Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  SANDER HALL TOOK seven seconds to fall. Young voices cheered what might no longer be cheered, a chilling first practice in watching a modern glass-sheathed building shudder and wobble like a woman fainting or shot. Still managing to keep her dignity as she stayed upright, she sank to her knees before vanishing in a tsunami of dust that pursued the onlookers. Online, you can play and replay four screens showing the single largest implosion in the western hemisphere. Five hundred and twenty pounds of dynamite carefully placed. Six months to plan. Seconds to fall.

  ON THE HOUSEBOAT, they raised their glasses to toast. White dust puffed gossamer between deep green hills where the tower had held the view for twenty years. My father said over the phone to me a week later, “Good riddance.” His voice still defiant. Interviews in the paper quoted him saying, “I still believe it was a perfect building. Even with all those fires set, a student never died in it.”

  Yet I imagined him looking down, tracing his foot along a seam in the deck, muttering quietly, “It’s a terrible thing to outlive your buildings.”

  House that Woodie designed on Nantucket, Wood playing, 1959

  EPILOGUE: NANTUCKET

  2011

  [Modernism] was revolution then, but it is art now. It is time to stop using modernism as a convenient punching bag, or turning it into trendy kitsch; this was one of the most powerful movements in history.

  —ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

  MY MOTHER AND I LEAN ON THE STERN RAILING OF the Gray Lady, a high-speed ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket Island, on an unseasonably warm last day of September. My mother is in her early eighties and I am in my late fifties. This is the first time we have returned to Nantucket since our visit in 1959 to the “upside-down” modern house overlooking the beach. We left our homes in Maine the day before, and drove south from Boston on a crowded highway in a rainstorm. Today a pale blue sky is washed clear of clouds, and the boat fills with day trippers sporting summer white shorts and tee shirts.

  As we watch the island slowly expand and grow larger on the horizon, we go over the old story of our visit in 1959. I calculate our ages. “I was five and you were thirty.”

  She nods. “I don’t know how I could have managed without you. Even at three months, Hubbard was such a big heavy baby. You helped me carry our bags. But it was little Wood at three who wouldn’t stop running off.” She explains about the pea-soup fog that had kept us from flying from Boston to the island the night before. We took a crowded limo to Hyannis where the driver dropped us off at a boarding house. “That lady was shocked when we all slept in one room, but your dad had sent us off on the plane from Cincinnati with hardly any money.” I remember that sweaty night traced with fog horns and the smell of salt, my first time near the ocean. On the ferry the next day the fog lifted to a sunny day, like today.

  My mom continues, “Little Wood was racing around these bolted seats and you tried to catch him. Other travelers kept an eye on him while I held the baby. Ruth met us at the dock. She drove us straight to the cottage, and we never left that whole week. I could finally rest.”

  This time, when our ferry pulls into the dock on Nantucket, two architectural historians are waving to us. They are both professors at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) and seem to be in their late forties. Patrick Snadon is tall, lean, and gracious, with a slight accent from his Missouri upbringing. Udo Greinacher looks distinctively European, with steel-edged glasses, and speaks with a softened German accent. I had discovered their collaborative book, 50 from the 50’s: Modern Architecture and Interiors in Cincinnati. I was fascinated by Patrick’s insightful comments about how Cincinnati became a leader in Modernism in the US after the war, with the city of seven hills offering spectacular sites for modern houses.

  When Patrick wrote that my father’s design for the Public Library seemed reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, I was compelled to write to him and included my chapter on building the model together. Did he know that was my father’s favorite house? Patrick responded with enthusiasm and countless questions. He felt my father was Cincinnati’s most significant and original Modernist architect and of national stature and importance. Part of the intention of their book was to raise awareness of how many early Modernist buildings had been torn down and were at risk, and to contribute to the appreciation and preservation of a remarkable era in architecture. We began a rigorous and generous correspondence; he answered my architectural questions and I discovered how much I had to offer his research into my father’s work.

  IN THE YEARS after my father’s death, my life was filled with my own family and work in Maine. I thought less and less of my childhood in Cincinnati until 2008. It was sixteen years after my father died and the arrhythmia I had inherited from my father was increasing in frequency. I needed to have a surgical procedure called an ablation, to scar areas of the heart that were misfiring. As I recovered, I woke each morning flooded with vivid childhood memories: the wallpaper on the wall next to my bed, my fears of the witch under the bed who might grab my ankles, my little sister faintly breathing in her bassinet. Each day I wrote down what my little-girl self in Ohio wanted me to remember. Each day there were more memories following me. Over the months I remembered when we moved from the Victorian house to the glass house, to leaving home. At first I was bewildered. What is going on? But I just kept writing everything down. The stream of memories continued daily for nearly two years until I had written every memory I had of my childhood, teens, and twenties, filling hundreds of pages. This was how I began to write this memoir about my relationship with my father, and how the rest of our family survived.

  After his death in 1994, when my brothers and I cleared his chaotic apartment and desk, we filled a box with his photographs, letters, Literary Club papers, and newspaper clippings and put them away, thinking we might someday deal with them. Hubbard took the box, and it moved with him from house to house, until it was forgotten in an attic. We were a family where none of us had photos of our father displayed. He was a book we had closed with relief and a shudder. After my memories started surfacing, I told Hubbard I wanted the box of our father’s papers. But after he passed it on to me, I was afraid to touch it for weeks. Yet after sixteen years, something had happened. I realized the radioactive half-life of my father’s fury had faded. I opened the box. At the top of the stack of papers was an oval sepia photograph of a curly-headed child with steady eyes. I delved into the layers, suddenly yearning for my father’s handwriting, his notes, his photographs. I would begin to see my father’s life as the unwinding of a tragedy: a toddler in a sailor suit during WWI, a lanky teen on horseback, a racing car driver, a young father, a visionary architect, a tyrant, a broken man.

  When I first began asking questions about my childhood and our years in the glass house, my mother was amused by my interest, but when the questions stirred up her decades of fury, she called me. “You can ask me about when you were little, but nothing more about when things got bad. I’m waking up with nightmares where I’m still trapped in that glass house.” After that, I carefully steered away from any difficult memories with her, or with my brother Woodie. His face weary from his years of working in engine rooms at sea, his eyes sad, he said, “I don’t want to go back there. I do everything I can to lock away those bad memories.”

  My youngest brother Hubbard, from his office in Boston, at first wrote back quick answers. He couched his answers with, “Our father was a bad man. I have no happy memories from my childhood except the months when our dad visited you on the ship.” But the emails grew longer, more detailed. One weekend, he spent hours writing all the bad memories he had with his father. After sending them to me, he put his arms about his wife and sobbed. A week later he sent me four more pages. He had remembered the good times with his father. A few months later, for our mother’s eightieth birthday, he wrote a ten-page letter filled with his happy memories from his childhood with our mother, baking bread and riding with her in the VW bus
.

  At Thanksgiving at my brother’s house, my mother glared at me. “Why in the world are you writing about the horrid man? Why would anyone want to hear about him?”

  I answered, “What I shared with my father was architecture and art.”

  Her face changed. She looked out the window as if looking back in time. She said, “I forgot. You had a very different relationship with your father than your brothers.” She paused. “Okay, now I get it.” Later I heard her in the kitchen, telling my sister-in-law, “Elizabeth’s book about her dad is focused on architecture.” She could accept this. She was willing to answer questions about my father’s buildings after that.

  When I flew to Cincinnati a year later, I rediscovered the complex, beautiful, and disturbing city I’d left at age twenty. I called my mother daily, saying “You won’t believe where I am now!” I loved the familiar parkways and architectural treasures all over the hilly city, art and historical museums, and old friends and cousins. I grieved the swaths of city blocks, burned out, bulldozed or abandoned nineteenth-century buildings, and the obvious polarizations of poverty, race, and wealth. Living in rural Maine for a quarter century, I was shocked by the vast suburban ring, a gorgon knot of highways through industrial complexes, abandoned shopping centers and concentrated housing, without a single building with any integrity or beauty in design. But overall, I spent a week compelled to find buildings and places that had been memorable in my childhood.

  On my return to Maine, as my mother drove me to her house from the airport, I was brimming with excitement as I recounted my adventures. I had met with the architectural historians, Patrick and Udo, and spent three days walking through my father’s buildings, as they filmed each building and interviewed us speaking with the owners. At the end of my visit, the historians and I discussed which was our favorite Woodie Garber house. The glass house in Glendale we lived in? The Klausmeyer house in Indian Hill, a glass cube on a wooded hillside? Or the Moore house which they had documented before it was demolished a few years ago? Two glass rectangular spaces with a glass bridge connecting them, white stone walls, and a hundred-foot precipice to a creek below. My mother teared up: “I loved that house.” That site was now covered with five McMansions.

  After I entered my mother’s Maine cape, she added wood to the cookstove and served eggplant parmesan, warm from the oven. “The last eggplant from my greenhouse.” As we ate dinner, she mused. “If I had to chose which of your dad’s buildings was my favorite, I’d say it was the Klausmeyer house on Nantucket. You remember how we entered on the ground floor where he’d put the bedrooms. Upstairs, I loved cooking in the kitchen and looking straight out over the dunes to the ocean.” She declared with excitement, “I guess for this project of yours, we’ll just have to go visit it!”

  AS THE JOURNEY to Nantucket nears, my mother is animated. “What is great about going to the Nantucket house is that I only have good memories about that house.” She had been remembering how, after my sister Bria was born, she had been glued to home caring for her until our friend Ruth told her to come to Nantucket. “The ten days on Nantucket gave me a rest and a chance to gain perspective. We never left the house and the beach. Ruth was so good with you children, telling stories, giving you scarves for dress-up. And then we’d play on the beach. We were so happy. I think that was when I learned that I could face my life. I could face what would happen with Bria and everything that would come after that.”

  On Nantucket fifty years later, we walk the cobblestone streets to have lunch with Patrick and Udo before driving to see the upside-down house. I have been in contact with Eleanor, the new owner, who purchased the cottage for her children’s families to enjoy. She is excited to meet us. Udo will film an interview with her as well as our exploration. When he asks my mother if he could interview her, she asks, “But what do I know?”

  We drive across the island, following directions, until we reach a warren of sand-drifted lanes where, dwarfed by recent elaborate summer cottages, we find the modest wind-worn modern cottage that shocked the island when it was built in the early 1950s. After we tour the house with Eleanor, the new owner, Udo sets up his video camera and mic to face a comfortable chair in the long great room. He invites my mother to sit. She asks with a trace of impatience, “What do you want me to say?” Patrick and I leave them to begin. We lead Eleanor downstairs to the far bedroom to ask her questions about the line of bedrooms nestled into the sand dunes on the ground floor of the house. We learn that this house is one of barely a handful of modern houses on the island. Planning boards got rigid, and required strict designs to ensure the same design style across the island. Houses are now required to have a complex cottage roofline, and no walls of windows overlooking the sea.

  Occasionally we hear the murmur of voices above. Patrick and I begin measuring the layout of each wall, hallway, closet, window, doorway. Since there are no longer any working drawings of this house, they want to take measurements. Back at the University of Cincinnati design studios, they will create a new set of plans and have their students create a model. This is the beginning of creating a retrospective show of my father’s legacy as an architect. As we work, Patrick is sorting out the details of the house through the lens of an historian and what this now-small summer cottage built sixty years ago means in terms of the history of modern architecture.

  When I hear the pushing aside of chairs and footsteps, I go upstairs and my mother smiles to me. It’s time for a walk on the beach. I hand the tape measure to Udo. As my mother and I take off our shoes and socks on the deck, I ask, “How did it go?”

  She looks animated. “He took me completely by surprise. He asked how I met your father.” She doesn’t look mad as I might have expected from the past; she is slightly flushed, like a schoolgirl who is telling about a crush. I suddenly realize I have never heard the story of how my parents met.

  “So what did you say?”

  “I told him the story of how he spilled beer on my pants at a party.”

  “He did! Why?”

  “Because he was jealous of my date.”

  “What! I’ve never heard that story!”

  “Oh, it’s just a silly story.” She laughs as she looks out to the beach. “I realized as I was answering his questions that what I remember are the funny moments and the times that scared me. But I’ll tell you later. I have to put my feet in those waves.”

  We follow the narrow worn path between the sharp-edged grasses up and over the dune to the beach beyond. This path is exactly the same, what my five-year-old self knows by heart, from our ten days of happiness in this house filled with light overlooking the beach. As my mother and I step down the hill, she says, “Feel how the sand is so thick and textured.” We step around the scatter of broken shells in the wind-tossed sand, making our way down to the ocean-packed slope. The soft rumble of waves became as familiar as breathing when we stayed in this house above the beach. We roll up our pants, and follow the edge of the sea. We hold hands, Jo feeling a little uncertain of her balance as the water pulls the sand away from under our toes.

  We search the beach, picking up shells. I pass her a worn moonshell. She hands me a flat square stone—“It’s your favorite color”—and holds it next to my coral t-shirt. It is the sand-dry smoothness, lingering on my fingertips, that suddenly reminds me of walking this same beach with my father, passing stones to each other. I look down and pick up a round gray stone, just like the stone he and I shared. I walk ahead, smoothing it between my fingers. I close my eyes and feel its coolness, and hear the ocean murmuring beside me. I feel the company of my father long ago, and my mother now. I hold the stone and try to imagine a color to the stone as my dad had encouraged. But I don’t want to see another color. As I walk along the packed warm sand, I like the gray stone simply how it is. I put it in my pocket, and take my mother’s arm before we walk back to the house to say goodbye.

  CREDITS

  Permission for Quotations

  © Ada Louise Huxtable, 2
008, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on A Century of Change, Walker Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  Photo Credits and Permissions:

  page number for each photograph

  Garber Family photographs: i, 10, 13, 50,72, 160, 201, 224, 323

  Photos of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye by the author, 1973: 39, 240, 248

  Exterior Photo of 70 Lake, photo credit Susan Rissover, © Cincinnati Modern: 192

  Woodie racing car 1952, photo credit Bob Wheaton, © The Columbus Dispatch: 84

  Implosion of Sander Hall, photo credit Lisa Ventre, © University of Cincinnati: 315

  The following photos are provided with permission from the University of Cincinnati Digital Collections, Architecture and Urban Planning Collection: http://digital.libraries.uc.edu/collections/urban/ (electronic resource).

  Formal portraits of W. Garber and Garber Family, photo credit Jerry Morgenroth: 5, 26

  1968 Garber house photos: photo credit George Stille: 22

  Photos of Sander Hall: photo credit George Stille: 150, 176

  Proposed Schenley Building drawing by W. Garber, originally published Progressive Architecture, Oct. 1945: 34

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Everything begins with my mother Jo and my brothers Woodie and Hubbard, who risked re-entering the pain to answer my countless questions, who allowed me to write about them, and were willing to read drafts of this book. We could not have emerged without each other. My gratitude to their wives, Anita and Anna, and my niece Bianca, for reading and commenting on drafts, and supporting my brothers in the pain this book stirred up.

  My gratitude goes to my children, Gabriel and Miriam, who always encourage me. I am grateful to their father, Peter, my ex-husband, for helping me heal and for his unfailing friendship. I am grateful to my Garber and Woodward cousins for countless emails uncovering family history, and especially Francie and John Pepper who let me stay with them on research trips to Cincinnati. My brothers and I are forever indebted to Francie for overseeing my father’s care as he was dying.