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Show Take It From The Top The Club ceiline You look up to notice a lamp fixture, or sky-light, or a staircase and your eye lands on a rosette or a brick or a polished eam and suddently your whole world turns upside down. Ceilings in Park City offer a reminder of a time of guilded opulence, when more and fussier were the dictates of decour. Stamp iron, arched brick, and polished oak are just some of the textures that were used to create the air of elegance in the late 1880s. With the advent of the railroads, technology created art forms. New materials and the hy .drolic stamping process pro-cess helped to usher in the widespread use of stamped iron ceilings. Sudden ly the look of expensive elegant plaster was available to the masses in the form of metal ceilings. And in Park City the ceilings served a dual purpose; pur-pose; not only were they visually appealing but the metal was thought to serve as a fire stop between floors. One of the oldest metal ceilings in Park City is located in The Club on Main Street. Here, several different differ-ent patterns were pieced together to form the intricate design. With old ceilings come old stories and one can only imagine the tales the old metal must guard. The Club is the oldest bar in town, having been re-built shortly after the fire of 1898. The upstairs once housed gambling gam-bling and prostitution, and the downstairs was rumored to be a favorite spot of Butch Cassidy. It's only been recently that women have been allowed in. For years when a local character named "Heinie" owned the building, it was a stand-up bar with no stools and no women. And if you hadn't found your way to the door by closing time, you were locked in till morning when Heinie got his paper. One can only imagine the late night stories those ceilings heard. Another pressed metal ceiling of ornate design is located in Day's Market. This building has housed a v. - ,m , '.ret' ' yrmn-tf srVi,to jewelry shop and the old Golden Rule Variety Store before it became a market for Safeway and then Days. Thp rprpnt revival nf tht m,immf-Kmmm - .'. 2 fcW(iJK (Sa'',!' fiigmfi' My" t -mm-.m J ' f t "ifi! tea s swfew ,w "w-f )istiwf t0mt I r H " " - HmMMUaNHUlt J t h,ii.,.iiiii ii iir fi -- - - mniMnilM- .,...,-... , ...... during re-modeling in Park City. Dolly Makoff discovered discover-ed the wonderful wood beams in what is now the Inside Story, but at one time was Dolly's Bookstore. For years this old building was a mortuary and in fact the wood box there is actually an old embalming fluid case. In recent years Victorian architecture has again come into vogue. All over the country, stained glass and ginger-bread trim have returned re-turned to a place of prominence. With them, has returned the use of metal ceilings as a decorative covering. The Barney Brainum-Shanker Steel Company Com-pany of Glendale, New York has been in business since 1 9 1 2 . According to an article in the July 1979 issue of "Americana" Magazine, the company "stamps out 18 ceiling-plate styles, six filler plates and 10 cornices out of 30-gauge tin plate." So for those do-it-yourselfers, all you need is an instruction sheet and a second pair of hands to recreate a look and a feeling of a bygone era. The Elks building, Rosie's Liquor Store, the old Washington Wash-ington School; there are dozens of fascinating ceilings and remains of ceilings all over Park City. Start looking up in some of your favorite buildings, you may discover they hold a treasure you underlooked. Car 19 has brought a great deal of focus on its cast iron facade as well as its reproduction metal ceilings. The cast iron front was actually purchased out of a catalog from Evensville, Indiana. And according to Tom Hansen, intern historian histor-ian at the Utah State Historical Society it was fairly typical in old mining towns. He added, "At the time, these fronts and ceilings were about as rare as aluminium siding is today. It was a novelty, and, a lot of people could afford to copy the look. It wasn't until World War I that the trend really died down. Then you began to see less of any kind of ornate design, people were re-acting to the fussi-ness." fussi-ness." While not "fussy" or ornate, one could hardly write a story on ceilings without mentioning the arched brick of the Alamo. The Mission revival style of the building is unusual in itself. The building originally housed the Utah Telephone and Telegraph Co., an early threat to Mountain Bell. For years a plaster ceiling covered the brick hiding the rare ceiling underneath. A number of unusual ceilings have been discovered discover-ed underneath false ceilings Alamo ceiling |
