Once upon a time . . . I happened upon an enchanted spot, a place where, whatever dark events engaged the world’s attention, life was always as one wished it to be. It was, for me, the stuff of dreams, a mansion spun from fairy tales, crouching upon carved stone boulders. Faced with marble and russet bricks, its dual towers rose above the town like massive sentries standing guard. Its outer walls bore wondrous and terrifying images graven in stone and terra cotta. Small, intense and wildly imaginative, I yielded completely to its spell.
Decades later, poised at the foot of the marble steps, squinting until galaxies of dancing stars blind me to the present, I will myself back into my five-year-old body. Staggering under the weight of my weekly quota of books, I struggle with the heavy doors. Patent leather Mary-Janes clatter across the marble-floor and up the too-high steps of the grand stairway to my magical realm.
Government and Justice occupied The City Hall, but, upstairs, the Public Library held me willing captive. Rank-on-rank, ceiling-high shelves housed volumes of every kind and color, redolent of the smoky fragrance of ancient printer’s ink, paper dust and mustiness that I came to associate with books. Books with pictures, books with stories–the mystique of words drew me into a world more real than any flesh-and-blood experience of my life.
By the time I discovered Old City Hall, built in the late 1800s, the castle was a bit grimy. No matter, it was a monument to the grandeur of another era, a triumph of the abundance of its time. Elegant and eloquent, the building spoke to me, answering an unacknowledged hunger, filling an unrecognized need.
Alfred S. Eichberg, the building’s architect, was a New World entrepreneur born of the heritage of European culture. His German-born father, Joseph, had spent his early years in France, emigrating to the United States and settling in New York in 1850. Creative and ambitious, he became a journeyman plumber and a retail merchant in plumbing and gas fixtures. He met and married Caroline Baudman. On August 23, 1859 Caroline gave birth to Alfred, the first of nine Eichberg children.
Click here to read the rest of Sharon Smith Henderson's article on the restoration of Old City Hall. |
