The Huntington Museum in San Marino, CA, close to Pasadena, has undergone major renovations during the past year. The original Huntington Mansion has been updated to more closely match the rest of the newer buildings.

It’s obvious that whoever controls the Huntington Library & Museum has decided on a policy of “out with the old and in the with the new”. The Mansion used to feel like a home that someone left open to visitors – like Arabella Huntington walked out one day and never came back.

It’s now undergone the famous “leveling” that Thomas Friedman wrote about in a socio-economic context. This place looks just like any other place. The danger that the leaders of the Huntington brain-trust were afraid of was that it would stand out for some reason and some group of people wouldn’t like it. The problem now is that it doesn’t stand out for any reason.

The Huntington was at one time, not long ago, akin to traveling back in time. You could literally pay the $15.00 fee (now $20.00) and walk for a few hours through another era, and more importantly another spiritual/intellectual/social echelon. For Arabella Huntington had pretensions to royalty – the train-baron Huntingtons were arguably part of America’s royalty – and she didn’t mind outfitting her home and grounds in that manner.

Not unlike walking the grounds of certain Spanish and French palaces The Huntington was a place where ghosts of a by-gone era roamed and if you had the right eyes that day you might catch one of them walking the grounds.

Although not entirely the right era, as you walked the halls of the original Huntington Mansion you could almost hear someone playing Chopin’s Nocturnes in some far-off room. The air was heavy, the air-conditioning didn’t work very well. A musty smell pervaded the senses and yet upon entering it was hard to ignore the spirit still in the architecture, a loving decay had set in, Arabella was still there.

Now though it’s been stucco-ed to death on the outside and re-modeled, exorcised and safely re-packaged on the inside. What was the need? Basically some fag consultant (by fag I mean what a gay man would call another gay man he didn’t like just as a straight-man would be called an asshole) or pompous New York corporate museum type (meaning someone who says things like “I want to turn the museum world into something profitable – we shouldn’t have to run at a deficit year after year!”) took a walk through that old, beautiful, dying Mansion and had one thought, “Gross.”

They then took it upon themselves to bring the masses to the Huntington. Perhaps attendance had been waning at the time. Whatever the reason was they essentially killed what had once been a beautiful example of what the world had once been – a place you could go and literally feel what it had been like to live in that era, an era when the opulence that the Huntington’s possessed was not like what we experience today. It brought about a different reality. It was an opulence that aspired to greatness – great books, great gardens, great artists – arrogance played a part to be sure, but instead of being content with having the best and most of it they attempted to go beyond.

It’s easy to despise the rich but I find it difficult to despise the Huntingtons, particularly Arabella. She loved beauty.

The rich of today are of course a different story. There is little support of the arts and of intellect, of a true searching for something higher and truer than what is happening right here right now this moment. Yeah, they can afford the world’s most expensive car but what does that have to do with actual life? Arabella seemed to desire something more and actively searched for it.

There is still one spot left on the Huntington grounds that evokes that feeling of what it used to be like to go there before they – whoever they end up being – decided to, probably unknowingly (forgive them, they know not what they do), destroy the spirit of one of the last vestiges of the old America. I won’t disclose where that spot is but suffice it to say that if you find it there will be no one else around. They don’t advertise it. I’m sure they’re trying to figure out how to tear it down or turn it into another cheap attraction like their brand-new supposed “arboretum” that is really just another cheap version of a “science-center” type attraction.

It is a location with hallowed phrases etched in to old decaying marble, a treelined walk through a rusted, bent gate, and a feeling that begins to run up your spine – that someone is there – someone is watching – reaching out a hand – and weeping, hoping and praying that you take it.