Reflecting on a Painted Wall |
HISTORY MATTERS
There really are wormholes in time and space. I saw one 30 years ago In Portsmouth. Ask people who were downtown during the last few pendulum swings of 1982. They'll back me up. We all saw it -- a full blown in-your-face breach in the space-time continuum. (Continued below)
It all started when the
To mask the reconstruction site and protect passersby, the builders put up a giant wall made from 50 sheets of four-by-eight foot plywood. It was ugly. Every journalist in town, myself included, described it as a monstrous missing tooth, an unsightly gap in our beloved gentrified downtown. It hunkered there obscenely between the Portsmouth Athenaeum and what is now Starbucks, leering across the street at the
Five local artists decided to paint the plywood wall. They were nuts, of course. The planned two week project took 12 weeks and the all-volunteer team sacrificed income, sanity, and friendships to paint over the gap. The plaque that isn't there should read -- With thanks to Cary Wendell, Steven Lee, Pat Splaine, Thom Cowgill, and Valerie Cooper. Others helped and will go equally unrewarded.
What they did was brilliant. The muralists filled in the 1,600 square foot gap space with a painting of the two buildings that had previously stood just behind the plywood wall. But they added a twist. They painted the former Foye and Pierce buildings as they had been nearly a hundred years earlier. Viewed from across the street, the painted buildings looked surprisingly real.
The differences were subtle. Old store signs from the Victorian era, for example, reappeared in the giant mural. On closer examination we could see items in a long-gone bakery window with ghostly shop owners inside, and even the painted reflections of
The town was enchanted by the biggest painting in its history. The artists called it a giant business card and it got them a few mural painting jobs including the nave of a Catholic church and a prison cafeteria.
Behind the wall, construction continued. Out front on
These were early warnings of a temporal storm that erupted with the arrival of the woman in the window. She appeared one day peering down from the third floor. She seemed to be Spanish. She was young with soft skin and dark hair. She wore her dress wide open at the neck and there appeared to be a flower in her hair. Propping her head in one hand, she gazed with fascination into the street below. Everything amazed her, even the empty street at night, night after night, through the winter and into the spring of 1983 until the wall came down around her.
It was rumored that the woman in the window had an unsavory reputation. The mural artists admitted that she might, indeed, represent a "lady of the evening" in one of
The woman was allowed to remain at her window and the artists were allowed to remain unheralded and unpaid. The wormhole continued to hover around the painted lady who seemed to study us as much as we studied her. She was transfixed by the horseless vehicles and the oddly dressed passersby. The
The woman in the window stared as if she could not look away. She leaned just slightly forward. The curtains at her sides lifted ever so slightly in the salt air. She was day dreaming now about the future, imagining her city a hundred years ahead in time. She could see the future clearly, but it only lasted for a few seconds. Then she blinked, the wormhole flashed, and the mural was gone.
Photos by Ralph Morang
Copyright © 2013 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Robinson’s history column appears in the