The Youth Music Scene
Out on Hiway #7, there’s a turnoff just east of the Muskrat bridge. Behind a thick hedgerow you can just see the bowed roof of a former municipal maintenance garage. Welcome to the Yellow Brick Roadhouse, site of Agincourt’s youth music scene. My last visit was a few years ago to experience He-She and the Screamers, passing through on their way to Council Bluffs. Bet I was the eldest person in the room.
And what a room it is. Bowstring trusses span the whole of it, open above their bottom chord and showing the wood rafters and plank above. That probably helps the acoustics — not that He-She needed the resonance of a Stradivarius to be heard in the nether reaches.
The city “abandoned” the building in the ’70s for a site near the new high school. It sat vacant a few years until the Youth Council formed (a bit late) after the turmoil of the Sixties. Hereabouts, we say, “In Agincourt, the Sixties didn’t happen until the Seventies.” There’s a time warp that still holds true, though the gap lessens each year. As municipal property with a new purpose which was a municipal agency, title transfer required nothing more than a city council vote: 4-to-1, and I’ll bet you can name the “No” voter. He resigned a couple years later and moved out to Nimby, to be in “better company”. Since then, with a now-peeling coat of paint and leaking crank-case stains showing where the snowplow used to park, it’s housed any number of needs, now for the Under Eighteens — well out of acoustic range from the nearest residential neighborhood.
You might know this would turn into a lesson in structure, though, the bowstring truss being one of the more graceful ways to span a wide berth. It consists basically of a bottom chord, parallel with the floor below, and a quintessentially arched chord (and a bunch of connecting pieces between) which, when you rotate it 90-degrees looks remarkably like the longbows that won the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. [Not incidentally, it can be installed upside down, which tends to create an uncomfortable compression on the human psyche.] There’s another equally graceful example not a thousand yard east of the Roadhouse: the old Hiway #7 bridge, now serving as part of the hike-bike trail system between Forth Dodge and Omaha. So that neighborhood has a respectable population nearly 24/7.
Sorry to have been away from the keyboard for so long. The rhythms of retirement haven’t quite settled yet but i feel the urge to write my way to the “dirt nap”.