Sprites and Spirits of PhotoRover's Cherry Street Gallery

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Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:04 AM

Cherry Street Gallery	Projects & Improvements	Sprites & Spirits	Cherry Creek, NV

Not everyone appreciates the little house that has now become the Cherry Street Gallery. I call her Juxtaposie.

The house is an old lady; dainty and fragile, bearing the scars of a life of hard work and poverty, and of dreams unrealized. No malice bears she, but only peaceful acceptance and laughter. She is content in her waning years.

Her history, while inglorious, tells the tale of the generations of common people whose lives were written on the pages of boomtown histories throughout the west.

The gallery has been home to numerous women, and each of them left an imprint on the fabric of theses crooked walls.

At times, she is Helen Coolie – the middle-aged wife who became an elderly widow and went mad in isolation.

Helen Coolie (center) celebrating with friends in Cherry Creek.
(Photo courtesy of Sandra Pierson Price. Sandy's grandmother, Lucy Duvall, is on the left.)

Sometimes, the house sparkles with aliveness, as five teenaged sisters primp and giggle, and fight like cats. Chances are, they all shared the same classroom, shoes, and dresses - and outdoor privy.

The Lady (I don’t know her name yet) conducts her frontier life with dignity and decorum. She can’t get the things she dreams of, in the turn-of-the-century mining camp. She does her best to recreate the grand styles of San Francisco and Paris that she recalls from the very different life she had before coming here. Unpretentious and modest, her decorating efforts are not for the sake of putting on airs, but only for trying to bring her memories of a more elegant existence into the present time. She is tatted doilies and floral wallpaper against rough lumber; delicate china teacups tinkling sweetly against the rowdy bedlam of saloons and bawdy houses on the next block.

There are man spirits here, too. Tired and hungry miners coming in through the kitchen door so as not to track dirt on the living room floor. The last man to call Juxtaposie home, was Herman Coolie. Herman was a mining promoter, son of wealthy New York shoe manufacturers.

In those days (late 1940’s), the promoter was thought of much as a personal injury attorney is, today. Herman passed away when I was very young. Whatever impressions of his presence remain here, I sense little of his personality in the abode.

Before the Coolies, Steve Main was the man of the house. I connect him to the "geometric linoleum period" -- so different from the bold florals that came later. I know that he used to build little curio displays from wood and auto glass. I know this about Mr. Main, because my father told me. Whenever I have come across a car window on the grounds, I wondered if it had been something Steve Main was working on.

My most immediate predecessors at Juxtaposie, were “the Girls” – “the Two Dianes”.
Fresh from Berkeley, California, they came to visit Diane’s and my grandmother, fell in love with Cherry Creek, and bought the house from Mrs. Coolie (then in a nursing home). The two young women stayed a brief, yet memorable time. My memories of them were, and are, direct.

Guardian of the Gallery - A sculpture by Diane Ruggles, embedded in the brick work she added to the "parlor"

Those were strange days at the house on Cherry Street. in the late 1970’s, and I will be writing more about some of the time I spent with the Two Dianes, and their friend, Butch, who sometimes took shelter in the trailer next to the house.

Diane died of brain cancer, in Massachusetts, in 2000. Diana lives in New Mexico. Butch died from a gunshot wound to the head, sustained in a Cherry Creek brawl after The Girls moved on to greener pastures.

Other residents of the Cherry Street Gallery are the Manifester Imps. I don’t know exactly whom – or what – they are. Perhaps some *Tommyknockers out of a job. Poltergeists, maybe, but not of the horror movie variety; these mischievous sprites are creatures of Light and curiosity. They laugh uproariously in their joy at bringing wishes into being – wishes granted, but always with some twist of humor.
(See “Be Careful What You Wish”.)

Beyond the doorsteps, another community of spirits: The miners, the hookah-smoking drifters, the Chinese laborer cum entrepreneur, and someone who loved the tiny yard, and planted locus trees, lilacs, iris, and primroses.

The miners left deep rock-lined dugouts, now caved in and weathering away, offering up the usual and customary offal of life in the camps: bottles, metal findings of all varieties, ash and bones.

Chinese immigrants contributed opium bottles, round coins with square holes in the centers, and broken ceramic rice bowls; mint green and hand-painted with flowers and birds, blue calligraphic trademarks stamped on the bottoms. Now and then, I find smooth flat-bottomed ovular objects in either black or white. I am told these were either game pieces or button bases. As buttons, they would have been wrapped in fabric, affixed with a shank.

It seems unlikely that any of the residents of Juxtaposie were carpenters. Not a single corner of the house is built to square, and most "improvements" have obviously been the work of unskilled persons doing their best to create a home in the little house on Cherry Street.

Tiny as it is, the house is filled with life and personality, and constantly flowing bright energy. The next time your path brings you to Cherry Creek, I invite you to stop by the Cherry Street Gallery and get acquainted with the ghosts and me.

Scanned from the book "Deep Enough" by Frank Crampton,
The little house that is now the Cherry Street Gallery is on the right side of the photo.

* With all due respect to Stephen King -- According to mining tradition, Tommyknockers are the "little men" that warn miners of impending cave-ins by tossing down pebbles to alert them. They are not malicious or evil.

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