Reeble's

Red Bricks & Sandstone

I wonder sometimes—if Emporia hasn’t always been that way? Red bricks & sandstone facades—along Commercial Street?

A kind of gothic Americana intermission—during the whole Westward Experience Movement thing? A brief pause, an interlude—while the Santa Fe Railroad made a stop there. Then kept its way going onto the West Coast?

What’s left for us—fourth generation Kansans who can look back on it all & still remember their grandparents, maybe even their great-grandparents? Caught up in the Now back then—of what we’ve still got left around us?

Kansas consciousness—what was it? Like the C of E campus. What was it? Is it disappearing now? The big cities on the west coast—they’ve got ghost malls but still things keep growing. While back in the midwest—everything is falling apart, decaying, disintegrating, turning into ghost towns not just ghost malls.

What really makes me feel helpless & nostalgic for the past is up there in Republic County—and all the farms being taken over by corporations & Monsanto. A lot of the churches, schools, banks downtown, bridges—they’re built to last with limestone cut from the quarries like in Strong City west of Emporia. The facades of some of the older buildings like this building on Commercial Street—so solid & not going anywhere. Pastels & patinas—jazzing it up a little bit.