built in 1905. It was one hundred years old. And carved in the granite stone above the doorway was the building’s name. It was the LaSalle, and it was a beautiful structure, dark and solid and full of history. It seemed far more permanent than the encroaching glass and steel boxes of the Cleveland Clinic.

But more and more people are getting old. More and more people are getting sick. And since hardly anyone dies anymore, the clinic needs to expand. The ancient LaSalle was simply in the way.

As I sat on the lawn, I admired the artistry of the wrecking ball operator. He swung the ball in gentle, short arcs to knock off a chimney, lop off a hundred-year-old gargoyle. He swung it again and a wall on the third floor fell away with a crash, exposing a sink and a bathtub. They gleamed nakedly in the sunlight, almost obscenely, as if a woman’s blouse had been suddenly ripped away.

And then the ball swung once more, and the kitchen was laid bare, with its ancient wallpaper, the cabinets no one had bothered to save. And I thought of all the meals that had been cooked in that room by the generations of families who had lived there. I thought of all the conversations between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, that had unfolded under the naked electric bulb now dangling in the daylight.

I imagined a man and woman eating dinner in 1916, a cool evening in October, talking about how many British and German soldiers had died the day before in the great war in Europe.

I imagined a couple of newlyweds in 1930, just starting out their life together, talking over their day while eating pork chops and drinking Blatz beer, listening to the streetcar pass beneath them.

And then the wrecking ball made its little arc, and its two thousand pounds knocked away the bedroom wall, and I thought of a young couple in 1942, lying there in the sweltering darkness of a Cleveland night in July. Their bodies are wet and gleaming with sweat. They’ve just made love, and they’re smoking a cigarette, sharing it, passing it back and forth between them. They don’t realize it, but they’ve just made a baby. And he’s home on a one-week furlough from the war, and they don’t realize that when he goes back he’ll be gone for nearly a year, and he’ll fight on Midway and Saipan and Iwo Jima, and he’ll see terrible things, but he’ll be ok, after all, and he’ll come back in his neat khaki uniform and she’ll be waiting at the train station, and she will be beautiful, and she will be holding his baby, and they will sit up for hours in the kitchen, just talking and talking.

And I think of the wrecking ball operator, going home at the end of the day. He lives in a little house on the west side. He’ll be tired, and he’ll come in and take a shower and sit down at the kitchen table and his wife will bring him a cold beer.

How was your day, she’ll ask. Well, he’ll say. I knocked down an old building by the clinic. And old, three-story brick place. Piece of cake. That brick came down like a house of cards. I had the whole thing down by mid-afternoon.

And then he’ll say, what’s for dinner.

Pork chops, she’ll say, and he’ll smile, because he loves the way she cooks pork chops, and they’ll sit together in the little kitchen in the old house they just bought last year, when they got married. The house they plan to raise a family in.

And finally I think of the air, the empty air, three floors above the hole in the ground that used to be the LaSalle. How the pigeons must have flown down at twilight that evening and circled for a while in confusion. Then they flew away.

Next year that empty air will be filled with a new wing of the Cleveland Clinic. And a new room will be where that third floor apartment used to be. An old man will be lying in that room, in his expensive, adjustable hospital bed. Maybe he’s an old man who fought in Midway and Saipan and Iwo Jima. Maybe not. At his age, it’s getting hard to remember things clearly. Anyway, no sense in thinking about that. It’s seven o’clock. He lifts the remote and flips the channel to Wheel of Fortune.
from Cool Cleveland contributor George Bilgere gbilgere@jcu.edu

 (:divend:)