When a Place Dies
How do we mourn lost space?
When a place like a club or small business dies it dies three times. The first, of course, is when it closes. When the owner, or maintenance staff, or whoever is in charge, turns off the lights, locks the door, and takes down the shingle, so to speak, for the last time. When the place first moves from a present tense — is — to a past tense — was.
This first death is the most recognizable. It’s the one that gets the obituary. The staff and regulars get interviewed and quoted and words are run in newspapers and on websites alongside a brief and entirely inadequate history. Characters get fixed to the record like beetles on an entomologist’s board, remembered alongside a catalogue of minor and thoroughly suspect legacies. These questionable details are most often acts performed on the premises by minor people who did popular things, or else by popular people who did minor things. Generally it’s something along the lines of, “It’s where nonstick teflon first came into common use, where Clarence Goodwin coined the phrase ‘the upshot’ and ‘fair enough,’ and where Ezra Pound was once thrown out on the street after getting into a violent disagreement with the espresso machine.”
You get the idea.
Then other people — which may or may not include you — who are not quoted but no less affected pass the obit around. Some pass from spite, affronted by not having their name alongside Clarence Goodwin and Ezra Pound, though most who want the writing seen feel a sincere sense of loss. Their entry to a shared mourning made swiftly personal. And this email of theirs, or this Facebook post, this tweet is their candlelit vigil for what is now gone.
Yet all of this generally goes on before the death has actually happened, while the doors are still open, when the place can still be thought of in the present tense. After all this publicity the actual death itself seems almost inconsequential. It’s certainly anticlimactic. The light goes off, a door closes, a key turns, and that is that.
The second death is much more subtle, and is a fairly recent phenomenon. The second death happens when the router gets disconnected. For awhile, your phone still lights up as it recognizes the old server. You can still sponge off the internet, pull it from the list of local routers and ration it out, like that stockpile of instant butterscotch pudding inherited after a loved one’s passing that just keeps showing up in the pantry. As you login and browse through emails and suggestions for stories to read, movies to watch, you can almost for an instant convince yourself that none of it ever really went away. That you can just walk back in, have a seat, get a coffee or a haircut, and it will all be just exactly the way it was.
But then one day — and maybe only a day after, or a week, or a month — the router winks out. It’s not in the list of servers anymore. It no longer calls out to you as you walk past. And while your phone would recognize it if it appeared, would in fact call out to it, that’s no longer possible. Of course not all places get this second death but for the ones that do you really have to care to notice just when it happens.
The third death is the most final, and is the one that takes longest. The third death is time. Technology advances, phones get upgraded, old devices discarded, and whatever data was left engraved in cell phones, tablets, and laptops get scraped away. A new place moves in. And for a long while people will say, ‘you know this used to be…’ until they too forget, or move away, or get old or dead themselves, which is among the more final forms of data erasure.
Facts get garbled — was it Clarence Pound? — in a lingering dementia — or Ezra Goodwin? — as details bleed away — who invented the first nonstick espresso machine?
But unlike the first two, the third death holds no witnesses since to witness is to make use of both sense and memory. So long as there are memories, there has not been the final death. But after the lights, the door, the key, then after the router and phones, the third death comes at last when the final memory is forgotten, and no can recall if there even was anything to remember. When they don’t even know that there was a was.
Cities, for their part, almost never die. They just gradually fade into people we don’t know. But the places within them, the individual cells that make up the gathering spaces — the cafes, the hair salons, the bowling alleys and noodle shops — are not quite so lucky. Maybe luckier now than they might once have been. Afterall it used to be that a place only died twice. Now it’s up to three. And perhaps in a few years, four or five. Maybe even more. It just takes so long now for a thing to die.
