When my dad was a boy, he snuck out one night to hear Ella Fitzgerald at a dance club a few blocks from his house. It was a black jazz club; whites were allowed only upstairs at the bar. My dad was 12 at the time, so he wasn’t allowed in it all. But he remembers standing outside and listening to Ella, and a few months ago, he looked for the building. Here it is, a shadow of its former self, but still standing. While we were looking around the property, the owner pulled up in his truck and told us that before it was a jazz club, the oldest part of the building was a steam-powered hemp factory.
You can love a place without knowing much about it, but if you know about a place, if you learn its past and its stories, how can you not be attached?