Left Standing

From the top of the rust-and-white-paint water tower fixed to the roof of the Liggett & Myers building, I saw a few wisps of white smoke rise above East Campus, then morph into a threatening black billow. Could make out dancing fingers of yellow-orange lightglow, maybe actual flames, maybe their reflections in the nearby building windows. I kissed the person sharing my cold, precarious stoop. The moment was romantic and obvious.

We speculated that mutinous first-years in Lilly Library were to blame and watched as a half-dozen fire engines and more police cars were dispatched from downtown, speeding up Main past the Point Break ambience and underaged students spilling out onto the Devines patio. After we climb down both ladders of the tower, down from the roof, down 12 flights of stairs to leave Liggett & Myers, we follow a late-arriving truck to its destination and discover that it’s a guitar shop on W Markham that’s in flames.

———

Back at my apartment, downstairs living room, “music corner” near the record player, speakers, iPod dock: orange powder residue accumulates where the carpet meets the red brick walls, where the floorboards would be if there were any. My thoughts are a little troubling: my walls continue to crumble, and I ought to vacuum more frequently. But the other part is the reminder—the specialty of living in a city where the buildings are often dusty old things, reincarnations. My temporary home at the Erwin Mill, a one-time cotton mill; the West Village apartments, also Liggett & Myers factories in a past life; local restaurants and downtown microbreweries, Brightleaf Square.

But some of these remain in post-industrial purgatory—Liggett & Myers ne plus ultra—neither preserved for historic posterity nor involved in any visible conversion process, commercial or residential or otherwise. A real estate sign fixed to the sidewalk outside the building’s NE face too enthusiastically declares, “Space available!” At the corner of W Main and S Duke, the building spans an area nearly the size of the entire Duke undergraduate bar complex of Shooters, The Federal, James Joyce, Alivia’s and Devines.

Despite a common history, its present is unlike its neighbors’, which bustle drunk with life. Not that the outside is deceptive—the utilitarian 12ish-story heft is uninviting, unwieldy, crowned with an inelegant L&M sign where the comparatively quaint Chesterfield cigarette billboard once perched—but the interior is colossally terrifying, the genuine embodiment of horror film emotively tuned to the paranoia of urban decay.

Start with the control room, a 6’x10’ space, large enough for one to two security guards. Absurdism exhibit A) two shelves drooping under the weight of about 20 extant CCTV monitors which, the first time I saw them, were mostly powered on and flashing solid blue, buzzing screens or humming with dark static. In huge stacks strewn about the desks and floor, Polaroids split into identical quarters, Warhol-style, with one quarter cut out, presumably for an employee badge. Blank, early ‘90s-looking faces of various gender and ethnicities, all showing the general enthusiasm one would expect from a factory worker’s employee badge. Eerie and dusty, I pocketed a few, then moved on.

Note—artificial light needed to navigate floors 1-3. This is more for mental than physical security; these bottom floors are mostly cleared out and vacuous. But not cleaned out. One room’s floor is covered with thousands of unfinished cigarettes, filters stuffed in papers with no tobacco. Wall paint peels away and flakes at every possible vertical surface, and the areas of ceiling that are not rotting holes are stained dark with flood residue. The drywall is crumbled, still crumbling, and a powdery asbestos aroma in the air. Cheap wood doors are prostrate on mildewed carpet or torn twisted off their hinges.

A former matron saint of the Duke Coffeehouse (her likeness is painted on its walls) is a nymph-like, idiosyncratic figure rarely chanced upon at Duke U. She took her building love to the fringes of conceivability when she performed a “gay marriage” to a Seattle warehouse scheduled for demolition. Her endearingly hair-brained protest against gentrification—she wanted to repurpose the space as a non-commercial community center—describes the affect called melancholia in the Freudian lexicon; feeling the tug of a loss of some unnamable thing. It’s abstract because an attachment to a building is hard to source. Is the affection related to our use and experience or the physical thing itself, down to the brick walls that sustain it? We construct meaning and get meaning back from our constructions. Until we leave them to die.

West Campus is the quintessential bubble, insulated by forest and captivated by that beautiful, monstrous phallic center and landmarked by the equally unnatural feminine counterpart in the form of the gardens. Though I’m not won over by the neo-Gothic fetish of university architecture, I am consistently bowled over when I step off the C-1 during the “magic hour”, circa 5:30 p.m. lately, when all these contrived, rough-hewn stone buildings blush with ruddy light and direct their scintillating shadows right at my gut.

But East Campus is superior, I’ve long maintained. I may be partial to walking among unthreatening, starry-eyed first-years, arts and humanities students and intensely academic-attractive types. But the buildings! The seamless blend of red brick and white wood that colors Durham. And the bucolic ease with which willow oaks and grass fields melt past the low stone wall into Old West Durham, Trinity Park, 9th St. and Main.