Tuesday, March 11, 2003

The Leland Hotel stands seven

The Leland Hotel stands seven stories tall over Polk Gulch, the part of Polk Street where hungry teens and homeless transsexuals compete for crack money and seek sleep’s solace in the sour stench of curdled alleys.  Further south, faceless edifices and the neoclassical coldness of the civic center do nothing to discourage such denizens, but fail to encourage them either and the region is seedy but dull.  To the north, porn and pawnshops give way to trattorias and trendy boutiques, where ‘quality of life’ crimes are enthusiastically enforced.  But right in the gulch, the richness of human poverty in all its diversity whimpers and twitches like a dreaming dog.

The Leland Hotel has been shuttered for years.  Perhaps it’s being renovated - very slowly, imperceptibly, secretly.  The shops fronting off its ground floor are all closed, ostensibly temporarily, apparently permanently.  They all have identical awnings with identical lettering, in a stab at sophistication that succeeds only in reinforcing a tawdry outdated vapidity.  The awnings advertise businesses long since relocated or, more likely, defunct - His’n’Hers Hair, Computer Game Depot, Acorn Bookstore, a jeweler, a tavern.  Their storefront windows admit a view of discolored floors, overturned chairs, and, to my eye, a terrible lonliness, while the adjacent sidewalks teem with chilly people looking for a place to turn a trick or sleep indoors.

The Leland Hotel is a dusty cypher.  But when I last went past it of an evening, one light shone from the topmost floor.  One room had been illuminated, while all the others below and to the left and right were black as battered eyes.  That single room seemed bright with more than light; the walls inside glowed freshly, the glass gleamed with an extra measure of transparency, and the light itself was airborne alabaster, cutting into the night with a purity unknown to and unsullied by the wretched street below.

And I asked myself, What’s going down upstairs at the Leland Hotel?  A squatter?  A tryst?  A body being secreted in a wall or floor?  A clandestine auction of stolen art?  A fetish fantasy atop the fetid Polk Street nightmares?  Or just a single thinker, reading, writing, watching traffic ebb and flow?

I drove on by, more curious with every block I travelled.  That single window still illuminates my imagination.  At the Leland, I’m sure it’s long since been extinguished, the darkness from the gulch absorbing it completely.  But as the Beastie Boys tell us, “darkness is not the opposite of light - darkness is the absence of light.” Now I have to do the shining on my own.