The Community Hall as Gothic Architecture

If you asked me to name the most haunted building in a small town, I would not say the boarded-up house on the hill, and I would not say the old church, and I would certainly not say whatever the tourist board has decided is picturesquely spooky. I would say the community hall. The Legion, the parish hall, the fire hall, the church basement with the low ceiling and the folding tables — the plain municipal box where the town keeps its whole emotional life, and I would say it precisely because it does not look haunted at all, which is the entire point.

Because the community hall is architecturally the least atmospheric building imaginable. It has a drop ceiling with a water stain in one corner. It has a floor built to be mopped. It has stackable chairs, and a serving hatch to a kitchen with an enormous urn in it, and fluorescent tubes that give everyone the same grey pallor whether they are dancing or grieving. It is a room designed to have no character, so that it can host every character in turn, and that neutrality is not the absence of the gothic. It is the condition for it. The hall is a blank so that the town can write everything on it, and the town does, and it never erases.

The same tables

Here is the thing that gets me about the community hall, the thing I cannot walk into one without feeling. It is the versatility of it — the way the identical room, with the identical tables and the identical urn and the identical grey light, hosts the entire arc of a human life, and hosts it interchangeably, so that the physical setting of your greatest joy and your worst loss is, down to the coffee, the same.

You were at a wedding in that hall. The tables were pushed back for dancing and there were paper decorations and someone’s uncle was too loud and it was, in the way of these things, perfect and awful and yours. And you were at a funeral reception in that hall, the same hall, and the tables were set out flat again for the sandwiches and the squares, and there was the same urn, and the same grey light on everyone’s faces, and you stood holding a paper cup of tea near the same serving hatch where you had, at the wedding, been laughing, and the sameness was almost more than the grief — the discovery that the room does not distinguish, that it will lay out the folding tables for your wedding and your father’s wake with exactly the same municipal patience, that the setting of your life’s most opposite occasions is one indifferent flexible box with a stain on the ceiling.

That is the hall’s whole gothic power, and no old church can touch it. A church is consecrated; it announces its weight; you bring the right feelings to it. The hall is consecrated by nothing and holds everything, and so it accumulates, invisibly, a palimpsest of every extreme thing that has ever happened to everyone you know, all layered in the same unremarkable room, so that to stand in it on an ordinary Tuesday when it is empty and smells of floor cleaner is to stand in the middle of the entire compressed emotional history of a community, felt all at once, in a space that is doing absolutely nothing to help you feel it. The banality is the haunting. The drop ceiling has seen everything.

The rooms are closing

And they are closing, which is the part that turns this from an observation into a small grief of its own.

The community hall is a technology of a certain scale of place — it requires enough people, close enough together, sharing enough of a life, to need a common room and to fill it. And as the small places empty, as the young leave and the congregations thin and the volunteer boards age out with no one behind them, the halls are being lost, one by one, sold or shuttered or simply left to the water stain to finish. And when a community loses its hall it does not just lose a venue. It loses the one room that held everyone — the only space that was neutral enough and big enough and cheap enough to contain the whole town at its weddings and its funerals and its elections and its terrible fundraising dances. It loses the shared physical setting of its collective life, and after that the weddings happen somewhere rented and far away, and the funerals happen at the funeral home with its tasteful lighting, and the town stops having a single room where all of it, joy and grief and bingo, happens to the same people under the same grey light. The palimpsest stops being written. The last layer dries.

So I have a real tenderness for these plain ugly rooms, and I notice them, the way you notice a thing you know is going. The next time you are in one — and you will be, for a wedding or a wake or a pancake breakfast — look up at the water stain and the drop ceiling and the fluorescent tubes and understand what you are standing inside. Not a hall. An archive, in stackable chairs, of everything that has ever happened to your people, holding it all with the same patient indifference, ready to be set up flat for the sandwiches or pushed back for the dancing, keeping no distinction between the best day of your life and the worst, because it has hosted both, for everyone, and it remembers, in its blank municipal way, absolutely all of it.