The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [39]
You had to be careful when you did this because the theatre manager employed vicious usherettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn’t been born into Hitler’s Germany, who patrolled the aisles with high-powered flash-lights looking for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times during the film their darting lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing position with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before being turned over to the police for a long period of mental readjustment in a reform school. Those were the days! You cannot tell me that some suburban multiplex with shoe-box theatres and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and community spirit of a cavernous downtown movie-house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet, but ours could well be the last generation for which movie-going has anything like a sense of magic.
On this sobering thought I strolled to Water Street, on the Savannah River, where there was a new riverside walk. The river itself was dark and smelly and on the South Carolina side opposite there was nothing to look at but down-at-heel warehouses and, further downriver, factories dispensing billows of smoke. But the old cotton warehouses overlooking the river on the Savannah side were splendid. They had been restored without being over-gentrified. They contained boutiques and oyster bars on the ground floor, but the upper floors were left a tad shabby, giving them that requisite raffish air I had been looking for since Hannibal. Some of the shops were just a bit twee, I must admit. One of them was called The Cutest Little Shop in Town, which made me want to have the Quickest Little Puke in the County. A sign on the door said ‘Absotively, posilutely no food or drink in shop.’ I sank to my knees and thanked God that I had never had to meet the proprietor. The shop was closed so I wasn’t able to go inside and see what was so cute about it.
Towards the end of the street stood a big new Hyatt Regency hotel, an instantly depressing sight. Massive and made of shaped concrete, it was from the Fuck You school of architecture so favoured by the big American hotel chains. There was nothing about it in scale or appearance even remotely sympathetic to the old buildings around it. It just said, ‘Fuck you, Savannah.’ The city is particularly ill-favoured in this respect. Every few blocks you come up against some discordant slab – the De Soto Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Best Western Riverfront, all about as appealing as spittle on a johnny cake, as they say in Georgia. Actually, they don’t say anything of the sort in Georgia. I just made it up. But it has a nice Southern ring to it, don’t you think? I was