Sunday Riposo (a weekly series)
WOW, JUST LET IT GET OLD
The Kennedy Center is closed. The fences went up and now the administration is telling a federal judge the building may have to come down. Structurally unsound, they say. Embarrassing to the nation's capital. The President was photographed on Air Force One looking over a poster that read "Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED."
It opened in 1971. Fifty five years old, and already we're talking about it like it’s a 2014 Dodge Durango which I still drive.
It isn't the only one. The White House East Wing is gone, knocked down to make room for a ballroom.
And in the NFL, a stadium is considered old at twenty five. Atlanta's Georgia Dome opened in 1992 and was imploded in 2017, replaced by Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a shinier building with more luxury suites.
I don't have to look far for another example. In Tampa, where I grew up, Raymond James Stadium opened in 1998. It's 28 years old, and it’s being called old. The Bucs want about a billion dollars to renovate it, with sun shades (much needed), more seating, bars and restaurants, and they'd like the public to cover most of the bill.
Here's the part that gets me. Back in 1995, the team's new owner said the old Tampa Stadium “The Sombrero” was no longer good enough and pushed for a new one. That stadium was 28 years old too. Same age, same speech, just a generation later.
Every time, the reason sounds practical. Outdated. Deteriorating. Too expensive to fix.
But follow the money and the story gets simpler. Tampa does not have an upcoming Super Bowl specifically because the NFL considers Raymond James stadium outdated. It needs to be updated with new contracts, new naming rights, new suites to sell, new seat licenses to offer. History doesn't show up on a balance sheet, so history loses.
Here in Sicily, the wow comes from entering the building. The centuries of people who stood in that exact spot and looked up and around the same way.
The Greek theater in Taormina has stood since the third century BC, and it still hosts concerts under the stars (Where I saw sting) with Etna smoking in the background. In Syracuse, they still stage the ancient tragedies every summer in a theater that has been there for about twenty five centuries. In Palermo, the Teatro Massimo, begun in 1875, still fills its seats for opera. Nobody here calls these places outdated. They call them what they are, theaters.
Walk into the Cowboys' stadium in Dallas or SoFi in Los Angeles and you get a wow too, and I'll be honest, it's a real one. The scale, the giant video boards, the roar of 80,000 - 100,000 people. But it's a different wow. It's built to impress you right now, today. It's the wow of what money can do. The stadium wow will fade, because in twenty five years someone will build a bigger one and call this one outdated. Ask Tampa.
Every year a place like Taormina stands, it gets harder to walk in without stopping. One wow is about the building. The other is about time. And you can't buy time. You can only keep it.
I get it. The United States is only 250 years old. Our history is still being written. We don't have two thousand year old theaters because we haven't had two thousand years. That's exactly why this matters. A country cannot grow a history if its leaders keep tearing out the roots every few decades.
The Kennedy Center could be our Teatro Massimo someday. A stadium could become a cathedral of sport the way Fenway Park and Wrigley Field have become. But wow, just let them get old.
A presto! Live your pawfect life.
Robert & Bolt
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