Thoughts on a Building
I will soon leave a curious building of many firsts for the last time
I tend to keep work things very close to my chest, but I’m having what I think might be interesting thoughts on this, so I’m going to open up a little here: My department is moving buildings once this semester’s over. We’re leaving a building named Twente Hall, which has served as the department’s home since 1974, for another building on the opposite side of campus. This is, like many moves, a bittersweet experience. I am excited for the new space, but I’ve grown fond of Twente and will be sad to depart.
It’s a quirky old building, originally built in the 1930s as a hospital and converted into an academic office building later on, a fact that one can feel if they know where to look. The building is vee-shaped, separated into East and West wings, one of which (I believe the second-floor West, but I don’t know for certain) was built to serve as an isolation ward if necessary. Several offices, originally patient rooms, have private bathrooms. Many bathrooms have mirrors that hinge out to reveal medicine cabinet shelves, and many of those have the little holes in the back where patients were to dispose of old razor blades. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a pile of years-old rusty razor blades that lay somewhere deep beneath the building.
There’s a sign on the door in the bathroom across the hall from me that reads “HAVE YOU WASHED YOUR HANDS?”, one that I have to imagine was tacked up during the building’s time as a hospital and has stayed untouched for over a half-century. I doubt whoever put that up there had any sense that it’d still be reminding people of the necessity of proper hand-hygiene so far in the future. I see that question every day, and I suppose that I answer it affirmatively whenever I remember to wash, an effort that engages me in a conversation with a likely long-dead hospital worker started decades ago.
It was built on a hillside, and I’m fortunate that my office has a Southwestern window facing down the hill, from which I can see parts of the library and power plant. There are trees that block me from seeing much more, but I’ve appreciated watching their leaves yellow in the lone autumn I’ll spend here. The prior occupant of my office left a lovely cranberry-colored rug that I’m going to take with me to the new space and a map of the world on a corkboard.
I know that the building won’t be torn down, but a significant interior remodeling is set to take place. I don’t know the details of that, but it seems that this iteration of the building I’ve come to know, with the gray tile floors and the chocolate-brown doors and the medicine cabinet mirrors, will cease to be in the near future. I’m at a point in my life where I’m able to point to more and more significant spaces that are no longer what they once were to me. My mental image of MCI Airport still features the constellations on the floor and the cramped terminals, even now that I finally visited the new terminal last month. I had a dream set in my childhood bedroom last night, two years after my family moved out. I watched my college’s football team from an NFL stadium an hour’s drive away on Saturday, while the one in which I grew to love the team sits vacant amid its reconstruction.
When I think back on physical spaces of personal import like this, I find that I group them as if on a timeline in Adobe Premiere. There are different tracks — Home, school, leisure, social, etc. — and this one will soon join two others on the “Employment” track as physically inaccessible. The Great Mall of the Great Plains, where I had my first ‘real’ job during the summers spent at home from college, was demolished in 2015. The space occupied by the wine store in downtown Lawrence where I worked in the summer of 2018 is still there, only vacant, as the store itself closed in 2020. I know that that the two writing centers and the HyVee grocery store (and I’m fairly certain that the country club fitness center) where I used to work are all still in operation.
This is also a unique building that housed a few of the ever-diminishing first-time experiences I am to have as I keep getting older. My office on the second floor, room 205W, was the first office I could call mine. I’d only ever shared space before that: desk space in a writing center; the retail counter at the mall; the shared offices for GTAs and embedded writing tutors; the bar in the restaurant in the HyVee — I only spent time in those, never had them to my name. I never had a nameplate on an office before Twente. I’d never had to decorate an office before Twente, a fact which anyone can easily see upon entry to my current space.
I’d never held a full-time job before Twente, either. I’d never held a job for more than two and a half years before Twente. This building housed some of my earliest steps into an actual career, one that is still nascent. There is something paradoxical about that — I only set foot into this building in the final two years of its fifty-year legacy. My place in its book would be limited and late-on if I am fortunate enough to be etched in it at all. But still, I’ll remember Twente as the source of new beginnings, a place of many firsts even in the limited time I spent there.
I don’t have a clear path to a conclusion for this post, but I imagine that this will be one of those trains of thought whose impacts won’t really make sense to me for a long while. For example: with the tenth anniversary of JoeBush.net this month, I spent some time sorting through old ephemera from the blog and found a draft entitled “Last Transmission from a Dying Mall” that I remember drafting on my phone during one of my last shifts at the Great Mall. I was 20 years old, just out of sophomore year, and just about to quit that job. I never finished it. I will post an excerpt here:
When I was younger I never thought that a shopping mall could really ever go out of business, or really that any retail store could go out of business. My mindset was that people have to buy things somewhere, and I always wanted to go to stores and malls because they seemed like fun, lively places. When I was growing up, the Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe was the second place where I saw retail failure.
The first was in 2006, when I went to a Game X Change to purchase one of their Super Nintendos they still had in stock (I remember being very impressed by their 'gold' SNES consoles, which looking back had probably just yellowed). I arrived at the store to find no store anymore. It was a GNC by the next month. That day, I purchased a SNES at a store named GameCo, which was actually a local chain, which had another location in the Great Mall.
…
Fast forward to today, when I work at this mall. Last night I was supposed to make sure nobody was in the store, which involved trekking to the back and into the locked-to-the-outside fitting rooms. The location I work in right now is a sporting goods store, but it initially was held by a Saks Fifth Avenue outlet judging by the signs in the back room - put there in 1997 and abandoned around the beginning of 2003 judging by the way the labeled shelves behind the counter come to a stop, abandoned just like the lockers in the back.
These fitting rooms were meant for Saks and were probably used by Saks. I do not have keys to these fitting rooms, and I can't get in the room which contains them from the outside. The only way in is through the back, and the door locks behind you if you go that way.Through the slats of the door, one can just slightly see inside. There's nobody and nothing in there, just like there hasn't been for at least 12 years. These rooms have remained untouched since at least 2003, locked probably by some store manager or employee like myself. I'll be out of the store in a few days. The store will be out of the mall in a few months. The mall will be fully out of commission in a few years as its last tenant runs out its lease.
In sort of a funny twist, the last tenant, a Burlington Coat Factory Outlet store, held on until at least the early twenties. It’s closed now, finally.
I see Joe at twenty hypothesizing about the Saks Off Fifth manager the same way that Joe at twenty-nine hypothesizes about the “HAVE YOU WASHED YOUR HANDS?” sign-poster. This curiosity about the way in which one’s actions continually affect their spaces, even once they’ve left them, runs deep. It’s one of the many aspects that brought me to rhetoric. I’m sure that intrigue developed out of the hope that something I put out into the world has a lasting impact (and probably in equal measure out of the terrifying knowledge that the something I put out into the world has the power to have a lasting impact that I can’t fathom in the process of creation).
The decommissioning or changing of physical spaces like this always gets to me. I’m fascinated by first-times and last-times, and I have been since I was a child.
I can remember being five years old, catching a fish off of the dock at my grandparents’ house for the first time, and thinking ‘I will never do that for the first time again.’ That made me terribly sad, knowing that another first thing in my life had been passed. That scene probably predicted the depressive tendencies I’d later develop. I’d skipped from living in the moment to lamentation of my mortality, passing over the entire nostalgic process of bittersweet recollection of the times in which I had lived in the moment. Efforts to assuage those depressive tendencies led me to become far more capable of appreciating those moments in adulthood, for what it is worth.
In Twente, I have an intersection of my firsts and its lasts. I was the final full-time occupant of room 205W, I am the final occupant of room 119. On the other side of the coin and campus, I will be the first occupant of the space I take in the new office. I don’t know what it will bring. However, I will try to bring one thing with me. Wherever we go, we’ll always need to remember to wash our hands.