Finding what usually goes unseen in Hidden Kalamazoo

Over and over the line-wranglers on last weekend’s Hidden Kalamazoo tour made the same apology – that the organizers hadn’t been sure many people would be interested in a tour of downtown’s neglected attics, rooftops and basements. Those organizers probably would have been relieved by the turnout if they hadn’t been running to catch up, coping with the teething pains of a sold-out first-time event.

 

Rain or not, it turns out the smart ticket-holders were the ones who started touring Saturday morning. Many of them managed to see most of the 10 venues, despite lines that could take 40 minutes or more. Those who waited until Sunday afternoon were lucky to manage three venues. 

 

Yet the people in those lines were civil, and almost everyone seemed to leave one venue happy enough to go stand in line at the next. And here where the tour’s organizers can pat themselves on the back, because they delivered the goods. Oh, sure, there’s always The Luck of the Guide, but for every well-intentioned volunteer reading haltingly from a crumpled sheet of paper or, worse, cheerfully speculating based on nothing at all ("Now, I don’t know if this is original or not, but it looks really old, so it might be…") there were joyful surprises: the guide who knew the ins and outs of mixing and applying horsehair plaster, or the one who could tell you how a performer’s status determined how close to the lone bathroom his State Theater dressing room was.  Besides, each tour group seemed to contain plenty of builders and architects and amateur historians willing to challenge, correct and generally keep things lively.

 

One example:

 

The happiest visitors may have been those visiting the former ballroom of the Arlington Hotel, above Bimbo’s Pizza. On entering Newman’s Bookshoppe, 12 visitors at a time had their tickets punched. After a few minutes to browse the bookstore, they were moved to an outdoor refreshment area while the next 12 were punched in. From the popcorn and soft drinks they had a short wait before being led upstairs into the shell of the ballroom, where one of the builders gave some background on the hotel-floors-turned-ballroom, describing the apartments going in over the next two years. He pointed out the dust-engrained floor dismantled and stacked against the far wall, waiting to become the apartment hallway, then revealed the glowing maple coffee table he’d sanded, oiled, and built from a few of the planks. 

 

Before anyone had time to be impatient, a man in a frock coat appeared, red rose in his buttonhole. Local historian Steve Rossio of the Portage District Library, enthusiasm in a cravat, not only had information about artifacts, like the newly revealed fireplace that will be a feature of one apartment, or the amazingly narrow stairway that would have led to the hotel rooms, but was able to explain the railroad/traveling salesman/hotel dynamic responsible for so many hotels clustering within a block of each other, and why lots of small rooms were a sensible and economical solution for men in town for one night. 

 

Emerging into the two-story ballroom space, he recreated its 1930’s glory – the bandstand, the mirrors on one wall echoing the windows on the other, the Art Deco wall that will be restored and retained as the apartment hallway. Even when the tour was over, visitors were free to wander, to examine a tableful of artifacts discovered in the renovation, to visit the rough stone and brick basement. Although the owners hope to open the site to the public on future Art Hops as work progresses, this felt like a rare privilege -- a chance to see two levels of local history briefly revealed before the latest layer covers them again. 

 

Another example:

 

Which line to risk – a 15th-floor view of Kalamazoo, or the earliest, least improved site on the tour? Seeing Pam O’Connor, author with Lynn Houghton of Kalamazoo: Lost and Found, punching tickets and chatting with the line was a tiebreaker. Although the venue was so small that only groups of 10 at a time could go up, O’Connor’s willingness to discuss the fine points of architectural restoration (hard mortar and soft brick turn out to be a bad combination) kept the front of the line entertained.

 

A1Printing is so narrow that three Midwesterners standing side-by-side are uncomfortably close. Not surprising, then, that a hotel on the third floor would be so cramped that it would be easier to lock the door on the space than to try to convert it to some profitable use. For exactly that reason, this derelict hotel wasn’t pretty, but was the most perfectly preserved of any of the sites. People’s eyes widened as they grasped that the only windows were in the front and back of the building, with nine rooms lining the front-back corridor. 

 

The construction-savvy guide pointed out the ceiling-level vents in the walls between rooms, the gas jets, the necessity for chamber pots. Nostalgia didn’t stand a chance here, but curiosity had a field day. 

 

Studding and lathe were visible through rare patches of fallen plaster, and the guide gave a brief tutorial on the uses of horsehair in plaster. The Art Nouveau hallway wallpaper, meanwhile, still glittered faintly in a flashlight beam. Clearly this was overflow housing; probably neither the guests nor the location would have been anyone’s first choice, yet it was exactly this site’s drawbacks that preserved it. Very little imagination was necessary to recreate the heat and smells of a travelling salesman’s August night in Kalamazoo.

 

Obviously Kalamazoo’s curiosity about Kalamazoo is greater than anyone guessed. Whether the next Hidden Kalamazoo tour chooses a different theme and set of venues or concedes that few people got to see everything and simply repeats itself (Hidden Kalamazoo – Encore!) it’s clear that  they have a hit on their hands.

Susan Ramsey is a Kalamazoo-based writer whose book A Mind Like This was published last year. She can be contacted through her website. 

Photos by Erik Holladay.