7th Demo Photo Set

Friday February 12, 2016. Very cold day so these are a bit rushed. They have knocked down all the auditorium except the balcony and the north wall. A lot of incongruity as the windows are still in the auditorium's front facade, although the stage and main seating area are gone, from the Church St. side it looks almost unchanged. If the weather was better and if I had known of the parade of former students to the site each hour I would have arranged to do interviews of all the generations of Ashland natives who have attended the school. This hourly phenomenon is amazing as almost everyone in town is feeling the loss of one of the remaining ties to their childhood. Virtually everyone who grew up here over past 100 years has shared this as a community bond.

Viewed from this angle there is no longer a way of denying that the school will soon be gone, for the first few weeks the efforts of the demo crew had seemed like the infinitesimal pitted against the infinite. Note the window to the ticket booth just inside the auditorium entrance, an occasional place of refuge for me and my closest counterpart to Melinda's janitorial closet.

My guess is that the blackened windows and brickwork were an early fix to the problem of unwanted reflected and natural light behind the sets on the stage.

At first I was puzzled by the two small arched openings in the above photo. They frame the Moorish style arches above the fire door exit to the interior courtyard, they are at the right front of the auditorium just before the steps up to the stage. The door itself is obscured by the pile of rubble in the foreground.

The days are also numbered as well for the blue Myers water tower in the background of the above photo.