It was inevitable he would pose the question. My son Josh is college-bound in the fall and when to my surprise he expressed interest in my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I gladly took him for a visit. We weren’t there long before he dished up the expected query. “What was it like when you were here?” Reaching back over thirty-five years, I reminisced about buildings old and new, my work for the commissary, courses on astronomy and seventeenth century British literature, bell bottom jeans and paisley shirts, country rock, and the anger and upset as the Vietnam War convulsed to conclusion. But with memories growing thin, I took him to a place in the center of town that might conjure more.
On the redbrick wall of the Amherst Cinema Building on Amity Street are scrawled two phrases in white paint. “Save the Drake,” reads one. “For Willy, for Humanity!” reads the other. Graffiti is typically a statement of the moment whose meaning dims faster than the paint. Often it gets covered over or slowly fades like an urban ghost sign. But strangely, these barely washed out words have persisted since at least the late 1990s.
After years of complaints from locals about loud, unruly and even lewd behavior, the Drake Hotel got a new owner and closed in 1985. But when I was a student ten and more years earlier, it was a notorious rooming house said to be the lair of drug dealers and other malefactors. Around the corner from the main entrance was the Rathskeller, a basement bar where Willy Whitfield, a tall, muscular black man presided over the bottles and taps. Willy seemed always genial, and though the denizens might be raucous, whenever I was there he ruled with a steely resolve no one dared challenge.
Tired after a week of classes, studying and work, I’d head to the Drake on most Friday nights. The beer was cold and cheap and Miller Dark was served in quart-sized metal buckets. Dimly lit, smoky, noisy and crowded with pin ball games and initial-carved wooden booths, you’d find construction workers blowing off steam, graduate students editing a thesis, undergrads playing chess, artists, and auto mechanics. Its unseemly reputation made me a pariah in many quarters. In an age when being antiestablishment was hip, that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Catty-corner across the street from the graffiti marred wall, is a staid four story apartment building sheathed in rough stucco and with a generous porch. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it’s had a long history of room rentals under several names, one of which was the Drake. Today it’s a quiet place without a bar called The Perry, a name recycled from early in the twentieth century.
Whatever it’s called, the building is no longer the lively place I remember so fondly. But like people, the structures we spend our time in have a life. They age, change in appearance and use, grow with additions and new technologies, and sometimes meet death by demolition. They get reinvented and assume new identities. Existing in time as well as space, to see or inhabit a building at any moment is not to know it forever.
My son was patient, but puzzled as I waxed nostalgic. I don’t know that he got any better sense of what the world or his father was like all those years ago. For a seventeen year-old, time’s passage is still a kind of amusement park ride. All I can hope is that he got an inkling of how valuable each day’s experience is, because returning is never going back.
