The Spot: Stories

In order to make room for the proposed civic center, a crew came up from Chicago and examined the Delvic’s structure and set packets of explosives in strategic spots and wired them all together. There was something hopeful in their bright orange hard hats and the casual manner with which they handled the deadly materials. They spent an inordinate amount of time locating and packing the mythic main beam — that singular elemental piece of iron that acted as the crux for the entire superstructure. They stood in the street with surveying tripods and figured the angles and odds and estimated the rate of fall and the potential width of the dust ball that would come out of the mass like a giant furry beast. The fat ornate facade of the hotel — which had at one time lent the town an optimistic sense of grandeur and hope, with its curly cues of rococo molding and Louis Sullivan — inspired terra-cotta, and its gargoyles froglike and malformed, hunched in the top corners and visible only at twilight when the sun spread across the heavens — stood even after the blast, while the skeletal innards slid down in slow motion, the way a warm wedding cake might melt (all this transpiring in a few seconds of dust-bloom wonder); but if you looked closely — people say, people who were there — you could see the facade heaving, radiating hairline fractures as it struggled against its forthcoming demise. Other onlookers swear they didn’t see a thing.

Gloria

Some say McGee was in the audience on Bronson Street, sitting in the bleachers with the rest of the crowd, when the signal was given and the wired packets exploded and the building held still for a dignified moment, emitting small puffs of smoke. Some town folk claim that Gloria waved to him — her hand, in a white glove, mistaken for one of the many pigeons leaving their roosts at the last moment. She had hidden herself in a storage closet, amid galvanized buckets and the stagnant smell of wet mop heads and pink floor soap, emerging into the empty hallway only when the building was silent and the evacuation team was gone. (Common assumption is that she hid herself away with the expectation that McGee would stop the explosions and rescue her; others say she was mentally ill and paranoid and couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else. Most agree that McGee thought she was safely out of the building.)

The fire marshal says that when they dynamited the Donavon Hotel in Chicago — previous home to an assortment of vagabonds and junkies, a remnant of the great flophouse culture of the Depression — they found the bodies of three men dressed in old tuxedos and the top hats of industrialists, with cigars still clenched in their teeth and cards in their hands. One, he says, had a pretty good hand, a full house, and seemed to be smiling, as if in that final moment of brain spark he had found deep pleasure not only in the good luck of his draw but also in meeting a benevolent grace-giving God who could at once provide justice and allow the persistence of deeper mysteries, the things that went beyond perhaps even His (God’s) own wide providence during yet another troubled period in American history. (See “The Great Depression,” above.)

The Botch