Hidden Hall

I had to look twice to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me.

I was sitting at a traffic light in the center of a small Delaware town. The road I was on was not one I traveled frequently so while waiting for the light to change I was taking in the scenery. Houses, old but well maintained, stood shoulder to shoulder on my right. Diagonally across the intersection was a water tower tall enough to have served as a NASA observatory, and directly beneath the water tower was the town hall.

And that's when I did the double take. Because while the facade of the town hall was one and a half stories high and a quarter of a block long, the town hall itself was - a storage shed?

Sure enough. The front of the town hall was a sham.

I started thinking about documentaries I had seen about the making of western movies. Those documentaries had revealed the buildings along the Main Streets in the cinema desert towns were nothing but front walls propped up by angled bracing.

The true town hall I had just discovered hiding behind the false facade was a squat building little bigger than the storage sheds in some of my neighbor's yards. I felt sorry for the one or two folks (because surely there wasn't room for more than two desks) who sat in the shed cooled by a single air conditioner dangling out of the single true window.

The traffic light turned green and I continued on my way - but not before wondering if those carefully maintained homes I had been appreciating were anything more than a movie set.