The message of the archway

OK, so the New York City subway love story didn’t work out. About a year ago, a guy named Patrick Moberg spotted Camille Hayton, an aspiring actress from Melbourne, Australia (a brunette, I must add), across a crowded subway car and fell instantly, madly in love with her. Forty-eight hours and a million phone calls later, Patrick identified his true love, thanks to a friend of hers who had stumbled across his nygirlofmydreams.com blogsite/desperate search.

Patrick and Camille dated for maybe two months and now it’s over, according to an article in The New York Times cheekily titled “New York Subway Romance Hits End of the Line.” Still, I’m a believer. Anything can happen on a train.

In a seemingly unrelated anecdote, I remember visiting England for the first time when I was a child. My parents dragged three of their children to every cathedral, museum and author’s birthplace around the British Isles, including Coventry Cathedral in West Midlands, England. There my father stood under the archway that connects the ruins of the original structure to its massive, modern reconstruction. He gazed back and forth from the scorched and skeletal remains of the 13th-century monument, to the soaring heights of the new building. Seems like he stood there forever.

The old cathedral was nearly destroyed during the Coventry blitz of Nov. 14, 1940, conducted by the German Luftwaffe. Today only the spire and outer wall of the sanctuary remain, and for my father, who escaped from Nazi Germany himself, along with most of his family, the place represented a powerful metaphor. As we stood beside him, his American children, under the redemptive, regenerating reach of stone between the old and the new, between death and rebirth, I watched the look of wonder on his face, and instinctively I understood the message of the archway.  

The new cathedral was consecrated on May 25, 1962. According to official church history, “The ruins remain hallowed ground and together the two create one living cathedral … Not as an act of defiance, but rather a sign of faith, trust and hope for the future of the world.”

We rode a few trains that summer, exhilarating experiences for my siblings and me, who stuck our heads out the windows and mooed at the cows and howled at the moon as we raced across the English countryside. Mostly we traveled by car, though, in a tiny Euro-version of an automobile that looked to us like a toy. We had to replace the hubcaps when my father returned that vehicle at the end of our sojourn because he consistently — and to our peril — overcompensated for the left/right side-of-the-road thing by driving into the curb of every city street we traversed.

Anyway, I’ve never forgotten that experience at Coventry Cathedral. I feel a similar sentiment wash over me when I look at renovated American buildings, like the Mercado buildings in Tucson. And like the Del Mar train station here in Pasadena. The original station was built by hotelier Edward C.

Webster, in 1886. Completely rebuilt in 1935, the depot served as a stop for passengers traveling between Chicago and Los Angeles. The present transit-oriented development was completed in 2006.

The connecting archway at Del Mar is implied rather than built out of bricks and mortar, but the relationship between old and new still resonates. Designed, like the Mercado, by Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists, the project adheres to the Secretary of Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historical Properties, a set of guidelines that “promotes responsible preservation practices that help protect our nation’s irreplaceable cultural resources.” Anyone who has renovated an historic home will recognize the Standards.

You can live, shop, eat, stroll and sunbathe at the Del Mar station. You can make a new friend while sipping morning coffee on a shaded patio. You can walk up to Colorado Boulevard for cocktails at dusk. You can ride your bike just about anywhere. Best of all, you can step onto the light rail, the Gold Line, almost anytime of day, and ride all the way to Union Station and El Pueblo, where Los Angeles began. And you might even fall in love along the way.

Joanna Dehn Beresford is a former teacher, nanny, actress, rock star, farm girl, waitress and clerk. She can be reached at truewrite@yahoo.com.