Home

Put up four walls and create a reality. Tear them down, and many of the memories disappear with the rubble.

All those office politics and co-worker friendships exist because the building you work in has a door to walk through. A reality rises up in every house you live in, at coffee shops, restaurants, bars and health clubs where we gather.

Then a business closes. We move to a new house, and those four walls become "remember when."

I noticed the walls coming down for the first time Tuesday morning. At 7 a.m. on Seventh Street, I saw the awning was gone and the windows were gauged out.

Depending on your generation, you call that empty building "the band room" or the "Seventh Street Playhouse."

For me, it is the latter.

I remember sitting in those seats watching people I knew display talents I didn't know they had. I remember sitting far from a sagging balloon of plastic and tubing that siphoned the melting snow from the leaking roof into a bucket. That bucket had the best seat in the house. I remember the day a tractor-trailer pulled up to the door and all the props from a decade of plays were loaded in: doors to nowhere, lamps without bulbs, a top hat.

After the door to the playhouse was locked, it was the last time I saw inside until Tuesday. For a while, the steps became a sort of shelter for Herb, and when he no longer was allowed to sit there, it was nothing.

Those rotting boards on the steps no longer looked like an inviting place to sit in the evening.

I'd moved on. I'd watched theater in other venues and liked it. Those red folding seats collecting dust in an empty room at Seventh and Aspen streets meant nothing to me anymore.

Until Tuesday morning.

As I walked by and saw the old thing being stripped to death, I felt a little wave of shock and sadness run through my body.

Old-timers in this town have learned not to be sentimental. As they'll tell you, Steamboat Springs turns over like a pancake every few years. The Steamboat of today is nothing like the Steamboat of five years ago. Finnegan begin again, etc.

But I haven't lived here long enough to be jaded about the things I've lost. When I first moved here, there were a few places that I thought set our downtown area apart from other similar towns -- a hardware store that you could walk to for a box of nails or some house paint, a community garden on a prime piece of real estate, a community theater tucked blocks from downtown.

By Tuesday evening, the roof of the playhouse/Herb's house/the band room had been knocked off. Through the missing windows in the front of the Playhouse, you could see jagged boards falling into the old sound booth, and beyond that, you could see the sky.

While people argued loudly about the future of the historic Harbor Hotel building, three blocks away this old man died a quiet death.