Staircases can be wonders, both in our material lives and in our imaginative expressions. One of the central attractions of our own Old Capitol is the gorgeous, unique reverse-spiral staircase, its elegant swirl providing a journey into Iowa’s past. If you have any notion of the interior of the RMS Titanic, it is most likely the sweeping Grand Staircase to the first-class section of the ill-fated White Star Line ocean liner.
Staircases play iconic roles—in story and aesthetics, in beauty and horror—in many of our most beloved movies. Gone With the Wind concludes with Scarlett O’Hara weeping and then rising triumphant on the Butler mansion’s magnificent staircase, vowing to go home to Tara and win Rhett back. Psycho would not be Psycho without Norman Bates running to and from the frightening wreck of a house on the hill on that perilous concrete stairway. And Laurel and Hardy’s most famous film, “The Music Box,” is all about getting that piano up that impossible stairway to the house at 1127 Walnut Avenue. Those steps (in reality at 923-925 Vendome Street in Los Angeles) remain a tourist attraction.
This past spring, the small concrete stairway at the southeast corner of Schaeffer Hall on the University of Iowa Pentacrest was dismantled. It was not especially especially surprising. The steps and borders were cracked and gouged, likely a result of both age and skateboards. Their replacement was a new smooth sidewalk ramp.
On the east side and in the middle of the Pentacrest, about halfway between the Old Capitol and Clinton Street, were two shorter concrete stairways of four or five steps each on the sidewalks that flare northwest and southwest from the Clinton Street and Iowa Avenue intersection. While not damaged, these staircases were also demolished earlier this summer.
What we have now are, again, two gradually rising sidewalk ramps up to the sides of Schaeffer and Macbride Halls. I don’t know why the two short stairways were removed, and I certainly don’t begrudge the improved accessibility the new concrete ramps provide. Even four steps can be difficult to negotiate for someone on crutches or with creaky knees, and impossible for someone in a wheelchair. So opening up the pathways to our beautiful Pentacrest to more people is a wonderful thing.
At the same time, I regret the loss of these small architectural details of our Pentacrest past. Stairways offer not only a practical means of rising to a new level, but they help create that new level. A multi-tiered landscape creates visual interest and aesthetic pleasure. A ramp erases the layering that stairs craft.
These stairs also contributed, in a small yet noticeable way, to the historicity of the Pentacrest. These are the grounds of our first state capitol and our first state university. They deserve a sense of ceremonial dignity. Granted, there is plenty—and more dramatic—splendor remaining among the neoclassical edifices. The imposing, massive stone steps and columns of the Old Capitol and of Schaeffer and Macbride Halls still declaim these structures’ stateliness and gravitas. The Old Capitol’s West Portico still makes the approach to the west side of the building a small pilgrimage through a short maze of broad stone steps and timeless granite railings and walls.
But the now-absent more modest staircases were heralds of these resplendent pinnacles of the Pentacrest’s monuments. By echoing the grand stairways in miniature, they prepared us for the splendor to come. They were intermediate stations that marked the procession toward our community’s temples. They were the overture to the opera, the Preface to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the wardrobe to Narnia.
As time wears on, few will notice the absence of these small flights of stairs on the Pentacrest walkways, and, as I said, many will enjoy the unobstructed passage. But losing such small details chips away at the historic nature of the center of our community landscape. It dims, even if just slightly, the aesthetic integrity of a place where tradition and beauty matter.
When it comes to stairs, Thomas Dean, my dear, does give a damn.
