Auld lang Syne to downtown Macon’s grand hotel

A majestic tree once lived across the street from us. It was an oak, but it might as well have been a redwood. It was ancient and tall, our version of a Southern Sequoyah. A neighbor, whose father has a background in forestry, estimated it had been around for at least 300 birthday parties. 

It was our signature tree. It stood guard over our neighborhood. If all that pulp had been turned into paper, a thousand stories could have been written.

Sadly, the march of time took its toll. Ice storms. High winds. Scorching summers. We may have been in denial, but the tree was in distress.

 During the Mother’s Day tornado in 2008, a giant limb broke off and fell across the tops of two houses. Seven years later, most of the rest of the tree came crashing down. It was a Sunday morning. There was a gentle breeze. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

 It just fell.

For years, every time I rode down our street, I couldn’t believe it was gone. It left a void in the canopy, an empty seat at the table. 

I expect I will feel the same way about the Hilton Hotel. It has been part of the city’s brick-and-mortar landscape since it opened in 1970. It’s hard to imagine how much its absence will change the complexion of our downtown skyline.

Macon will ring in the new year with a bang on Jan. 1 when the old hotel is imploded at 9 a.m. Six decades of memories will be reduced to a pile of rubble. 

Can you imagine waking up with a hangover on New Year’s morning, then driving down Riverside for a cup of coffee at the Krystal or Waffle House and you did not get the memo? 

Can you imagine coming down the hill at Gray Highway or traveling on I-16 near Coliseum Drive, and suddenly witnessing a 16-story building going down in a heap? 

Yes, it would be quite startling. You might leave a few brown spots … and wonder if Putin had invaded the city and rolled down Walnut Street in a Russian tank.

Macon is not a skyscraper town. When I moved here in 1978, there were only a trio of tall buildings – all within a couple of blocks of each other. 

There was the 12-story First Liberty (now BB&T), the 15-story Charter Medical (now the Fickling Building) and the 16-story Hilton. 

No nose-bleed towers have gone up in the past 50 years.  There are still three. Soon, there will be only two.

The Hilton has been through more name changes than the Medical Center. It later became known as the Radisson, then the Crowne Plaza and finally the Ramada. It may have had all those other names on its business card but many of us still catch ourselves calling it by its maiden name.

After the last guest checked out years ago, it sat empty for more than a decade. Every time it changed hands, no one could quite figure out what to do with it. The city bought it and determined it was too cost-prohibitive to fix.   

Euthanasia.  A mercy killing. Put it out of its misery.

Since the announcement, folks have been taking sentimental journeys down First Street, where the Hilton, with its parking garage and retail space, stretches an entire city block.

I cannot think of another building in Macon – even those that have stood for centuries – that has had as much history walk through its doors. It was built on the same patch of land that was once the site of Macon’s first schoolhouse in 1825.

For more than 40 years,  celebrities, politicians, actors and musicians filled its guest rooms, hallways, elevators, lobby, ballrooms, restaurant and bar.

Elvis Presley stayed in the penthouse suite before his concert at the Macon Coliseum in June 1977. Two months later, the King was dead. Acclaimed film director John Huston, winner of two Academy Awards, was a Hilton guest along with the movie cast of “Wise Blood,’’ which was filmed in Macon. Another director, Steven Spielberg, checked into the Hilton during the time he had an interest in directing “Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars,’’ another movie made in Macon. (Building on the success of “Jaws,’’ he opted instead to take on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”)

  President Ronald Reagan once made an appearance at the Hilton. Game show host Bob Barker came on down, too. So did Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes’’ fame. I once interviewed a man who met Bob Hope at the Hilton bar after Hope’s plane was forced to land in Macon because of bad weather. When George Lindsey, who played Goober on “The Andy Griffith Show,’’ was a Hilton guest, he walked a block down Walnut to get a haircut at Sheftall’s Barber Shop.  

A 12-year-old Michael Jackson stayed at the Hilton while touring with the “Jackson Five.’’ The group had come to Macon in August 1971 for a concert. It seemed a parade of high-profile musicians was always passing through – from James Brown to Prince, Kiss, Johnny Cash and Kenny Rogers. 

And that’s just to name a few. Who knows what became of all those guest registries and bar tabs? 

The old-timers may remember when Playboy magazine ranked   Baptist-affiliated Mercer University as one of its “Top Ten Party Schools” in 1987. Everyone thought it might be a joke, but the editors showed up to interview local college students in a suite at the Hilton for the opportunity to pose nude for the magazine. (Little old ladies in Sunday Schools across Macon have never been the same.)

Of course, the Hilton was much, much more than the celebrities who checked into rooms with a star on the door. It was a point of local pride for citizens who could boast about having a grand hotel with revolving doors and an impressive lobby … even if they never once lay down their heads on a 300-thread-count pillow on the fourth floor. 

  There was a time when the Hilton boasted two restaurants and a bar, gift shop, travel agency and a Delta Airline ticket office. It hosted conventions, conferences, banquets, proms, civic club meetings, graduation parties, wedding receptions and retirement roasts. Business transactions were made there. Sunday brunches were a tradition for many families.

Like others, I have a personal history with the Hilton. When I worked at The Macon Telegraph, our offices were located three blocks away at 120 Broadway. After I was promoted to a room with a view at the front of the building, the Hilton was the most dominant feature outside my window. 

Writers have a reputation for staring out windows for inspiration, and I would spend hours reaching for thoughts and words as I watched the morning sun reflected on the windows along the Hilton’s east side. It was like having a rear-view mirror for every sunrise across the river. 

I met out-of-town guests for interviews in the lobby. I had a power lunch with Coach Billy Henderson and Eddie Battle at the restaurant and shook hands on a book deal to write Henderson’s biography. I was asked to speak at banquets and civic club meetings in the ballrooms on the first floor.

I once wrote a story on Sarah Fleming when she was the second-longest tenured employee there. She had worked at the 297-room hotel since 1975. Miss Sarah had clocked in just about everywhere – from housekeeping to the kitchen and the laundry room. In 1993, they put her in charge of the employee break room in the basement, where she ran a tiny cafe and served the sweetest tea this side of the Mason-Dixon. It was legendary.

My most unforgettable – and terrifying – memory came on a September afternoon in 1997. I was doing a story on high-rise window washers, and a newspaper photographer and I rode the elevator to the hotel roof (by then it was the Crowne Plaza) with some employees of a local window washing company.

With the exception of nearby church steeples, we were at the highest point downtown. I was deathly afraid of heights, so watching those guys dangle 150 feet above the ground, suspended with ropes like Spidermen, turned my legs to jelly. I had to go to the center of the roof and sit down. For years, whenever I would cast a glance at the top of that roof from a distance, my stomach would get queasy.

  I’m sure the New Year’s Day implosion will attract a crowd of the curious and sentimental. Perhaps the city should make it a ticketed event. They could sell souvenir chunks of concrete and use the profits to give us a break on our property taxes. 

For weeks, the square block around the hotel has been a hard-hat zone. Workers have been chipping and chiseling away, taking out windows, knocking down walls and dismantling wiring and plumbing. The interior has been hollowed out.

An empty shell won’t be as difficult to bring down. Sure, there will be a rumble and a tumble. The air will be heavy with dust and smoke. But don’t expect the apocalypse. 

The event could be spectacular. Or it could go out with a whimper. It may be a non-event, like the solar eclipse of 2017.

Either way, we soon are going to look around, and it will no longer be with us.

Auld lang syne.