I have a great love for buildings with faded glory.
Buildings that have a sort of story lurking about their empty shells.
At first, it’s just an abandon mess, a hunk, an eyesore piece of trash that irritates locals, until it fades into the scenery and becomes ignored. No one notices exactly when they slip from being trash into being a mystery. A curiosity. History. Then suddenly you can hear the ghosts whispering a story about the life that was there before you stumbled along.
(It’s the original Johnson’s Corner station, at it’s new location. I took this in Dec 2012, about a decade after it’s relocation)
For 15 years I have lived by and driven past this piece of architecture daily. Its details have always intrigued me. Over the years I watched it limp along: it was the home of a couple different used car lot businesses –maybe a mechanics shop, too, my memory is a little fuzzy. I remember when the two pillars were painted with cartoonish palm trees. (Pictures here.) And there was a miniature Model-T Ford style replica, with an oversized, white stuffed teddy bear in the drivers seat, that lived on the roof, at some point during that time.
Then it was relocated and a highway was built through the property.
In all the years I drove past that building I was unaware it was the very same gas station Jack Kerouac lands at in the beginning of his novel “On the Road”.
While working my third shift job as a computer operator in my early twenties, I would read “On the Road” in the snips-and-snaps of down time I had in between loading and unloading big magnetic tape reels in-and-out of these hulking tape drive cabinets.
I loved that book!
But by the time I moved here I was in my thirties, and the story had already slipped from my mind. It never occurred to me this was the very same station! I learned about its history during local efforts to save it from being demolished. There was a successful rescue and relocation, less then five miles south of its original location. And there were many good intentions to restore the station to it’s full glory at the new location. But all of them have failed and this little treasure is crumpling away.
Then Craig Stevens did this extremely cool thing! He actually made the building’s most famous ghost speak, and tell some stories:
Reunion at Johnson’s Corner from Craig Stevens on Vimeo.
The highway that you see through those windows is the same “hot road” that Kerouac catches his ride to Denver. Many of the landscape photos I’ve published over the years were taken from the same highway. And these are some of the mountains views he was seeing as he laid with “…an elbow out, and one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment.”
I am not sure how much longer this building will have before it is beyond the reach of restoration. But it will live humbly preserved from it’s full glory days in this piece of iconic literature:
“I got a ride right off from a young fellow from Connecticut who was driving around the country in his jalopy, painting; he was the son of an editor in the East. He talked and talked; I was sick from drinking and the altitude. At one point I almost had to stick my head out the window. But by the time he left me off at Longmont, Colorado, I was feeling normal again and had even started telling him about the state of my own travels. We wished me luck.
It was beautiful in Longmont. Under a tremendous old tree was a green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station. I asked the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure; so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face on it, with an elbow out, and one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment. I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being the an occasional Colorado ant. And i am here in Colorado! I kept thinking gleefully. Damn! damn! damn! I am making it! And after a refreshing sleep filled with cobwebby dreams of my past life in the East, washed in the station men’s room, and strode off, fit and slick as a fiddle and got me a rich thick milkshake at the road-house to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach. Incidentally, a very beautiful Colorado gal shook me that cream; she was all smiles too; I was grateful, it made up for last night. I said to myself, Wow! What’ll Denver be like! I got on that hot road, and off I went in a brand-new car driven by a Denver business man of about thirty-five.”
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
It’s funny, but as I finished typing that Kerouac passage above, I realized he might actually be haunting me these days, more so then when I was twenty-some.
Because I caught a ride with a woman writer who had a General’s swagger; she was from Connecticut, and worked as an editor in her life out West. And Man! I will tell you this, she drove that car like a mad woman, a real jet fighter pilot! At least that’s how I remember it. And I’ve been painting, and writing, and hanging my head out the window ever since; my heart twisted from its tumultuous fall into a lost and blinded sorta love; and I was a little ill from altitude. I am starting to feel better now.
Wow! And how we both know the weight of some of the very same things in this crazy upside-down world. Like, everyone wants to meet a Kerouac, but they never quite know what to do with one; especially if you’re a Kerouac on estrogen. And just like he said, we…”never say a common place thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.”; we’re different sides of the same magic soul coin; she’s the head and I am the tail! Oh! Did I say that out loud! Yeow! Yeow! Yeow! Spicy! Do Tell!
And every word’s the Gospel truthy!
Man! I need another cup of coffee!
*snap snap snap snap snap snap*
It’s my Kerouac Gifty.
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