In a recent column I described the razing in 1978 of the Hotel Abraham Lincoln. Readers interested to learn more about this consummate act of stupidity might enjoy this piece I wrote a few weeks before the building’s execution. It was published under the title “Adieu to the Abe,” and appeared in our paper that came out Dec. 7, 1978. They will learn, if they didn’t already know, that Springfield has been having the same arguments about historic preservation for nearly forty years.
Checkout time for the Hotel Abraham
Lincoln in downtown Springfield approaches 9:30 Sunday morning, December 17. At
that hour the fifty-two-year old Abe will be reduced to rubble to make room for
a new state courts complex and legal education center. Gravity, not the
wrecking ball, will be the agent of the Abe’s doom; crews from Controlled
Demolitions, lnc., will use explosive charges to shatter the foundations of the
twelve-story structure, thus allowing it to fall on itself in an avalanche of
brick and terra cotta. Building the Abe took fourteen months and $1.4 million;
destroying it will be quicker and cheaper.Springfield is showing a morbid
fascination with the project. The blowing up of the Abe promises to be a
first-rate spectacle, especially since we are all used to seeing our downtown
buildings destroyed piecemeal, by neglect, rather than all at once by dynamite.
It has been suggested (accurately, I think) that the state could set up
bleachers in the streets and sell enough tickets to the curious to pay for the
razing. A clot of invited “dignitaries” — many of whom probably
haven’t been downtown in years — will be there to witness the execution. Many
people will film the show, and the more enterprising of the city’s citizenry
are likely to seize upon the event as an excuse for a party. The atmosphere
doubtless will show the same mix of holiday and horror that characterized
Newgate on the day of a hanging.We should be grateful that the
state had the good sense to hire a professional firm to do the job instead of
trying to raze the Abe itself. Assuming the Capital Development Board (the
agency overseeing the project) is no better at destroying buildings than it is
at putting them up, everyone living within ten blocks of the Abe would have
been well advised to duck under the nearest kitchen table at about 9:27 a.m.
There also has been some concern expressed that the Abe actually be empty when
it is blown up — a rudimentary precaution. but so many winos have taken shelter
there that at times it had more guests after it closed than it had before;
without it, there would be so many strange birds falling out of the sky when
the hotel comes down that it’ll look like a grouse hunt.The day and time of the blast were
chosen because downtown streets will be largely deserted then. Largely, but not
entirely; when the schedule was first announced, several downtown churches
complained that they would be right in the middle of the Sunday services when
the Abe joined its maker. The CDB could have kept the date secret, of course,
but that might have had unfortunate consequences. Imagine this scene: A dozen
pastors in the midst of their weekly perorations when, without warning or
apparent cause, the Sunday morning calm explodes with a roof-shaking roar.
Hundreds of the prayerful, taking the noise as a message, drop to their knees
furiously babbling “Hallelujahs,” each swearing that if He lets him
off the hook this one time he’ll repay every cent of the money he swiped from
the office coffee fund, while the preacher frantically reviews his notes to see
if he can figure out what it was he said to bring forth such an emphatic
exclamation point from the heavens. lt’d be the greatest thing to hit Christianity
since tax exemption.Of course, congregations close
enough to actually see the Abe collapse might assume that the Almighty himself
was — what else? — making a parking lot, reading into the event a blessing for
their own energetic paving work. As a quick survey of the downtown area
confirms, churches need no encouragement in that direction. lt is perhaps too
easy to make jokes about the whole thing, for the loss of the Abe is an unhappy
affair. For a while it was hoped that
such a job would not need doing. There were the usual half-hearted plans to save
the Abe by making it an office building, a student dorm, or a housing complex
for the elderly, but none worked. Indeed, some have asked why, with plans being
finalized for a new hotel which also will bear Lincoln’s name to be built four
blocks away, the Abe couldn’t still make it as a hotel.
The answer, ironically, is that it might have, had
it survived perhaps ten years longer. Recently architecture critic Ada Louise
Huxtable wrote a bitter denunciation of what casino owners are doing to the
grand old resort hotels along Atlantic City`s boardwalk like the Blenheim, the
“Moorish sand castle” that is being dynamited by casino operators to
make way for some Vegas hideousness or other. She notes that “Business
Week” magazine has found the business of recycling old hotels hot enough
to be called a boom, particularly “the ‘classic” hotels of Belle Epoque
grandeur, through the l920s.” “It may be news to New Jersey,”
she notes acidly, “but cities everywhere are investing in creative
restoration and expert conversion of landmarks, in conjunction with quality new
construction. as their ticket to the future.”As the Abe proves, it’s news to Illinois, too. While
properties like the Abe were allowed to stand rotting, developers scurried to
put up new “luxury” hotels which are nothing more than a bunch of
Holiday Inns piled on top of one another, as different from the terrazzo and
brass of the Abe as a Melmac plate is from Spode china. Should Springfield ever
want to buy its “tickets to the future,” it will not be able to do it
with the Abe. Even ‘“creative restoration” can’t restore a ghost.
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2016.
