When a Building You Love Dies

It’s never good when the phone rings early in the morning. It’s worse when it’s your editor.

“You’re kidding me,” is all I can reply. “Oh, my God! Are you sure?”

Of course he’s sure. Firemen had battled the downtown blaze all night. (I thought I heard a siren in the distance.) The internet is ablaze with videos of the smoky fire. The State Street Saloon buildings are gone. The block is smouldering rubble.

Miraculously, I’m told, no one is hurt — physically, at least. But there are victims and there are scars. Fire consumes the present, and eats the past for dessert.

“Didn’t you live near there?” the editor asks. I did. A parade of roommates and I rented the entire top floor of the wooden building next door on Pleasant Street. We had eight rooms with eight dormers and skylights for $225 a month. Back then the Saloon, the Rusty Hammer, and the Press Room were brand new, and so were we.

The blackened and now-exposed wall of that building was my apartment. For 10 years my bed was five feet from the dark narrow alley that separates the buildings. I often dreamt of fire and collapsing walls. Perhaps we all do.

A ladder from my bathroom window led onto the nearby roof. The people on the third floor apartment of the Saloon building were my “roof-mates.” Their fire escape was my fire escape. We all sunned ourselves up there. We watched the fireworks over South Mill Pond together and listened to the choir singing in the Unitarian Church below.

I had a little box garden up there for years. One summer a couple of policemen clambered up the metal fire escape that clung to the wall of the building that is no longer there. Someone must have tipped them off about my plants. The officers seemed disappointed to discover my crop was only cherry tomatoes.

Fires spark memories. I also rented much of the second floor in my building as an office. The stairway that now leads to the Portsmouth Buddhist Center once led to my company. There was an insurance agency and later a video store on the first floor during my era. Before me it was Gallagher’s Sports Center. Before that, I don’t know. My office neighbor, an elderly attorney named Bob Renfro, used to run up and down those stairs to demonstrate his physical fitness. We’d break for lunch at the Saloon. Sometimes, we were back at the Saloon for drinks hours later.

I’m drifting around in the past when I realize my editor is still on the line. “What’s that?” I ask again. “You want a few words about the history of the building? You need it when?”

Despite decades of writing about this town, I’m not an encyclopedia. Asked to rustle up a quick history of the devastated buildings, I draw a blank. In my brief memory, this corner of State and Pleasant streets has always been the State Street Saloon.

Two hours of research later, I’m not much better off. The key town histories have little to say about this 19th-century structure. There are archival images of the building dressed in bunting for the Return of the Sons and Daughters in 1873. It stands as background to a number of parades. In a few Kodak snapshots, we can see the Russian and Japanese delegates passing the building in their convertible Pope Toledo cars during the welcoming parade of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905.

The ashes have gone cold as my deadline looms. I’m watching videos of the midnight blaze online. I’m imagining myself living downtown again. People are commenting on social media, waxing nostalgic, speaking in the past tense. In candid photos, the street corner that I know so well looks like a war zone. The four-and-half-story brick building next door, the one that loomed for a decade outside my bathroom window, looks awkward and embarrassed standing on its own. Funds for the displaced victims of the fire are flowing into a charitable website.

Portsmouth has been altered again. We have all changed with it. Another old building is dead and, like a neighbor we scarcely knew, its passing makes us pause. We think of the times we spent there. Then we think of the time we have left.

With only minutes to deadline, I find another photo in the archives. It shows a man and two women lounging in the doorway of the same building. A large sign over the door reads “Portsmouth Steam Laundry.” These laundry workers had no clue that, a century later, this would be the fallen doorway of the late great State Street Saloon.

And there’s more. A bold sign on the second floor reads “Daily Times.” That would be the late great Portsmouth Times (1868-1923). That newspaper evolved from the Portsmouth Journal. Its editor, Charles Brewster, my hero and ghostly mentor, wrote the history of the city. I had no idea we were neighbors.

Historians are always a day late and a dollar short—and I’m out of time here. But the least I can do is dig deeper into the backstory of the place next door. I’ve written too many eulogies, but we can’t let an old friend go without a few kind words. In the meantime, there are souls to comfort and beer glasses to raise.

Copyright 2016 J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.