Puttering in the Study

Hub - Christmas lights up (and side by side comparison to 2009)

Here's the view from outside at night as of last night, with the wreath and parapet lights up.  We're still adding some to the windows on the 113 side, and you can see the blinds that are now (finally) up on the 111 side.

Just for comparison, the picture on the right shows the store last October before we started work.  (Yes, the Hub is rotated back to its original direction).  And the picture below shows the original storefronts after the aluminum facade came down.

"Hub offices" sign up

We had to take the awning down temporarily to get it up (which we needed to do anyway to patch the stucco over the black tile) but the "Hub offices" sign is now up, replacing the original sign that's now on display inside.  This picture shows the original with the original black from a year ago when we had just taken the aluminum siding down.

Hub mezzanine - staining complete (well, except for the door)

The door is finally up, and the patching, priming and staining on that is about to begin, but I wanted to post a few pictures showing the mezzanine with the woodwork at long last complete and stained, with the 1928 photo that was our guide for construction for comparison.

The view looking forward and from the balconies is also shown.  Floors aren't done yet (haven't figured out how much work to do on them just yet) and obviously everything is still extremely dusty.

Hub - mirrored door goes up ... then down ... then up again ... then down again (but we're learning)

While the painter was starting the last round of staining of the new upstairs shelving over on 111 this morning, downstairs the carpenters and Jim are trying to figure out how to rehang the rebuilt mirrored paneled door that separates the mezzanine/atrium (the "war room" for lawyers reading this) from the break room and bathrooms.  I am  hopeful this is the last major "how the hell do we do this?" moment for the project. 

As I posted last week, the door had to be cut down in height and expanded five inches (you can tell it has expanded a little from its youthful appearance in 1928, but hey, who of us hasn't?), but with a heavy mirror and a extremely thin profile (just over an inch thick), my initial plan to make it a swinging door wasn't working out real well.  Looks like it will end up being a hinged door with a knob after all.

Attentive readers will notice that the columns were stained over the weekend - they took the "faux bois" finish very well Saturday afternoon, and I enjoyed applying it.  The door will be treated the same way once it's in its final position.

Meanwhile the 113 front door painter is evaluating when to put the final coat of glossy black enamel on it, and he'll be back later today to take down the 111 awning to install the big Hub sign, during which time Jim will do the final patch and paint on the stucco on that side. 

It's just not the Hub without trains in the windows

Anyone from Marshall knows that while the Hub Shoe Store may have had a shoe or two in the display windows (as shown in this 1908 photo with store founder Mose Weisman), in recent years it was always a good place to see memorabilia on trains and the historic Marshall Depot.   So our Christmas decorations for Wonderland of Lights will feature a model train set running in one of the old display windows.  The boys and their Papa had fun this afternoon setting up a train set to make sure everything fits okay before we start putting up decorations next week.

New Hub sign

The old neon Hub sign that was outside the 111 side has been moved indoors where it's displayed over the front door in all its disheveled glory.  Today we got in its replacement, which will be hung outside Monday.

This sign will be outside the 111 side, which is available to visiting lawyers to rent as needed, so we replaced "SHOE STORE" in the sign with "OFFICES". 

Our core offices of course are on the 113 side, with 111 available as overflow for visiting lawyers when it isn't being rented.  Since it didn't have exterior signage historically we have just a small "blade sign" hanging outside.  We did uncover a huge hand-painted sign that had been turned into shelving in 1928, and we've reassembled that, and after it gets a few touchups Monday it'll go up on the inside (like the neon sign) early next week. 

Activity at the Hub

Busy day today, with carpenters working on the rent side, siding people installing the correct color aluminum trim on the rent side, and the original (1897) doors going back up on the 113 side after being down for a week to be stripped and repainted - here are before, during and after photos. Always a happy feeling when the plywood comes down!

But one of the high points for me is the original mirrored-glass door going back up on the 111 side.  As these pictures show, we found it standing against a wall last fall (some of the green paint on the floor we couldn't get off, so that's why my office has green paint on part of the floor), and saved it for reinstallation in its original place as shown in the 1928 photo.

Update: Okay, that was the high point, but we have a new one - the new Hub coffee mugs are in! 

Unexpected sidewalk notes at the Hub

Grayson and I stopped by the Hub today after going to confession (his first, I'm proud to note) and he found something I had never noticed.  In front of the door to 115A East Austin, which is the building next door to the Hub which used to be my grandfather's stationery store when I was little, the concrete sidewalk is a set of three initials and a date.

The date is 1971, and the initials are MS ER and CJ, for me, Elaine Rountree, who worked in the store, and my grandfather Charlie Demmer.  From the relatively bad handwriting and false start on mine, I'm guessing I was trying to do it myself.  I was about seven at the time).

I remembered Pop putting our initials (and hand and footprints) on the sidewalk in front of his house when it was relaid when we were little, but I had forgotten he'd done it here as well.

The Exodus Quest - Will Adams

I really liked Adams' first book The Alexander Cipher, but this one not so much.  The characters are good, but the action is often so detailed it is hard to follow, and the historical "find" is clumsily shoehorned in to the point that the extent of the family is irrelevant to the plot or the action.  People are digging and have motivations and they act on them regardless of whether a find is a cahe of gold or the most important find since Noah's Ark.  So okay, but not great.

The Wisdom of History - Prof. Rufus Fears

I finally finished the 36 lectures in this Teaching Company course, and while I learned a lot of factual detail I didn't know before, the course was a little vague and judgmental for me.  At the end of the first several courses, many of which dealt with Greek or other mythic events, which is hardly "history" from which you can draw lessons, I realized that I still didn't know what the "lessons" we were supposed to learn from history were. 

I agreed with the concept that not everyone is interested in freedom, and that a primary motivation for leaders historically is power, but it was really difficult to determine without the benefit of hindsight what the "wisdom of history" would be?  The professor really likes Winston Churchill, but as with most leaders he was only right part of the time, and it's impossible to gauge what alternative leaders might have done better or worse.  It's easier to make a positive judgment on FDR's war leadership, but there are negatives there as well, and it's similarly impossible to gauge whether he could have done better butting up against the facts in 1945 vis a vis Stalin at Yalta.  And what effect on all of this would the wisdom of history have? 

In the end, I agree absolutely that knowing history is critical for leaders and the voters that put them there because it gives you a context for understanding what is happening, but it is very different to say that individual decisions would be aided by knowing the "widowm" of history, because every decision is different, and most importantly, the wisdom of history offering in every single case contradictory lessons.  A simple example that comes up in every case is knowing when to continue fighting for something and when to give it up and move to something else.  One lesson from history is not to give up on something that's important, but another is to know when to stop throwing good money and lives down the drain.  It's easy to commend Lincoln for continuing the Civil War when times were darkest, but we would probably be making the opposite argument today if he had decided that enough was enough and agreed to let the Confederacy go.  Certainly no one is arguing that George III should be faulted for deciding that enough was enough and that the American colonies should be given their freedom because keeping them was too expensive and difficult.  Likewise it's easy to fault Hitler and Napolean for invading Russi abecause it didn't work out, but Hitler in particular came very, very close to succeeding in knocking Russia out of the war, and had he done so, the decision to invade would be seen as brilliant.  Churchill's refusal to reach a separate peace with Germany in 1940 looks great now given how things turned out, but had Britain been invaded and subjugated, our judgment would probably be different. 

Anyway, it was an interesting course, but I'm not sure how helpful the principle is.  I don't feel like I am in any better shape to make decisions knowing this.  I certainly don't feel that our nation's decisions would be any better informed if our leaders listened to this course.  I think they'd still find themselves in the same spot, trying to decide what was a principle worth defending at all costs and what wasn't. 

The one thing I did think was useful was the observation that not all peoples at all times are interested in freedom, and that there are different freedoms, and people may be interested more in national freedom, as a national or ethnic entity, than they are personal or political freedom.  Because we have all three in America, we take them for granted and don't differentiate, but in many, many parts of the world, people are utterly disinterested in personal or even political freedom, and completely dedicated to the concept of national freedom, i.e. a state for their national or ethnic group.  So I did learn that.