Pointless Effort No. 54

Woke up and worked on the Great Office/Bedroom Swap of 2007--moving about 600 books; dismantling, transporting, and reassembling the desk; running cable and speaker wire through the basement/ductwork/crawlspace, and reconfiguration of the sound system. All to move the office, though I won't be able to spend much time actually working in it until May.

Once the computer started working again--after several more trips to the basement to twiddle with wires--I found more pix on the Indiana Historical Society website, such as the various buildings that didn't make it past that wrecker-happy year of 1974.

Earliest to go was the Claypool, which was the closest thing Indy had to a large-scale European-styled hotel. It's the place all dignitaries stayed.


The larger suites were pretty large.

I managed to find the key for room 746 at an antique store.




Right next door was the Indiana Theater. It had fallen into disrepair in the years after the demise of the Claypool, but City planners rescued it...sort of. In naming the Indiana the venue for the Indiana Repertory Theater, they moved in with grand plans to renovate. To make a more intimate theater experience, the theater was divided--a floor two-thirds of the way above the main floor, with floor level right around where the top of the curtain is in the photograph. Of the auditorium pictured here, nothing remains but the nonsensical elaborate plaster moldings of the proscenium as backdrop for the stage of the smaller auditorium. In the larger theater, all is black wallboard and orange-and-brown carpet.
The only 20s movie palace in Indy to survive in close to its original state is the Circle Theater, though Indiana Power and Light almost succeeded in getting the real estate to expand their ugly concrete headquarters.

I had a point in typing this when I started it, but hell if I can remember it now. I'm off to take a hot bath in hopes I'll not be so sore in the morning I can't get out of bed.