The Old Madras Club

Hemanth, of Instant Kaapi, read my post mentioning the passing of the old Madras Club and has posted several pictures of it here. They're beautiful.

My father loved buildings, and he was a Civil War buff. He travelled to a number of plantation houses in the South. He took the family along on some of the trips, but my sister and I were too small to appreciate them, and whined a lot, so I didn't make it down to Louisiana to see Belle Helene. He took a picture of it, though, that haunted me for years -- a crumbling, columned building, hung about with Spanish moss. I just found a picture of it, in better shape than when he photographed it, at Louisiana: Plantation Country (page down). And a more evocative picture here. The image of Belle Helene came back to me quite recently, and I wondered if it was the root of my love for crumbling buildings. Our obsessions tend to stem from such tiny and arbitrary beginnings, don't they?