For the Love of The Park

A true story performed in 2024 for Here:Say Storytelling in Traverse City MI

In this life, I was lucky enough to grow up with two movie theatres within biking distance of my house.

The Park and The Knickerbocker. The Park was closer, and where I stood around the block on a hot June day, my head about to pop off waiting to see Star Wars, and finally becoming a real teenager.

The Knick (formerly The Holland) was where that teenager later ducked under the seats between shows so I could watch Top Gun just … one — more — time. The bigger of the two and with a balcony, The Knickerbocker was also where my aunt Kathy played a print of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which she booked and showed in memory of my uncle after he died, a free screening open to anyone.

I knew the bones of these places so well I can still see them in my mind today: the special staircases, the details in the lobbies, and especially the brightly lit flashing marquees that promised excitement and tales from the big world of “Somewhere Else.”

I felt a real kinship with these dark and mysterious places, and a pride of ownership knowing they belonged to me as a part of the town I inherited. So I also felt real panic when at age eleven, I rounded the corner on my skateboard only to be stopped in my tracks when I first saw construction workers tearing the Park Theatre to pieces.

While many adults probably knew this was coming, I was just a kid — I didn’t read newspapers, or listen to the radio, and we sent emails by yelling across the fences in our backyards. News traveled slower. But no one told me about this. It was a total surprise, and in an instant, I felt something was really wrong.

It was 1984. The single screen arthouse had fought the good fight against cable and VHS technologies as long as it could. But I couldn’t understand or care about any of that at the time.

I just stood there and watched indifferent men toss chairs, concession counters, and rolls of carpet into a big meaningless pile in front of me.

It created a new kind of unfamiliar and instant sadness, an ache and a pain — maybe the first time I experienced nostalgia, or felt sentimental about anything in my whole life. How could they do this? Who would allow this to happen? And what was I going to do about it?

I skated home and started planning during dinner. When I took stock of my resources, and my available helpers in two younger sisters who couldn’t care less, I had very few options. $25 in a savings account I only knew was at a bank somewhere, so buying the building was out since I couldn’t even access my money.

I could volunteer to quit school and run the theatre full time? That sounded great, but then I didn’t really believe I could get permission to pop popcorn professionally and I wasn’t even tall enough to run the machines. I just wanted to act, and I kept thinking about how mad I was that all of this was happening and no one consulted me, or asked what I wanted!?

At sunset, I returned to the theatre parking lot with my wagon tied to the seat of my ten-speed bike behind me. Using leverage and every ounce of strength I had, I toppled one section of chairs from the pile so they laid across the wagon, the wheels flattened, and the back end scraping into the sidewalk.

The velvet fabric was already worn and frayed, and the sculpted wood was cracked.

They were the classic folding and curved back opera chairs that came in sets of four, destined to be intertwined and fused together forever in molded ornate iron. They had not been unbolted from the floor since 1935, when they were installed a mere 22 inches apart, for the slimmer figures of the past. They easily weighed over 1 million pounds in my mind, but dammit — I was going to save something from this special place.

I tightened the ropes and pulled the load bit by excruciating bit, passing each driveway until I reached 12th Street — for blocks behind me, there was a scratch line of evidence of what I had done should the authorities ever come after me. I opened the side door to our long basement stairs and crammed the chairs into the narrow opening, wedging and pushing as hard as I could.

Gravity took over and pulled them down in a crash, fast and heavy, denting the wall along the way and becoming a part of the history of my childhood house forever.

I maneuvered them into my basement studio where my sisters would act like V-I-P’s in the front section and watch me practice my magic tricks, the centerpiece of my professional kid’s hideout and workshop at the time. They were always the best audience.

Later I brought down a small TV and VCR combination unit and we could watch movies while sitting in them, creating our own tiny arthouse theatre to make up for the ones that closed around us. The sound was horrible and the tape always skipped, but there was still cinema magic happening while we sat in those chairs together like mini Siskels and Eberts.

And even though I was still so young, these chairs connected me to the past, I could feel it — and they shaped my sense of awe for history, as I imagined who had made them, sat in them first, or who sat in them last — before The Park closed.

The chairs and workshop got less and less used over the next few years as my sisters and I traded the imaginary world of the basement for high school, college, then adult lives that were thousands of miles away. I ended up in Los Angeles, where there were others like me — those who save chairs for no reason they can explain.

I have visited all new kinds of arthouse cinemas, some across the world in those foreign places. And every time I saw one, I probably thought for a brief moment about my basement arthouse, and those precious chairs I would retrieve someday and restore to their full glory.

I always had ideas for how to get them to California and reunited with me, but I found the exigencies too difficult and I never solved them or expressed this hope to my Mom. The thoughts were just my secret, inside my head, of how I wanted things to go and end up.

And in the same way many of us never want or expect our childhood bedrooms to change, I never wanted those chairs to leave my life — even if they were just sitting in the cold dark basement waiting for me.

Decades later my parents sold the house — and an architect friend of theirs delighted in finding the now “vintage” and “one of a kind” chairs which she salvaged for someone, somewhere, who couldn’t possibly have loved them the way I did. My folks had not alerted me, which became a bit of a short-term conflict, but it was easy to understand why.

What would I possibly have done to get them from Michigan to L.A.? My bike and wagon would never make it that far. That eleven year old ache came instantly back when I asked my mom where they had gone during the move?

On the one hand, I had lost them now forever — and on the other hand, I had in fact saved them since they still lived somewhere in the world: relics of something meaningful enough to drag on from the past to the present.

The Park and the Knickerbocker have both reopened — adaptive reuse projects that turned them into performance spaces, and they sometimes screen movies again too. The marquees have been lit back up and they always make me stop. Mirages of the past — familiar and comforting, but possibly not even real.

Many of my biggest dreams for my life were hatched up sitting in those two cinemas, and they still feel like home to me and they always will.

I look back fondly on the day I stubbornly dragged home those chairs, whatever it meant. Whatever it did to me.

It was the moment I crossed over from a kid with only a future ahead of them, to a small person who had a past. And memories, and something to cherish forever.

Post Script: I’m returning to The Park Theatre on Weds April 24 at 7pm to screen my first film ever, “Marqueetown” — a documentary about one man’s quest to save the movie theater of his youth in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I co-wrote and co-directed it with Jordan Anderson, and it will be the first time I’ve been back inside The Park in over 30 years. Tickets still available.