wichplace

2709 East 25th Street, Minneapolis. A low building behind an ivy wall. No sign on it. From the street, nothing marks the place.

Before it held a room that absorbs 99.99% of sound, it was Sound 80, the first multi-track digital recording studio. Bob Dylan cut part of Blood on the Tracks there in 1974. Prince made his first recordings there in 1977. Lipps Inc cut Funkytown there in 1980.

In 1990 Orfield Laboratories bought the building and moved in an anechoic chamber. Guinness certified it the quietest place on earth three times, 2004, 2012, 2021. -24.9 dBA. Stand in it long enough and you start hearing your own body.

Same address. One room built to catch every note, another built to swallow every sound. Thirty years apart.

Sources: public records, including Wikipedia and the institutions' own sites (Orfield Laboratories, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, Timberline Lodge, Major League Baseball, the U.S. Census Bureau).

The Overlook Hotel doesn't exist. But the outside of it does.

The exterior shots of Kubrick's 1980 film are Timberline Lodge, a four-story stone-and-timber hotel at 6,000 feet on Mount Hood, Oregon. The interior was a London soundstage. The lodge is only a face.

The face is a Depression-era WPA project, built 1936 to 1938 by hand from local volcanic rock and heavy timber. The WPA spent $695,730, and 80 percent went to labor: skilled tradesmen 90 cents an hour, unskilled 55. Roosevelt dedicated it on September 28, 1937, as a monument to the skill and faithful performance of workers. National Historic Landmark since 1977. Still a working ski lodge.

The part I keep turning over: in King's novel the haunted room is 217. Management asked Kubrick not to use that number, afraid guests would refuse a room a horror movie had cursed. He agreed, and invented 237.

It backfired. 217 is now the room guests ask for by name.

So the real hotel asked out of the story, became its most recognizable face, and its fake number became advertising for the exact room it meant to protect.

I collect these: real places carrying a fiction they never asked for. If you know one, tell me which.

Sources: Wikipedia (Timberline Lodge); timberlinelodge.com; reporting on the 217/237 room-number swap.