Old Buildings and Spring Evenings

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally known for its massive collection of art, which was amassed by William and Henry Walters, and then gifted to the City of Baltimore.  The city of Kobe Japan has its own Walters-like story.  In 1928, Ikecho Meng, a wealthy Japanese art collector built a unique, Art Nouveau structure on a steep hillside overlooking the Port of Kobe, Japan. Square stone foundations reminiscent of a castle supported a tile roofed stucco structure that looked more Spanish than Japanese.  Beautiful winding stairways led to grand galleries with arched windows that overlooked the City whose lights at night twinkled like the reflections of a thousand stars on a still pond. 

The collector’s family lived in an adjoining mansion and the grand patios were the site of parties that attracted the most popular theatrical actors and actresses of the day.  Miraculously, the building was spared any damage during the war, but its owner was forced to sell the building in 1946 to pay taxes levied to help rebuild those parts of the country that were not so fortunate.  A local medical group purchased the structure and converted it to a clinic and hospital.  The art was moved to another Kobe City museum.  Later, a more modern hospital facility was built across the narrow street, downhill from the house, with a bridge to connect the two.

So why write about this?  In May 1979, I spent two long weeks at the hospital (then called the Ryu Gekka Byoin or “Ryu Surgical Hospital”), following an appendectomy that triggered a life-threatening staph infection (that’s another story).  During my recovery, I was the sole occupant of the room behind the pair of arched windows on the left-hand side of this photo and, once I was physically able to do so, I spent nearly every evening sitting on the window sill watching the activity of the city below.  It was one of the most harrowing and yet most inspiring times of my life to that point—a time I’ll never forget. Let’s just say that, when you feel like you’ve been given another chance at life and you have the “alone time” to really consider the meaning of it all, the experience makes quite an impression.

Fast forward 35 years later and, at the click of a button, I can be standing virtually on any street in Kobe.  So imagine my surprise when, just last year in a moment of nostalgia, I logged on to Google and panned across from the new hospital building and saw, not the old museum, but a vacant construction site.  Apparently, the medical group had decided it was time to build a new facility and made the erroneous (to me) decision to raze that beautiful 90 year-old facility.  I was stunned.  And I wasn’t the only one.  Blog pages and Tweets lamented the loss.  Fortunately, many of them, like this one and this one, documented the old building in photographs.

Things change.  Buildings, like those warm Spring evenings in Japan, come and go.  But for me, the memory of that city view will live forever.

(Modern Port of Kobe from Mt Rokko. Photo from Japan Travel Bureau)