Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ It’s looking bad for the fabulous Empire Hotel and the future of the South Main’s fragile bat ecosystem. The historic preservation tax credits mercifully timed out in Raleigh on December 31st although Governor McCrory and Susan Kluttz are scrambling around trying to find votes to revive historic preservation’s abuses at tax payer expense. Hopefully the N.C. State Senate will pump lead into any historic preservation tax credit schemes.
The Rowan Free Press’s Mind-Hive has thoughtfully considered several ways to save the mythic Empire. We’ve discussed keeping only the front of Empire and gutting the rest of it to create a multi-tiered parking lot. But alas there is no need of a parking lot now that the city is hell-bent on using the “Complete Street’s Plan to drive motor vehicles away from the vacancy strewn Main Street area.
Our Mind-Hive considered calling on the Antiquities Act of 1906 (Teddy Roosevelt’s baby) for saving national monuments. I’m sure the folks who review the application of such acts would cringe if they actually visited the Jules Verne style Empire and its mineral rich deposits of almost a century of bat guano. The fact that General Robert E. Lee visited the Empire when it was known at the Boyden or that the Otto Wood, the “Robin Hood of the Piedmont”, once flopped at the Big “E” would make little difference to the guardians of our nation’s antiquities. Not even the famous melodramatic actress Sarah Bernhardt who stayed here during her theatrical engagements at the Meroney could gain currency for this crestfallen former flophouse unopened to the public since 1963.
I won’t even mention President William Howard Taft, Lillian Russell, John Philip Souza (“Washington Post March” and “Stars and Stripes Forever”) or Carrie Nation the High Priestess of Prohibition slept at the bat castle. Yes at one time Salisbury, N.C. had some weight.
We even considered an old Salisbury favorite of making bogus claims for its mean Downtown streets like calling them vibrant or historic. Perhaps Salisbury might toy with labeling the Empire Hotel as the new epicenter of the Earth’s North Magnetic Pole. What a draw that would be, but the RFP’s Mind-Hive’s collective conscience ruled against it.
For days the Rowan Free Press Mind-Hive were at their wits end when an idea came sailing out of the blue. We had overlooked the obvious. The tried and true “European Method”–a favorite in Rome, Greece, and Pisa, Italy. Take a ruin and fence it in. Let it give in to gravity and Mother Earth’s erosive qualities. Let the Empire become a fenced-in ruin with little if any expensive upkeep. It worked in Rome–it could work in North Carolina’s 300th rated city/town Salisbury, N.C.. Simply bulldoze the surrounding obsolete structures and allow the Empire Hotel to glorify the coming centuries as a ruin surrounded by a chain link fence.
Feast your eyes on how the theory of ruins worked in Rome and Pisa, Italy:
