DIVINE LORRAINE HOTEL

After spending a few hours in the Divine Lorraine and using up the batteries on my camera, I came into the sunlight and took this on my phone. The sun had moved around to the front of the building, so you get a sense of its contours.

The photos below, also from my phone, show front and back views of the inside of that courtyard-- which you glimpse here inside those two giant central arches.
























There were times when the building had me thinking of MC Escher, but more on that later.








Before we walked to the Lorraine, we stopped at an architectural salvage shop that is selling off the bits and pieces of the building before it is made into condos.



I liked these two Busby Berkley style staircases, and figured they were from the Lorraine.



We walked down to Broad Street, and approached the building from the back:
If you look to the left, you can see a square brick annex that juts out the back of the hotel. If you traveled with a servant, that's where your servant would stay. The Divine Lorraine tells two stories-- the story of how the leisured class in pre-World War I America lived (and may live again, if the gap between rich and poor continues to grow)-- and the story of life in the Peace Mission cult.

We climbed this pile of bricks to reach the back door.

Here's the back door from the inside. The ramp was for hauling out salvage. The man there chatted with Matt for a long while when I was inside taking photos. When I came out they were talking about the recent Democratic sweep of Congress. To the left of that ramp was a black hotel safe you could fit a Volkswagen in (vertically). My photo of the safe didn't look like much, so use your imagination.

There was a long central hallway, with a bar on one side and a dining room on the other. Here's the hallway:


The entrance hall had that lavish yet desolate feel of the scenes in Citizen Kane's Xanadu, after Charles Foster Kane's death-- dusty treasures heaped in a monument to outmoded notions of luxury.

Looking out the front window. It's tough to know just what "peace" means in the context of cult life. Probably something akin to what "freedom" and "liberty" mean in George Bush's speeches. For me, the window becomes a metaphor for the inversion of meaning when words are abused in the context of propaganda, and reengineered as tools of coercion and control. When you live inside an ideological narrative, you see the world only through the lens of that teaching. I used to be an evangelical, so I guess I am finding metaphors within metaphors here.

To the left is the dining room. Check out the dinner bell.



Inside the dining room. There's that big bell to the left. It's styrofoam. Those arches look back into the entrance hall.

Below is a big side board you can see reflected in 2 mirrors in the picture above. Imagine heaping platters of food there back when the Lorraine was a luxury hotel.

In the second mirror from the right you can see a good friend of mine. She's also in the picture with the piles of bricks.

These piles of dimestore china on the lunch counter are from the Peace Mission days.


Looking at the dishes, and the lunchroom trays that were still stacked at the end of the counter, I thought about the celibates who eaten from those trays-- people who had surrendered their will, intellect, and sexuality to a megalomaniac's delusions. What did they get in exchange? Security, purpose, and a place in Father Divine's glorious Oz. My pictures of the trays don't look like much, so I didn't post any. But the trays really drove home for me the emptiness of living your entire adult life in a dormitory.

Across the hall from the dining room is the bar:

My companions kept making comparisons to Kubrick's Shining. I haven't seen it-- horror movies really get under my skin. Love Kubrick, though. I should see it. Still, sometimes real life is enough.




All throughout the building, the salvagers had assembled piles of stuff by theme-- relics from the Peace Mission. Here are some I found particularly intriguing and evocative. You can supply your own metaphorical mumbo jumbo this time.

Lanterns and mirrors:


Trash cans:


Keys:


Sewing machines:


and army-issue Bibles:


The Bibles were WWII vintage. Most were labeled Protestant, but there was one that was the Jewish scriptures. The Jewish one had a different binding, flimsier-- paperback where the others were hardback. I'm sure there's a reason for that, one that in no way involves the heritage of bias in this country...



Jacob's ladder.

After we explored the first floor, a woman appeared, a really cool young woman who works for the salvage company. She took us up in the elevator, I took a film of the trip. The elevator was open at the top, and we could see the floor numbers sinking. The numbers were painted in a deep reddish brown color like, er, blood, and done with little serif flourishes. It was one of the more gothicky moments of the trip. I am always trying to squeeze gothicky moments out of life, but, despite what you might expect, the vibe of the Lorraine wasn't all that dark. It's no Eastern State Penitentiary.

If you look back at that first photo, you'll see the Lorraine has two peaks on top-- like Gary Oldman in Coppola's Dracula. Those two peaks are spectacular rooms that were used as worship spaces by the Peace Mission.

That lattice up top was a skylight once.

The Lamb and the Bride say "Come!"

I loved this old piano. I wonder if it dated back to the hotel's pre-Peace Mission days.

Someone stripped the ivory from the keys. But not to return it to the elephants, I guess.

One of the Peace Mission's hymns was still in the piano!




From the balcony:

Looking down at Broad Street:

I leaned off the balcony to get this shot of the Divine Lorraine sign:

Here are some shots looking into the courtyard, which separates the twin rooms:

That one reminded me of MC Escher architecture. Looking out from the Lorraine onto the mean streets of the 21st century was jarring. There was such a sense of the past in the building and unconsciously I guess I felt like the whole city had sunk into the past with me.

That's my friend in the window, she was always forging ahead of me.

Looking down into the courtyard:


















So, the twin room across the courtyard was different only in that the little swirly ornamentations above the the windows had been replaced by these homemade mottoes:




I speculated that the artist was the same one who did this fan that was in the dining room:

(with these Peace Mission newsletters, which I hope find their way to an historical archive somewhere). There were other places around the Lorraine where you could see this same type of amatuer painting. Someone had found a way to express individuality...



After exploring the top of the hotel, we visited some of the middle floors and looked at the rooms where the Peace Mission folks had lived. This is where we lost Matt, who left to talk politics with the guy downstairs. He made it back to the real world before the rest of us, tagging that base first.

The rooms had these cool window seats, with specially-made seat cushions, and trap doors underneath for storage.

These are all taken on my phone:



That's about it. The whole thing fascinated me, and got me thinking about the many ways that the past persists into the present.

I guess the future is all around us too, but maybe we don't notice it so much.