Building Venues for Collective Memory
Reflecting at the Madonna Inn on spaces that hold our cultural identities.
Christmas at the Madonna Inn. Surfaces already adorned with carved wood, carpet, velvet, lacquer, or ornately cut tile now gleam with lights, sparkling ornaments, Christmas creatures. A grove of frosted artificial trees separates the dining area from the dance floor, a wide hall with parquet floor and large stage and the proportions of a cathedral.
It’s Sunday night. A few couples sip novelty cocktails at the bar, and tables of women have cake wrapped up in takeaway containers. The different rooms at the Madonna Inn make it hard to know how full or empty the place is, but tonight it’s far from a raucous crowd. We order Manhattans from the handsome, long-haired bartender who’s been there every time I have.
The sound of a drum machine sputtering to life with kicks and snares overtakes the house music, and then a few soft, clear tones of a trumpet. An old man wearing a black hat, pants and shirt with a red tie has taken the stage. He’s seated next to the grand piano with a keyboard and microphone in front of him, and he’s gotten the drums to play as he wants them. Accompanying himself on the trumpet, he plays chords on the keyboard with one hand: a simple, unembellished Noel.
No sooner does the song come into focus before a couple — the only couple seated in the banquet area — has taken the floor. The man has shoulder-length white hair brushed out in a wild mane, and wears a black button-down shirt with vertical stripes in red, white, and sparkling silver. The woman is petite and lithe, and they dance, swan-like, as though in a silent courtship, bowing, twirling, sashaying for one another’s benefit, alone on the dance floor.
By the next number, they’re joined by two small girls dressed for dinner, who alternate between wild games of spinning one another in circles, and experiments in being observed as young ladies in public, craning necks, pointing toes. The couple we see dancing every year (man with a white beard, woman with a long white braid, always wearing matching outfits) take the floor and begin moving in synchronized steps, like a cowboy swing.
More people have joined the audience now, and between numbers we’re applauding the dancers and the music man on stage. I wonder aloud if David Lynch ever spent an evening here, and then drift into a whiskey-induced thought of everyone who’s ever visited the fever dream that is the Madonna Inn, American roadside fantasy of that great century of highways and local capitalists known as the nineteen-hundreds.
As this night unfolds, it joins the archive of every other night in the history of this place. Every birthday party, wedding, first date, graduation, fight in the parking lot, spontaneous singalong. Every individual memory of spending time here swirls together into the pool of collective memory held within these adorned rooms, like different boats scattered across the same sea.
Most of my friends who grew up in California have memories of coming to the Madonna Inn on roadtrips up the coast. For those local to the San Luis Obispo area, the place is a local spectacle that everyone remembers visiting at some point.
For those of us who return frequently, we come to enjoy a dip back into the collective memory held within this place. It reminds us of bygone seasons of our own lives, but also lets us rove around the common past, where Alex Madonna drank with Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, where Phyllis Madonna would join the band to regale guests with her accordion and vast lipstick smile, where there was a land before highway, and California was the country of Steinbeck and cattle ranchers.
People in my parents’ generation can recall without hesitation where they were when JFK was shot. People my age each have a version of the day the planes hit the towers, like different vantage points of the same scene, observed from our own situational realities.
Remembering the same thing as someone else is a key element of social connection. Think of how many conversations we have with old friends that are just retellings of the same stories and jokes we’ve always told. Tony Soprano might say that “remember when” is the lowest form of conversation, but it’s also one of the deepest ways we humans relate to one another, establishing shared frameworks for friendship and community that ladder up to form large aspects of our cultural identities. My high school friend Jireh texted our group chat recently to say he was at the deli we used to go to after school, and that it still smelled the same. Everyone knew exactly what he meant.
Collective memory requires spaces that endure beyond individual lives. The deli, the school, the church, the cafe, the bus stop, the town park pool. These physical venues allow events to stack, contradict, and reinforce one another over time.
Historically, many of the spaces that serve as important venues for collective memory were built on the funds of wealthy philanthropists. Our great public museums and libraries, universities, parks, hotels, and concert halls came into being because individuals threw down to create them. Spending in this way was a great mode of demonstrating power, enduring influence for generations through endowments, and cementing the names of our American industrialists into the history of this place.
Alex Madonna earned his fortune building roads, and then built a place in his town that didn’t yet exist: somewhere a community of farmers could come get dressed up and play a glamorous fantasy, doubling as a destination along the way of Madonna’s shining new highway.
Today, the wealthiest among us are investing their billions into the intangible: Metaverses and crypto assets, networks, platforms, and space programs. Fewer and fewer public rooms are being built for long-term social use. Instead of grand halls and bar seating, the venues built by today’s great capitalists look different to each of us. As people put their money into platforms and allow the algorithm to personify a user’s sense of place, these platforms become less like venues and more like individual rooms, outfitted for our personal interests and comforts.
We need the place to remind us of who we are, together.
I’m not expecting anybody reading this to be a wealthy philanthropist looking to put their millions into a grand hotel or cultural center. And I know those people are out there, somewhere uptown, donating to museums and concert halls and colleges. But it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself, however humble your economic influence, what would you build? What do we need?
A space to find focus? A space to rest? A space for children to play? A space for art cinema, great parties, sports, or growing food? For the need to be relevant, it has to be locally specific, like Madonna’s wonderland on the California prairie.
Not everyone can build a grand hotel, fund a museum, or endow a library. It’s hard enough to open a small business in this city. But if we acknowledge the role these spaces play in our quality of life, maybe we’ll be less likely to take them for granted, to be surprised when the bar we haven’t been to in five years goes out of business.
Today, the role of the customer is as important as the role of the owner or the philanthropist. By frequenting a venue, we do our part in supporting its continuity, making sure it stays put long enough for memory to accumulate, for familiarity to take root, for us to recognize one another across time.
Elie Andersen is the Director of Index, a community center with locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Communications Director of garden3d. Each year, garden3d offers a democratically-elected, $20,000 grant to anyone in the world building a space that serves its local community. So far, we have opened spaces in Amsterdam, Bengaluru, Ishikawa, and Richmond.