If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Spend some time looking at the photos on a nostalgia website, one devoted to your hometown perhaps, and you will see many pictures of buildings that are gone now.

So it was at the Facebook page, Port Allegany, Remember When, when Lanny posted more photos of Canoe Place Inn.

“The Canoe” has been the subject in many previous photos. Nearly always a great, collective sigh wafts through the Seneca Highlands region of Cyberia. Viewers bemoan the tragic loss of the dear old Canoe Place.

It should have been left intact! “They” should never have allowed it to be demolished! Soulless local officials, how could they stand by and allow this treasure to be razed?

Look at that garish food and fuel business with its neon and bright lights, blazing away night and day! “They” should at least have kept the historic main building and built the Sheetz store around it, carefully imitating the architecture of the Canoe!

It is hard to make a modern gas station look like a gracious old inn, though. There used to be gas pumps in front of Lynn Hall, back in the day, but they were modest and didn’t have an actual island.

Clicking through the photos of Canoe Place, the old postcards, I notice that some are so unlike others, it’s hard to believe they depict the same place. They represent different eras, different stages in the long life of the business, as it was operated under different ownerships.

I don’t remember Catherine Lay’s Tea Room. I never saw the four-square house version, or the big portico on the south side.

I want to ask those mourning the death of the Old Canoe Place, which version do you believe should have been preserved, changeless, frozen in time?

The original tea room, where no intoxicating spirits were served? Was it a boarding house too? The family lived there, I suppose, and guests were invited into part of the place.

Or was the building most authentic when it had been extended to the north to become a hotel? When it began to be called a restaurant?

Or was it coming into its own when the second story and a new roof were added? When the attic was dormered out, creating a third-story apartment? When Doc Niles lived there?

When the first motel units were added, at the rear? When a sidewalk went to the front entry, and a fence divided the parking lot from the front lawn?

When the other motel units were built, their backs toward West Arnold, and the parking lot was enlarged? When the old lawn and garden area was still there, or when the new landscaping was done? When the porch had hanging baskets and café tables and chairs, or when there was wicker furniture?

Was the Canoe Place truly itself when it was booked solid at hunting season, with flatlanders and Buffalo hunters packed in like cured muskrat hides, and management maintained a list of private homes where owners would “keep hunters,” and referred the overflow to them? When the front yard b “game frames” for two weeks, where deer corpses were suspended, each aging for the ride home on the successful Nimrod’s fender?

How could it have been the Canoe Place before the tap room was added? Or before the Grecian columns were placed along the front porch? It was not always a hotel and restaurant, let alone a hotel, restaurant and motel.

When was the Fireside Room added, off the lobby—a place where guests and locals could sit by the fireplace, read the paper, wait for the arrival of a lunch guest and pass the time of day? When was the new piano acquired and put into the alcove?

At some point live music began to be provided Friday and Saturday nights. At some point the Canoe became spacious enough for wedding receptions.

What was the high point of the cuisine? I’m guessing the Elsie Manning years. Oh, those prime rib suppers, and the splendid fare on Sundays!

With every major change, there probably were people who were annoyed. “They” were tampering with tradition. Those who drank and dined there frequently, and those who did not, felt that the place should not be changed like that. Leave it alone!

But everything was changing around it, and kept changing to the point that such establishments became passé. One after another, they closed, or were torn down.

It didn’t help if a new owner’s menu changes proved unpopular, and wait staff were too few and service was slow.

Privately owned businesses change hands, long-time owners want to retire, fast food chains make inroads in fine dining. Our little burg is no exception to nationwide trends.

Another much lamented loss was the Grand Theatre. But there had been at least two other theaters or auditoriums or opera houses, here, and those are gone. Did people mourn for them?

I’d have liked to see the local entrepreneurs given a chance to buy and rehab the theater building, and recreate a movie house. From what I have heard, their restoration plan was physically viable and they had the financial backing.

But would it have been a success? Even as we speak, films as such are becoming obsolete. Just as drive-ins and most movie houses were killed off by television, the present trend is for new productions to be released directly to viewers on media, or for rental or pay-per-view, for consuming wherever one prefers: in the living room, during the commute, wherever. It is predicted, by industry prognosticators, that we won’t be going to movies much longer. They, or “content,” will come to us.

When should the old theater building have been magically sealed in some time-proof substance? When it was a movie house, even though no movies were shown and no audiences came? Before it was a newspaper office? Or a store, or a tattoo parlor? When there were offices upstairs, or apartments?

Maybe before fracking servicing sand and water trucks thundered by, pounding the infrastructure and shaking buildings. Best get the preservatives applied, sentimental preservationists, before all our keepsake landmarks go the way of the Mt. Jewett mural building.

Peace.