Inside the Giant Gray Temple Building That Has No Windows

I have been staring at this building for my entire fucking childhood, adolescence, awkward twenties. I mean, it's right in the middle of Ohio City. It was right next to the overly ornate church we went to before Mom made us Catholic again. All of you have lived over by it at some point and we've turned around drunk in it's steep little parking lot while searching for your new apartment. And it has no fucking windows. That alone, but no, it gets better. I remember exactly the day when I asked my mother what it was, and she told me it was a Masonic temple and BOOM my little imaginary mind was blown. First of all, no windows. Second of all, Masons? The very concept is enough to ruin an 8 yr old for anything productive for the next three years. Third, it looks like a temple. It looks more like a temple than how I imagined temples should look. It looks like exactly what they intended it to be, a place where you don't get to see what the fuck is going on in there.

Well, ha, look at that. Look who got inside, you dowdy old long dead men in weird robes (there were pictures, and there were costumes, promise). Who thinks your place is the coolest building ever. Definitely right up there with the Cleveland Trust Rotunda, which had all those crazy bank vaults and that stained glass, so that's stiff competition, but it stands up. This building had crazy amounts of huge massive safes. 1920s bank robber safes. Huge double desks made of entire trees. And a boxing ring! And sepia tinted roll call photos everywhere! And lamps made of skin!

Plus thick solid beautiful old wood, and a marble staircase, and secret throne room chairs with ornate esoteric carvings, and falling apart old books with odes and songs and MASONIC STUFF. Faces of old men everywhere, and their trophy cases, and their plaques.

Also ashtrays everywhere. Everywhere. I won't even start to talk about the kitchen cabinets which went miles to the ceiling. It was like hanging out in the best church basement ever invented. It made you crave watery coffee and stale jelly donuts after mass, even if you had to stand in the corner while Mom said hi to everyone.

I don't know if I was just blinded in my youth by other things, or maybe I just sucked horribly at math and therefore never even thought about engineering or architecture because like space travel, it was just not something I was good enough to do. But why aren't we all just in constant awe of the buildings around us? We live in Cleveland, for gods sakes. Building is something we did really really well for a long time. Thank god my parents didn't make me grow up in someplace like Phoenix, or anywhere in Florida, where things are new and flat and don't have secret old pianos hanging out behind thick stage curtains on old polished floors. Why aren't we just constantly marveling at the designs of man all the fucking time?

Don't you just want to stay back there behind the curtains forever? Don't you just want to sleep there overnight? Who needs love when you have flooring like this? This building doesn't care about you and your problems, it just exists and asks to be used well and with respect. Hurting this building would be like throwing a stone at an elephant. You'd have to try really hard to have any affect on the elephant. You could hurt it, but you'd have to have hate in your heart and a lot of fucking balls. This building is what every little girl wants.

Masonic Temple: Where Good Chairs Go to Die

When I think of Masons, I think of this:



Shadowy robe closets and giant auditoriums full of middle aged white men sitting in pews against the wall. Halls to be rented out, safely sanctioned off from the hidden twin staircases that bring those in the know to the rooms of power.

But when the humans leave, whether from suburban or earthly flight, the native objects take over and make it a home. Here we see a passive herd of tires, grazing on the fallen plaster. Family like, they cluster around the den mouth, never straying far from the group.

Lone pianos lurk in corners. Being solitary nocturnal creatures, they are quiet and sleepy, hiding from the light. But at night, they gather to hunt and mate raucously.



Skittish groups of dishware rattle away happily until they sense the vibrations in the floor of approaching predators, and then they freeze, play dead, trying to blend into the debris.

On the upper levels, migratory clothing perches, guarding their carefully constructed nests.



But the real natural wonder here are the chairs. This is where chairs come to be born, and later in life, where they come to spend their final days, in safe pastures.

Above, a baby chair gets it first legs.

A stately alpha chair standing watch over his resting pride.

A pregnant mother chair, preparing for birth.


The old alpha chair, dominated out of the pride, retires to the hallways, away from the territorial younger males.

Several female chairs, socializing before the evening graze.

And the basement, where the sick and infirm are taken in their final days, to rejoin the circle of life.



More pictures can be seen here.