Reminiscences - Ross Thornerossthorne.com/downloads/Reminiscences 1986 Atlanta... · 2017. 12. 20. · Mayfair Theatre, Sydney, demolished in I developed a false memory in Atlanta,

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Reminiscences

Real or False Memory? When I was researching cinema and theatre buildings a person came up to me and said: “I remember seeing The Sound of Music, film at the Embassy Theatre (Sydney)”. I thought, “No, it was at the Mayfair Theatre about three doors up the same street”, where it actually had been for many months. This man had a false memory just the same as some people will swear that an event happened to them when it had not, and often, could not have happened1. I developed a false memory in Atlanta, Georgia in 1986 after a 26 hour sleepless travel from Sydney Airport to Los Angeles – walking around the airport to reach the internal airline building and check in again to Atlanta. I caught a taxi to the Howard Johnson Midtown Hotel about which I have absolutely no memory although I have found one of my colour slides of the hotel. I was in Atlanta for a conference held by the Environmental Design Research Association (edra). Without spending time to get over my jet-lag and lack of sleep I started straight in photographing buildings the next morning, and completing conference registration at the Georgia Tech Institute between 1.00 pm and 1.50, then went out to photograph more buildings until 5.00 pm, when I attended a keynote address from 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm. The next day (Thursday 10th April) I attended the conference sessions from 8.45 am to 5.00 pm. On Friday I went on a field trip from 9.15 am to 12.30 pm when at last, I had a rest until a meeting from 5.30 to 7.00 pm. It was then off to the conference dinner 1 My knowledge of the theatres is due to my research for Cinemas of Australia

via USA.

Mayfair Theatre, Sydney, demolished in

the 1980s, built in the first decade of

the 20th

century as a vaudeville house.

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that unfortunately the edra organisers almost always refer to as a “banquet” without their actually knowing the meaning of the word2. As shown in the footnote, a banquet is a sumptuous feast that may be followed by speeches. At this conference dinner we had speeches, or at least one. The edra ‘banquet’ was held at the Georgia Railroad Freight Depot which had been for the interchange of freight but the rail-lines had long-ago disappeared. The building, dating from the 19th century was rightly considered of heritage value. It had been four storeys but was reduced to one very long space that the Georgia State Government owns and hires out for weddings, birthdays, conferences and special events. It is a building that I had totally put out of my memory. Another building that eludes any memory brain cells is the Museum of Art, yet it was in this building, according to a diary entry, that the conference held a reception for delegates. One building that I do well remember, and of which I have colour slides, is the former Biltmore Hotel on Peachtree Avenue. It is this building that has come into my tortured memory of Atlanta, as being somehow ‘related’ to the conference – yet it was not. I took 144 slides of buildings in Atlanta. In 1986 it was ‘famous’ for the AT&T ‘intelligent’ building. Two other buildings that were ‘must see’ for architects were the Marriott Marquis Hotel and the Hyatt Regency Hotel, both with atriums over many floors. Surrounding the atriums were access walkways open

2 The Macquarie Dictionary refers “banquet” as “a formal and ceremonious

meal, often one given to celebrate an event or honour a person”. That is mild compared to the definition given by the Oxford (1959) and Shorter Oxford (1993): ‘A sumptuous entertainment of food and drink or now more usually ‘a ceremonial or state feast followed by speeches’.

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to each atrium. The guest rooms off the walkways, therefore faced outwards to a view of Atlanta. The Hyatt Regency was opened in 1967 and, of its 24 floors, 22 were of atrium space with, in 1986, either real or artificial plants ‘waterfalling’ down the fronts of the balustrades. The Marriott Marquis Hotel, completed in 1985 had 52 storeys most of which was terrifyingly deep atrium space. Its balustrades were deep from front to back and were topped with hundreds of planter boxes in which (in 1986) had only dry soil or potting mix. Atlanta is a large city if one includes the metropolitan area that contained about 5.5 million people, when visited. It has the World Headquarters for Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, AT&T Mobility, and The Home Depot3, and at last count, the largest airport in the world4. On Friday 11th April 1986 I attended the edra so-called ‘banquet’ at the Georgia Railroad Depot and my diary entry notes that I chatted to Richard Aynsley (who had previously been on the staff of the Department of Architectural Science at the University of Sydney). I vaguely remember talking to him when we discussed the deficiencies of the Georgia Tech School of Architecture where he had been working in 1986. We were at a table to ourselves at the end of a large room near where the bun-rush occurred to obtain food. That is all I ‘remember’ – nothing about the environment or building in which Richard and I were sitting. The False Memory The conference in Atlanta, Georgia, and the ‘banquet’ or dinner was to be at the mid-1920s-built Biltmore Hotel on Peachtree Street. It extended a whole block

3 The Home Depot is the largest home repair and rejuvenation company in the

USA (and also has branches in a number of other countries). 4 AT&T (American Telephone, formerly Southern Bell Telephone).

Looking down the atrium of the Marriott

Marquis Hotel, Atlanta, in 1986.

An example of a dinner at the Georgia Railroad

Depot showing the interior of the space.

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from 5th Street, N.E. to 6th Street, N.E. It was a long and narrow building with rooms on both sides of the corridor, on each floor, that extended for the whole street block. On the opposite side to the main street entrance there was a narrow street and a small fenced park. The story of this United States-style ‘banquet’ starts at the ‘Reception’ in this small park. It was late dusk and I walk from the hotel through the gate to the postage-sized park or hotel garden. I could see people with glasses of some bubbly wine or orange juice. I go across to the table that is covered in a whitle table cloth on which are glasses filled with liquid. I reach out to take one. “Can I have your ticket?” asks a hotel employee. “My what!” I reply. “Your ticket, You can obtain one over there”. I go to another table over there which is a white table cloth but behind is a person taking money and giving change for tickets ripped off a ticket roll that appears to have escaped from a cinema box office. I pay my money; the person tears off a ticket and I present this to the man behind the table on which are full glasses. He hands me one in return for the ticket but the experience has made the chardonnay more sour than usual. (It is the first and only ever time that I have had to ‘buy’ my glass of wine at a conference ‘reception’) After slowly downing my wine in silence amongst a crowd of people, it was announced that the meal was

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about to be served. It was being served to about two hundred people in a very large room at small tables, each with four chairs. The surprise was that it was not being ‘served’ as one might expect, considering that all the tables had been set with cutlery. To my astonishment two hundred or so people stood in a line or queue to be served first, a miniscule ramekin of soup, then queued up for dollops of chile con carne (bean stew) to be deposited on dinner plates. I thought “bugger me if I’ll stand in such a queue!” So I sat at the table and chatted to Dick Aynsley until the queue had whittled down to about 15 people. We then joined at the end. We moved along one-person distance just as the main course had run out. The catering staff rushed off as we waited having the only thing of visual interest to look at being a table crammed with tall parfait glasses filled with the most vulgar-looking concoction of multi-coloured jellies interlaced with cream. The catering staff finally returned with saucepans full of the ‘alternative’ main course – a sort of stew. We took ours to the table and wondered what was in the jug of amber liquid on each table. Beer? I thought. No! It was cold tea – Yes, COLD TEA! I went to ask one of the catering staff if and how one could obtain some wine. He told me that I had to go to the bar for that. “The bar?” “Yes, it is out these doors and along the arcade to the far end”, he replied.

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The so-called ‘banquet’ hall was at one end of the building, the bar at the other end. The walk was one street block long! I bought a bottle of red and was given a couple of wine glasses to walk the block-long arcade back to the ‘banquet’ hall. We settled down into that and finished our stew when one of the conference organisers, no doubt at the head of the queue, and eaten his desert, got to his feet and hit his wine glass a few times to attract attention. That was the sign for the catering staff to remove any sight of food including my anticipated multi-coloured desert. After a speech of ‘welcome’ we were told that coffee was in the long-room upstairs. I thought, ‘at least I can have a decent cup of coffee’ but, it seems, 199 other people had beaten me to it and it had also run out. I thought, ‘if I was in Australia I could adjourn to my room and boil some water and throw in the contents of a satchel of International Roast coffee and add some milk or milk powder – but not in the USA where the only way one could obtain a cup of coffee in one’s room was to ring down for ‘room service’. I thought my experience was not of a group of amateurs organising a charity picnic when they had never organised anything more than a meal for dad, mum and two kids. This dinner was run by a professional hotel or catering contractor with, it was assumed, many years of experiencing such events. It was, in fact real ‘hicksville’ Banquet or simply a conference dinner? Never, never, NEVER!

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And we paid about $40.00 for the ‘privilege’ The Biltmore closed its doors just after the dinner, and was empty when photographed in 1986. It was sold to become apartments. How much of this so-called memory was false? Was my memory of my visit to the former Biltmore Hotel just after it closed, but into which I could gain entry and photograph its principal entertainment rooms, its long arcade that faced onto a small private hotel garden. Was the ‘memory’ of that visit – visiting a kind of Marie Celeste building – a building left with its decorations and huge chandeliers but no people – as if they had simply disappeared? I looked out onto the small garden from the arcade. Was it similar to visiting an ancient building, perhaps partly ruined, where one ‘conjures’ up what it would be like when inhabited by people? Such a visit may imbue the observer with sadness or a feeling of nostalgia, wondering what it was like in its heyday of activity – in this case, from the mid-1920s to 1986. I have only ever been to Atlanta that once, and have never had any reason to look at the colour slides these past 30 years to remind me of the city or the former Biltmore Hotel. Why didn’t I remember the large and historic Georgia Railroad Depot building where the conference dinner was actually held? (Its images have been derived from the Internet – my having taken no photographs of it.) Of course since the Depot did not have a kitchen the description of the catering, with all food and facilities brought in by a contracted company may be accurate

The street-block long former Biltmore Hotel at

Mid-town Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The upper

photograph is the view into the hotel garden.

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since, contrary to one’s desired belief, organisation was not necessarily a forte of American Contractors. If I do not remember the location of the edra conference dinner at Atlanta, however my diaries certainly have reminded me of four other ‘dinners’ associated with conferences. One was at the Guell Park, Barcelona, in 1982; the second was at the Robb College, Armidale, NSW, the third being in Canberra for the International Sociological Association conference, the fourth being in Perth. Excluding the Barcelona ‘dinner’ that started at 10.00 pm and consisted almost entirely of drinks, and a miniscule quantity of ‘finger’ food. The other three had ‘proper’ food. The Robb College dinner had an open bottle of wine on each table (no cold tea here!) and table service; The Canberra conference dinner was a memorable silver service dinner with waiters delivering each course and filling wine glasses until buses arrived to return us to our university residence at the Australian National University. The second Perth conference that was held on behalf of People and Physical Environment Research (in the 1990s) was memorable for its lack of organisational ability by the person responsible. The young psychology academic at the University of Western Australia booked premises closer to the city without considering the cost of such premises. He also obtained a quotation for the conference dinner but did not confirm it. When we asked where and when would be the conference dinner, the ‘organiser’ contacted the supplier of the quotation to discover his own lack of accepting the quote. He managed to get some ‘finger food’ rustled up to have with drinks. A colleague and I finally gave up and went to North Perth to obtain a ‘real’ dinner at a restaurant. Almost immediately after this ‘dinner’ the organiser took up a position at an American University. Shortly after the organiser’s ‘disappearance’ the Head of the

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Psychology Department contacted me to say the conference (and therefore his department) made a loss of $3,000 – the first loss made on behalf of People and Physical Environment Research. Reminiscences of Pan American Airlines Pan Am, as it became known, was (together with Qantas) the American airline that circled the world and the second principal airline that flew the Pacific to Los Angeles and on to New York. The earliest planes in which I travelled were Boeing 707s but Pan Am brought in Boeing 747s shortly after they became commercially available. Pan Am advertised flights direct from Sydney to New York. It was a strange idea of ‘direct’ for ‘direct’ it was not. The flight from Sydney stopped at Los Angeles International Terminal for an American Customs and Immigration check, a change of plane (which also required a change of terminal that may have required a long walk across the airport), and we were off. Pan Am must have had the most disorganised cabin crew and service that could be imagined. I was pleased to see it go into liquidation as a company and disappear. This was at a time before so-called ‘budget’ airlines when the passengers in economy class actually were served food and inexpensive quarter bottles of wine. The Pan Am flights were usually late in leaving, late in carrying out in-flight ‘service’ and late arriving at the destination. One recurring problem was that the count of passengers on the plane was not as it should have been, so the ‘hostess’ counted and recounted against the list she had. At last something became clear and we were onto the runway and off.

ABOVE: Interior of a Pan Am Boeing 707, being

one of earliest planes flown in to go to the USA

BELOW: One of the early Boeing 747s.

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Up in the air with the seat-belt sign off, the flight attendants went into the kitchenette to heat food and coffee. The attendants seemed to have no fixed duties (as Qantas attendants had). The Pan Am cabin crew seemed to have been trained in disorganisation. On one five-hour flight from Los Angeles to New York there were four and one half hours to serve drinks, serve food and show a 90 minutes long movie. Such was easy for Qantas but not for Pan Am. The latter’s cabin crew could not make up their minds as to who was serving what, and how it should be served. One trolley (for drinks) started down the aisle in which I sat. Halfway down it went back, crossed over to the other aisle and started again. It seemed to be some sort of lottery as to whether a drink was obtained or not. The same odd behaviour happened with the food trolley, then after four hours with people still eating food, the movie was switched on. As we were descending towards New York airport the food trays were quickly picked up and stored away. We landed and taxied to the terminal. The movie was still playing while we were walking off the plane with most of it unseen. Shambles was the only word to describe such ‘service’. I thought the USA was the home of all those ‘how-to’ books on organisation, much of which seemed to be common sense. How did Pan Am lack both organisation and collective common sense? Other airline reminiscences. Airline toilets were not ideal in past years. In a visit to Budapest (1963), Hungarian Airlines, I discovered, had old two-engine Russian planes similar to what in Australia would have been seen in the late

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1930s. Seats had no head rests and there was a toilet at the rear of the cabin, where the planes diameter diminishes towards the tail. I visited the toilet to be surprised by the distance from the door to the ‘facility’. More unusual was the toilet bowl. It was a china bowl with wooden lid as one might find in an Australian house of some decades previous. More usual with American-built aircraft, the toilets were stainless steel-lined cabinets. Frequently after a meal there would be a queue for the couple of toilets. I ‘held on’, refusing to join a queue. I waited until nearly all the passengers (on a long flight) were asleep. I then ventured into the ‘cupboard’. This was before there was a ‘suction’ system that made a loud air-intake sound (like an expiring vacuum cleaner) to remove the bowl contents to an invisible tank in the bowels of the plane. No! It was a time when one lifted the lid of the seat to see down into the container that is removed when the plane next has a catering service. Near the end of a Pacific Ocean crossing one could go into the toilet and be confronted by a disinfected, odourless ‘sea’ of yellow-green liquid in which floated paper and solid matter. One always hoped that outside turbulence did not cause the plane to drop suddenly leaving any unbelted passenger (and once an air hostess) momentarily up in the air, together with some content of the ‘thunder box’ in the toilet. Ah! Travel! It narrows the pocket and broadens the mind – or so ‘they’ say.