PROMINENT HOUSE 1890
“Stand well back now while I open this door, ladies, it must weigh a ton and it could fall,” I said motioning them back and looking upward. I then quickly glanced all around me and planned my own route of escape, if the door did fall off its hinges.
The ladies, all three stepped off the marble steps and toward the yellow pick-up truck.
“Tim, please be careful,” Andrea said, suddenly on edge.
“I plan to, honey,” I said, as I carefully pushed against the one large cathedral door which housed the lock mechanism while simultaneously watching above me at both doors for any signs of hinge failure. I needn’t have worried, the door which I was pushing against opened as easily and smoothly as if the hinges had been oiled last month, with only a slight squeaking sound. The other door remained solid as a rock when I tugged on it several times.
I quickly ducked my head around the doors and glanced upward at no less than eight large iron hinges on each door.
“These doors are three inches thick and solid oak. A Sherman tank couldn’t blow these doors off,” I said incredulously.
I now stood within the massive doorway and just gaped at the inner foyer which was the size of an entire trailer court. The room had the distinct smells of desert sand combined with that of a second-hand store yet I detected no stench or saw any sign of mold or rot anywhere. There was evidence of small animal tracks upon the dust-covered floor and some bird droppings but nothing to the extreme.
I gawked upward now, craning my neck as if looking up at a skyscraper.
The marble ceiling must have been seventy feet above me and was adorned with an extremely detailed latticework consisting of hand-carved angels and intricately scrolling vines. There was also a large oval-shaped skylight in the center of the ceiling, the size of a small swimming pool, which was undoubtedly a dome upon the mansion’s roof. The skylight which I was now looking at was made from ornate iron webbing and multicolored glasswork which boasted intriqintricately detailed victorian artwork of angels. No light showed through, however, obviously because of decades of dust covering the upper portion of the glasswork.
The rest of the entire ceiling was an exotic mural of more angels brandishing harps and trumpets as they floated around the sun, stars, moon, and mystical-looking clouds. These were traditional angels in the form of erotic naked women with cherub wings. Within this exotic artwork, the sun and moon also had extremely detailed faces and appeared to be three-dimensional yet they were only painted upon the ceiling. It appeared that the mural was intended to represent Heaven in the afterlife.
Directly below the skylight and within the middle of the foyer sat an ornate, yet filthy, marble water fountain in the same shape as the skylight. The fountain boasted more elaborate scrollwork carved into it. I speculated that the fountain had probably held around fifteen hundred gallons of water and been an absolutely beautiful piece of functioning artwork, once filling the entire foyer with the tranquil sounds of cascading water. I assumed that it was now empty, and judging by the bird dropping on its sides, it had been for some time.
Also within the foyer, were dozens of large marble pillars that stood on the edge of the dusty linoleum floor which itself consisted of two-foot by two-foot tiles and were arranged in a black and cream-white pattern like an oversize chessboard.
The fifty or sixty ornate marble pillars, each seventy feet tall, stood neatly surrounding the entire open circumference of the foyer in a square orderly row similar to soldiers standing guard. Reaching the height of the marbled ceiling, these massive pillars also held up five consecutive floors of open balconies on all sides of the room.
Each set of pillars had a curved archway, atop each consecutive floor, that was adorned with intricate scrolls and a carved lion’s head within the center of each archway. Each of these archways connected to the next adjoining pillar, and that pillar to the next archway, onward in an endless chain around the entire foyer.
The pillars and archways gave the large foyer a mesmerizing theatrical appearance that was completely overwhelming.
Each of the five balconies was also lined with a marble safety rail adjoined by hundreds upon hundreds of smaller hand-decorated marble pillars of their own.
The one exception to this array of archways and pillars was above the double cathedral doors themselves. instead of a lion’s head in its center, this archway had a large, three-foot diameter, ornate clock with Roman numerals. The clock had stopped at 6:12. and appeared to have a slight blemish of some kind within the face of the clock. The concave glass, protecting the face, was also broken with a jagged hole and several cracks starting at the bottom left of the clock face.
…It almost looked like a shotgun shell had been fired at the clock…
At the far side of the foyer, just across from me and under one of the archways, I noticed an extremely large piano that looked to be the size of a small yacht. The piano’s top was still open and it would almost appear as if a concert were planned for this very evening, aside from the thick layer of dust upon the fine wood finish. The piano’s bench seat was where it should be yet it looked as if rodents had torn apart the ornate cushion and spread the stuffing within the immediate vicinity of the instrument.
…Glancing upward again, I noticed that four huge electrically powered chandeliers hung from long golden verticle shafts, the chandeliers themselves, were decorated elaborately in gold leaf and more angels. In looking up at these chandeliers I was unable to see any mechanical or cable mechanism in which to lower the massive chandeliers for lightbulb replacement yet I did not doubt that every single one of the bulbs had been fully functional when last in use.
At the far end of the room were two long and elegant sweeping marble staircases, east and west, meeting each other at their bottom steps. These grand staircases were probably each one-hundred and fifty feet long and the steps of these massive staircases were covered in green rug carpet. Both staircases descended gracefully to a large open hearth within the center rear wall of the large foyer. A person could literally drive a truck up these curved staircases, as huge as they were. These double staircases were artistically perfect and only added to the foyer’s grandeur.
I knew from my own research on Victorian mansions that these staircases were intentionally designed to allow well-attired ladies a theatrical entrance into the open room with all eyes upon them. The owners of sea-going oceanliners had been quick to grasp this concept and soon began to incorporate grand staircases into the interiors of their ships, such as Cunard’s Lusitania and Mauretania, and many others at the turn of the century.
Looking out into the open foyer again, I could almost see the ghosts of dozens upon dozens of young and extremely beautiful women in full Victorian dress gowns as they danced gracefully with well-attired gentlemen to a live orchestra of master musicians. Husbands had proudly danced with their wives while young single men in attendance had skillfully beckoned fair maidens to accompany them out onto the dance floor, right here at this very spot where I now stood. The age-old game of courtship had been alive and well long before the creation of Prominent House I knew, yet it was doubtful that it would ever reach this scale of elegance and sophistication ever again within a house this grand.