Notes from my Knapsack 11-28-24

Notes from my Knapsack 11-28-24
Jeff Gill

Thankful for what is no more
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Thanksgiving season is obviously a time to work on feeling thankful.

The usual drill is to try and be more mindful of the blessings and advantages and gifts you have that you may well be taking for granted. And there's nothing wrong with working on that one!

What I have in mind this year, though, is more obscure, but I hope is something that might help me in that increased awareness of immediate reasons to be thankful.

If you've followed the saga of the 1900 Avalon Building in Newark, on social media a large number of people turn out to have had personal stories which wound through the apartments above and shops below over the previous century. Obviously there was sentiment to save it yet again, but old buildings are not like cats, and are lucky if they have two lives, three at most. The water from extinguishing the fire across the roof of the Avalon sealed its fate. And the hard reality about historic preservation is: you can't save 'em all.

So while I never lived in, shopped at, or even entered the Avalon, its demise has me thinking about other buildings now gone that are part of my life, if only now in memory and imagination.

For six years I had a desk in the 1886 county Children's Home on E. Main St. with the juvenile court. Torn down in 2013, while there were voices calling to preserve it, the structure was, like the Avalon, too compromised for preservation. It was a fascinating building, though, with a great deal of history taking place within it over a century and a quarter, and it pops up in my dreams at odd intervals still.

When I first visited Newark in 1989, the Auditorium Theatre was still standing, and had more going on inside of it than the then shuttered Midland across Second St. Built in 1894 as the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall, it was an echo of my hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana, which also had the unique feature of a Memorial Opera House built instead of a towering monument to Civil War veterans. There was a practical spirit linking the two places which pleased me; why spend a pile of money on a monument when you could memorialize the soldiers and sailors with something everyone could use?

At that time, fires and decay had taken away the building's classical facade and sculptures, some of which you can still see at VFW Post 1060 on Forry Avenue; the pinnacle statuary group is on private property elsewhere in the county but survives as well. I saw performances and concerts in the old Auditorium, and think of it still when I walk past the Licking County Foundation's offices now on that site.

Recently I got to attend a friend's production of a play at the Eisner Center on the Denison University campus; it was in the Hylbert Family Studio Theatre, and well staged there. But I kept thinking back to the Ace Morgan Theatre, the knotty pine lobby, its history back with Morgan's friend Hal Holbrook, and later student stars in the making like John Davidson, Michael Eisner (whose center now occupies the location), Steve Carell, and Jennifer Garner.

Along with long-lost family homes and places where in years past I've enjoyed Thanksgiving dinners, there are so many buildings that I find myself thankful for which are no more. What lost locations helped shape you, and what do you recall of them?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if he got going on lost church buildings this column would be a multi-volume book. Tell him about places that are gone but not for you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.