1.
My daughter, Angelica, wanted to see the House on the Rock, a tourist attraction near Dodgeville, Wisconsin. So we went there.
2.
Many years ago, I saw a sign in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a big river town just across the Mississippi from Minnesota. The sign was blue and white, without images, and featured a single word “KABBALISTICAL!” Smaller letters, in a curious alchemical script, said that the House on the Rock was at Dodgeville,Wisconsin. I had no idea how this strange word (if it was a word) could apply to tourist attraction in rural Wisconsin.
3.
I first heard rumors about The House on the Rock when I was a child. Many working class Polish Catholics lived in my neighborhood in the suburbs of St. Paul. The kids reported that their parents had taken them to Dickeyville, Iowa to see the famous grotto built there by an eccentric priest. Returning to the Cities, they stopped at the House on the Rock and, then, a show-cave in Wisconsin about an hour away from where we lived. When I asked the neighbor kids about the House on the Rock, they told me that it was a house built on a rock and filled with strange stuff.
4.
The House on the Rock is not to be confused with the Rock in the House, an attraction located in Fountain City, Wisconsin. For a couple dollars, you can walk into a rather small, humble home, familiar to me as the sort of place where I was raised as a child. In the middle of a bedroom, there is a massive boulder about the size of an old VW Beetle. In the corner of the room, there is an old TV set with rabbit-ears antenna and a wooden chest-of-drawers supporting a mirror. The ceiling is ripped open and the rock stands upright like a dolmen embedded in the earth. The boulder makes a curious contrast to the home’s domesticity – there is old carpet on the floors, wall paper, a kitchen with some appliances, another TV facing a couch in the living room, subdued wallpaper. (It looks like a painting by Rene Magritte, a shocking collision between a dwelling and raw nature – the imposing, invasive stone has a sort of serene dignity that the little cottage could never achieve.)
5.
Memory plays tricks. One of my motives for returning the House on the Rock, which I have visited on two previous occasions, was to see how my recollections of the place, my mental map, as it were, of the attraction differs from reality. The last time I explored the House of the Rock was about fifteen years ago. I think I went there ten years before that as well. Setting out for that destination, I had vague memories of the small dark rooms in the house and, then, the cavernous and colossal spaces somewhere beneath the building on the cliff, everything hidden from view so that the place seemed to be all interior with no exterior at all, a maw in which you were swallowed so that you groped through darkness fitfully lit by red lamps and ornate chandeliers. I remember the Rock in the House as documenting a disaster that occurred in the eerie depths of my childhood. In fact, the boulder toppled off the Mississippi River bluff during the spring thaw in April of 1995 when I was 41 years old. Somehow, it seems that I have furnished the house into which the 51 ton boulder fell with the trappings of my childhood home, the same sort of davenport and carpet and kitchen, the same clunky square TVs with the rabbit ears antenna. And, based on pictures, I misremembered the shape of the rock, putting one of Magritte’s ovoid and rough-hewn eggs amidst the wreckage when the actual boulder was upright and taller than a man, like stone lance-point fallen from the skies.
6.
Calamity likes to revisit its venues. In 1901, a boulder dropped off the bluff and bounded down the sheer slope to kill a woman sleeping in bed next to her blind husband. This catastrophe happened, it is said, on the exact spot where the giant stone fell in 1995. The woman was crushed to death; her husband wasn’t injured at all.
7.
Advertisements for the House on the Rock are written in an ornate, if legible script, with curling scimitar-shaped serifs and the “h” characters extending comet tails below the line of the inscription. The sign for the Rock in the House aped this calligraphy. But, dear reader, you won’t be able to check on any of this. COVID closed the Rock in the House in 2022, although the structure, considerably decayed, still exists today. No one will accost you if you park your car on one of the terraces streets in Fountain City, a place clinging precariously to the river bluffs, and walk around the structure to see the standing stone embedded in what looks like a crumbling lean-to. The stone will remain, stoic and indifferent, long after the home that it invaded has vanished.
8.
Google Maps claims that the House on the Rock is (depending on the route) three hours and 20 minutes or three hours and 25 minutes drive from where I live in Austin, Minnesota. But, with a stop for fuel and fast food, the route will require about four-hours drive-time.
9.
Angelica and I left after work on Friday, departing town at five-o’clock in a humid and warm haze of particulate smoke blown down from wild-fires raging in Canada. We took the short route (five minutes less than the long way) and reached Dodgeville, where we booked a room at the Don Q Inn, at a little after nine p.m. The short route is all two-lane black top and angles across northwest Iowa to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin and, then, over the ridges of the Driftless area to Dodgeville.
10.
We left the freeway and drove a crooked path to the tiny town of Elkton, then, followed more country roads to reach Adams. Both of these villages are well-known to me – I had a client with horrific personal injuries in Elkton (to me the town reeks of carbolic acid, disinfectant, rotting bandages) and my law office operated a branch for forty years in Adams. (I was strangely disheartened to see that our sign is no longer displayed on the little glass-walled annex to the electrical contracting company that we occupied for so many years – we didn’t have any lawbooks there and no computer terminal; by and large, we used the place for signing Wills, transfer-on-death deeds, and corporate documents. Catholic Social Services now has its shingle where our sign was once located.) The route to Adams by backroads was so unfamiliar to me that I didn’t recognize the town when we came off the prairie into its quiet and deserted streets. Already, a sense of disorientation was oppressing me. I was driving by a display on my phone that showed only a thousand yards or so of the highway ahead of me, and, so I didn’t have any map-sense of direction or where we were located. The longer I drove, the greater a sense of estrangement and desolation afflicted me.
11.
I had driven to Adams a hundred times, perhaps, and so I knew the main road to the village very well and, of course, could mark the places where there had been fatal or injurious accidents, but to the south and east of that town, things became markedly more unfamiliar – I’ve been on these roads only three or four times a year, if that often, and, so, everything looked strange to me. I recalled open prairie and wild flowers between Adams and Leroy on the Minnesota border, but, over the years, the shelter belts in this part of the State have grown wild and reclaimed much of the grasslands and so shaggy, dense woods lined the highway and the terrain had something of the aspect of a jungle, woods overflowing with green all dark and shadowy and numerous little sloughs and creeks all tributary to the Cedar River that flows toward the Mississippi in northern Iowa.
12.
At this time of the year, the trees and brush seem to have too many leaves, a surfeit of foliage that drags down the branches and twists them into the leaf-litter. Every twig is heavily laden with leaves and the leaves seem to have sprouted leaves and there are no clearings, no gaps in the walls of forest and, then, when you encounter open country, the terrain is interspersed with shaggy sentinel trees also immensely burdened with their freight of foliage. The marshes are full of cattails with fat fibrous tumors on their tips and you can see deer lurking in the brush. At the Iowa border, there’s a wayside rest with waste bins overflowing with wine bottles and beer cans and glass crunchy underfoot. A sign says that this land was once covered with bur oaks – that is, a bur oak savannah. And, by the evidence visible today, the bur oaks have returned and the ancestral forest has re-established itself.
13.
Across the border is Lime Springs, Iowa and small hamlet where something terrible has occurred on Main Street. The road is blocked by several cop cars with blazing blue lights that flash in a menacing way. Already, Iowa is off-limits, blocked at the border by a police presence, and the detour goes out over the hazy plain, running along ridges, and, then, rejoins the main route and, from there, its about 100 miles to Prairie du Chien, a long, slow way obstructed by pickups with old men gawking at the crops and dawdling across the prairie, winding roads where there is no place to pass, and, then, high tilted ridges riding above seas of green filling up the ravines. There are no towns at all along the route, something that alarms me a little. I didn’t recall Northwest Iowa to be so empty of human habitation, such a wilderness, in fact, where it seems that everything is reverting to woodland. I plan to stop in Decorah, but the city is hidden somewhere among ramparts of bluffs and trout streams glistening in shadowy gorges and, then, before I know it, the route is out on the rolling prairie again, passing cemeteries of rose-colored granite stones, denuded when the trees died twenty years ago, little plantations of polished rock at the road side, and, in the distance, under fissures in the dimming sky, old churches vainly lifting their steeples to an empty heaven. A sense of desperation begins to oppress me. How far does this empty zone extend? When will I reach something like a real town with fast food joints, Kwik Trips for gas, some place to go to the bathroom?
14.
The road is on a naked ridge. A sign points to the Yellow River State Forest and I can see the valleys all crumpled up together like the troughs of green waves topping green waves and I know that there is nothing down there, no towns, scarcely any roads, a hot steamy jungle slit by turbulent rivers running under pinnacles of eroded rock. Then, the road narrows and swoops down a ravine, passing the Effigy Mounds National Monument, and, then, tracking along the lagoons of the Mississippi where islands all pimpled with Indian burial mounds occupy the wetlands between river channels. The highway has to enter Marquette, a river town now revived by a floating casino, to access the high bridge over the river and, so, at last, there is a place to stop, use the toilet, and fuel up. Marquette is full of road closures and detours. The town occupies a notch in the bluffs with buildings rammed up against sheer green cliffs.
15.
Ancient Prairie du Chien is on the other side of the river, some decaying manor houses on the tangled river-bottom and a historic fort with crumbling field-rock walls and, then, a mile from the downtown, a strip along the flats where there are motels and big box retail places and some fast food joints. I see a place that particularly enchants me, “The Angus Club”, a typical Wisconsin road house, and, therefore, an excellent place to eat. I imagine the dark inside of the place (no windows visible from the parking lot) with shag carpet on the walls and a salad bar that is sixty feet long and buxom waitresses serving up watery whisky drinks full of ice and big trays of steak cooked rare and oozing blood all over the plates and it makes my mouth water to just see the place, the motorcycles and ornate pick-ups packed tightly together in the parking lot and the corvettes and other convertibles, some of them fire house red, gathered along side the building. But we don’t have time to stop at a sit-down restaurant of that sort and, so, have to wait our turn for burgers at the Culvers near where the main roads intersect.
16.
Now the sun is hanging limp in the sky, a tattered liver-colored disk, in the haze from the Canadian forest-fires. Shadows are lengthening and darkness has gathered in the trees filling the narrow valleys. Dodgeville rises on a hill where the trees have all been slaughtered, some horizontal streets among featureless buildings rising over empty intersections. The Don Q Inn is north of town on the highway aimed at some bluish ridges where the House on the Rock is located. The entrance to the Inn is marked by a huge military airplane brooding over a knoll that slips down to the long facade of the motel. There’s not one airplane, but rather another, and, then, another, the aircraft rotating around an axis with noses pointed at the motel and huge rotors on engines extended out over the prairie grass on the little hill, a fleet of planes apparently dropped down on this knoll. Cars and SUVs are parked along the motel’s front, a decorated shed, it seems, in the deepening gloom. At one end of motel, a church steeple hovers over the structure, chopped off at the base, it seems, either annexed to the building or right next to it. What does this mean? In the darkness, church steeple and plane seem hazy, improbable, as incongruous as 51 ton boulder in someone’s bedroom.
17.
The night clerk in the Don Q Inn is Asian and disfigured. His face is like a jigsaw that has been disarranged and, then, put together with a couple of pieces missing. The man’s jaw is twisted and his Indian accent is hard to interpret in any event and what comes out of his mouth don’t seem to be words, at least, on first hearing. The lobby of the motel is large and rustic, fading into darkness at its edges, a curious circle of gleaming chairs arranged around a black iron furnace, some kind of industrial vat, it seems, that dwarfs the seating around it. The disfigured clerk is on the phone. He ignores us for awhile. Some game boards for cribbage, although on a giant scale, are shoved into the corner of the room and there are some heaps of books by another hearth in the brick wall of the lodge lobby. The whole place seems vast, uncanny, empty despite the motorcycles and pickups and SUVs outside. Poorly photocopied newspaper articles are trapped under glass at the counter. The articles describe the Don Q Inn and its history. The corridors are broad and silent and the rooms are accessed through alcoves off the hallways. A brochure at the front desk describes a number of “Fantasuites” – there is an Arabian Nights room, a medieval room, a suite that is decorated like Noah’s Ark and another suite that seems to be a bedroom in an intergalactic starship. One suite is decorated in the style of the fifty’s root beer stand and the bed is shaped like a convertible from that era.
18.
Our room is not a Fantasuite. It’s spacious with an expanse of carpet marked like a globe with odd, indelible stains, vaguely sinister continents impressed on the floor The bathtub is stained as well and some tiles are loose and the water coming from the sink has a bitter, chemical taste as if it is processed and clarified sewage. There’s a forlorn “infinity mirror” by the door – that is, several catoptric boxes with small incandescent lights that reflect between mirrors to expand the space into an endless, vertiginous abyss. The room’s two beds are shoved against a wall across a big expanse of soiled carpet. A flat-screen TV is mounted on some sort of hutch that has its bare back turned to the door leading into the room – the TV and hutch are just marooned in the middle of the carpet. In the toilet, there’s a curious hatch installed in the wall. It’s hot in the room and the air is stagnant and the beds are serviceable, but not particularly comfortable. This is the sort of place in which it’s hard to fall asleep and the anxiety of the four hour drive from nowhere to nowhere is lingering in my imagination – so much of the country is uninhabited or abandoned and, although this thought should make me happy, I just feel depressed and tired and can’t sleep until, at last, I am asleep and dead to the world.
19.
I’m up early. The shower alternates between scalding and ice-cold. When I open the curtain on the room’s single window, I can see the big silver airplane parked on the hill outside. The illusion of two or three planes is refuted by this vista – it must have been mist that multiplied the plane when I drove into the parking lot last night. The big aircraft is east of the motel and enshrined in a blinding halo of solar radiance, the sun rising behind wings and fuselage and the smoke in the air diffusing its light into an overall hot-white glare.
20.
Breakfast, as the disfigured clerk, mumbled to us when we checked-in, is served from six to nine. There are some scrambled eggs and sausages in stainless steel bins next to a waffle-maker and coffee machine. On closer inspection, the strange swivel chairs around the black iron furnace are from barber-shops or hair salons, twenty of them arranged in a circle facing the fire although, I assume, the things can be spun on their columns bolted to the floor. In the corner of the lobby, an antique dentist’s chair with overhead stanchion and drill sits against the wall. The “spit bowl” is round and dark like a spittoon. Some peculiar, and lethal-looking, medical devices are in other corners, machines made to emit various kinds of rays and electrical discharges for therapeutic purposes. Up in the rafters, since this is Wisconsin, there are a couple of deer mounts.
21.
The plane on the knoll is open and you can climb some steps to enter the fuselage, a dark tunnel with corroding benches bolted to the walls. The floor is pierced by a hatch that drops down into a darker and more ruinous-looking tube below. The hatch looks pretty deadly to me, a metal pitfall with sharp edges and a vestigial iron ladder, nothing to fence-off the hole in the floor. At the front of the plane, banks of controls with switches and dials flank the console where the pilot once sat. One of the panes on the windows in the plane’s nose is broken. From the platform next to the aircraft, I can see that the motel is designed like an old farm barn that has been stretched like taffy across the brow of the hill. Sheet metal cupolas crown the building’s ridge-line at intervals and the mansard-roof is painted bright red. At one end of the structure, a church steeple is stabbed into the ground, it’s entrance padlocked and a little cast-iron balcony protruding from its belfry. Everything is invested in a glare of white light, as if the smoke particles in the air are all somehow mirrored.
22.
Angelica, perhaps, wisely is not interested in eating breakfast at the Don Q Inn and, so, after checking out, we drive back into Dodgeville to a McDonald’s. A middle-aged guy is pushing a mop by the restrooms and he asks us where we are from. “Austin, Minnesota,” Angelica says.
“Never heard of it,” he replies.
He asks where we are going and we tell him the House on the Rock.
“You will need to spend three or four hours going through there,” he says. “You want to get your money’s worth.”
He says that, although he has lived in Dodgeville all his life, he has never been to the House on the Rock. “Too pricey,” he says. He has never been to the Cave of the Mounds either, another well-known local tourist destination nearby, although he was once in its parking lot. “Too pricey,” he remarks again.
He says that he once brought shrimp scampi to a family reunion. Everyone else brought burgers or hot dogs, but he brought shrimp scampi.
He asks if we are going up to the Dells. “No,” I say, “we’ll go back home through La Crosse.”
The man with the mop says that he was in La Crosse once. “It’s pretty up there,” he says.
23.
The House on the Rock is only ten minutes away. In this part of Wisconsin, bland farmland with contoured crop land and dairy buildings, alternates with strips of impenetrable forest. The House on the Rock is located in the woods at the end of a curving access road. A peculiarity of the attraction is that the exterior of the House on the Rock is not visible from the adjacent woods – perhaps, the foliage is too dense – and the rock itself, apparently a half-acre of stone protruding above the forest also is concealed. Some aerial photographs from before the house’s construction show a fissured, incised lump of rock surrounded by trees. It may be that the heap of boulders was never really visible except when you stumbled upon it in the woods or from below it’s tilted rock-shelter face, a shallow nook where the outcropping rises out of the tangled brush. Deer hid there in cold weather and there were traces of old Indian campfires under the shallow rock arch. Of course, people always knew about outcropping (it was called “Deershelter Rock”) and a companion spire of rock a few yards away. Although a local farmer owned the woods, visitors came from as far as Madison to picnic under the rampart of stone and Alex Jordan, the man who built the House on the Rock, spent hours exploring the maze of pinnacles by climbing onto them. But here is the paradox – viewed from the gardens near the House on the Rock or from the access road or the parking lot or, even, a foot trail that leads to the base of the forty-five foot spire called Inspiration Point, no rock can be seen on these grounds and there is no house visible either. It’s all just a chattering, wind-twitching canopy of trees tightly interwoven together to block any perspective on the building.
24.
House-sized ceramic jugs mark the entrance to the property. The jugs have an alchemical shape; the vessels are pregnant and come to a point on their tops as if to exude some sort of distillate. Dragons and reptiles patrol the curved surfaces of the jugs – these forms, which also line the access road and sit next to the parking lot, are some sort of trademark for the attraction. They have the appearance of having been designed by M.C. Escher by way of Hieronymus Bosch.
A Japanese garden with arched “moon” bridges and ponds full of floating lily-pads wraps around a glass and steel pavilion, a structure set in a wooded glen that looks like an upscale office building. About a dozen people are milling around the door to the structure; the place opens at 9:00 am and we are a few minutes early.
The pavilion contains an exhibit of photographs and personal belongings owned by Alex Jordan, the man who created the House on the Rock. This is new since I came here last time. On previous occasions, the myriad questions that the attraction poses, including its basic purpose, were unanswered at the site. You had to drive to Spring Green to get a decent book about the place or pay an additional twenty bucks for a behind-the-scenes tour – there are enormous warehouses and shops hidden in the forest about a quarter-mile from the House. Twenty years ago, much of the history of the place was shrouded in mystery. Disclosure now seems the order of the day.
25.
The House on the Rock consists of three elements: there is the House itself with its curious architectural features that parody the esthetics of Frank Lloyd Wright, there are vast rooms that create ominous, even menacing environments, and, then, there are the collections – carousel horses, miniature circuses, Chinese antiques, scrimshaw, dueling pistols, carved religious statues, jewelry store display automatons, even, replicas of Queen Elizabeth’s crown jewels, to mention only a few categories of the objects on show. The House on the Rock, which is only a small part of the attraction, and the monstrous environments don’t arouse skepticism – they are what they seem to be. But the collections contain many peculiar items: for instance, in a showcase full of revolvers, there are pistols with two barrels, something that seems plausible, perhaps, but, then, also revolvers with eight or ten barrels encircling the trigger mechanism. In one case, you will see a prosthetic leg, an ugly plastic appendage with a niche at the thigh designed to conceal a derringer. Medieval armor occupies big displays where soldiers battle with one another and elephants entrapped in dense metal plating gore attacking troops.
Some of the suits of armor appear authentic, but most of them are studded with spikes and blades and have outlandish helmets. What is going on here?
In fact, the collections are almost entirely fake. Jordan acquired gewgaws used in the commercial displays from the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and, then, fused disparate elements to create chimeras. The guns with a half-dozen or more barrels, of course, never existed in any world other than the peculiar, shadowy realm of Jordan’s imagination. Like P.T. Barnum, Jordan didn’t disclose that he was the author of these “gaffs” – to use the word for chimeras manufactured to amuse or frighten the ticket-buying public. But the artificial limb, for instance, is a product of Jordan’s workshops where he employed thirty or more craftsmen at a time building these objects under his direction. In the display case in which the prosthetic is displayed with various other dueling gear, Jordan posted a label saying that the leg was owned by a prostitute who serviced the lumber camps near Hayward, Wisconsin, that her customers were rough characters, and so she needed to have the derringer hidden in her fake thigh to protect herself. Hayward, Wisconsin exists and lumberjacks were there, but the rest of the story is completely fictional.
26.
As a young man, Alex Jordan was a hoodlum whose home turf was Madison, Wisconsin. His father was a wealthy real estate developer. Jordan had a silver Packard and he hung around town impressing the girls with his car. With his girlfriend, he engaged in some penny ante extortion – he ran a so-called “Badger scheme” in which his female accomplice, Jennie Olson, seduced older, well-established men in her apartment rigged for photography. Jordan took compromising pictures and, then, blackmailed Jennie’s paramours. The enterprise prospered for awhile, but, then, both Jennie and Jordan were arrested, convicted, and served a few months time in jail for extortion. Jennie remained Jordan’s girlfriend until Alex’ death, although they never lived together – instead, Jordan maintained an apartment in Madison next to Jennie’s flat. Strangely, there are no pictures of Jennie with Jordan – we see portraits of him and there are pictures of Jennie (she has pinched features with prominent black eyebrows and a heap of dark hair over her forehead), but not the two of them together.
The legend is that, after his prison term, Jordan was managing a family business called the Villa Maria, an impressive building constructed in either 1923 or 1926 on Lake Mendota in Madison. The Villa Maria was a dormitory for students at the University of Wisconsin but owned by Jordan’s father. The story is that Jordan’s father was an amateur architect who designed the Villa Maria, said to be either a pastiche on an Italian renaissance palazzo or an interesting example of a Spanish colonial-revival building transplanted from southern California or Palm Beach to the cold northern woods around Lake Mendota. Jordan is said to have shown the plans for the building to Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect headquartered at his Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green, a small village twelve miles from Dodgeville and about fifty miles from Madison. Wright, who was notoriously irascible, told Alex Jordan that the Villa Maria plans were miserable and that “I wouldn’t hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You’re not capable.” Even in this form the story is garbled and doesn’t make any sense. Neither Jordan nor Jordan’s father designed the Villa Maria. In fact, the architect on the structure was a well-known beaux arts designer, Frank Riley, a man responsible for many impressive structures in the Madison area. (And, in any event, when Wright is supposed to have insulted Jordan, the architect was in Tokyo working on the Imperial Hotel.) No evidence supports the proposition that Jordan ever worked for Frank Lloyd Wright or sought employment with him. However, the legend explains many peculiar features of the House on the Rock, a building, it is asserted, that is intended as an ironic reductio ad absurdum of Wright’s architectural theories and practice. And, indeed, there is no question that Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence is omnipresent in the residence at the House on the Rock.
27.
Working alone, so the story goes, Alex Jordan built his house on the rock between about 1940 and 1958, when the residence was finally finished. There’s no point from which to view the structure and so the visitor can’t correlate inside to outside – this initial disorientation is intrinsic to the entire experience and most vivid in the grandiose environmental spaces later in the tour.
The house itself is accessed by a slanting redwood-slat walkway, sort of like a large, linear backyard porch. There is a narrow enclave named the gatehouse with a couple of sharp turns in the plank pathway, then, another long walkway into the residence itself. The inside of the house is constricted with small multi-level rooms, all of them windowless. The structure turns inward to its core of rough, greyish boulders. As in Wright’s houses, there is built-in furniture: upholstered benches line the rock walls and inglenooks are recessed into alcoves that are very dark and shadowy – perhaps, there are hearths in those black nooks but it’s unclear because the lighting is low, even, close to nonexistent. Wright’s architectural rhetoric is omni-present and smothering. Low roofs bully visitors and it seems that you have to stoop to make any progress through the rooms. (Wright’s plans feature alternating compression and expansion – that is, tight squeezes that open into large, airy rooms; here it’s just tight-squeezes without the corresponding sense of liberation induced by open larger spaces.) There are gratuitous platforms and ramps and, often, one enters a room, makes some tight turns and, then, looks down on the space that you have just traversed. The air spells faintly of wet rock and mildew and there is no central hub to the maze, just little niches arrayed around the irregular walls of boulder. In some places, murky-looking water courses through cistern-like pits and there are cave-sounds of trickling, and dripping. None of the rooms seem utilitarian – it’s not clear where people cooked in this place, whether it has closets, or where anyone slept. The rooms are ornamental, with complex topology, but it doesn’t seem that there’s any space big enough to accommodate more than six or seven people. It would be cramped except that Angelica and I are fifteen minutes ahead of the other tourists and, so, we have the whole place to ourselves.
The highlight of house is the so-called “Infinity Room”, a long deck cantilevered out over the forest gathered around the base of the rock. The space is shabby and useless, converging to an abstract point that is, of course, so small and flimsy as to be inaccessible. (Wright like to cantilever decks and roofs and the “Infinity Room”, of course, is a malicious parody of this stylistic impulse – but it feels half-improvised and rickety, as if a strong wind would blow the thing off into the green crests and troughs of the forest canopy below.) By definition, the “Infinity Room” can’t lead anywhere – it dead ends in the inaccessible tip of the spear, angled upward with exposed beams and ribs of wood. The impression that the “Infinity Room” yields is not of expansiveness and open space, but, rather, of a sort of perilous confinement, a shed gone wild hanging over a conceptual abyss since you can’t really perceive how the space fits into the world around it. The windows in the room are odd shuttered affairs that allow you to look through obstructed cells down at the canopy of trees but not up into the sky. Exterior pictures of the house show a shell of these occluded cells, a bit like the scales on a fish, wrapped around the house – it looks a bit like an ark come to rest precariously on the battered rock. Obviously, the “Infinity Room” gets very hot and, of course, it can’t be air-conditioned in any reasonable way. On the stained carpet, there are several fans plugged into wall sockets with orange (trip-hazard) cords.
28.
The house itself is just the foyer or ante-room to the much larger and more spectacular displays occupying immense building hidden in the forest. (These structures can’t really be seen from anywhere on the premises; characteristically, they are experienced as pure interiors, all linked together by what seem to be subterranean passages. However, a glimpse downward from the “Infinity Room” shows them to be huge metal pole-buildings, probably adapted from agricultural applications.) After a long trudge over enclosed wooden ramps, the visitor encounters a waterwheel turning sluggishly in dark water and, then, a series of dark alleys with illumined storefronts – this exhibition is called “The Streets of Yesteryear” and it simulates a small-town’s commerce: a dentistry office, toy shop, blacksmith shack, a place selling antique clocks, and so on. The storefronts are brightly lit and full of all sorts of elaborate junk. For instance, a candy shop is crammed with ornate-looking jugs and clear vases full of bright confections. The displays are forlorn and don’t know whether they are supposed to whimsical or nostalgic or, even, historical – of course, I assume everything is fake. Angelica and I were alone in the exhibit and our footsteps echoed off the walls and the concrete floors. I have no idea what was above us. At least, in memory, these spaces all seem to reach up into an indistinct black void. Everything is dark.
29.
Alex Jordan, so I maintain, is entombed in the exhibit called “The Heritage of the Sea” or, popularly, called the “Whale Room”. It is in this procession of spaces that Wright’s doctrine that the “path of discovery” should move through closed, compressed areas and, then, open into large rooms is fully made manifest, albeit on a grandiose scale that would have both appalled and astounded the architect. (In Wright’s work, the most dramatic example of this alternation between tight enclosure and expansion is the Guggenheim Museum – you walk through a warren of entrance rooms with low ceilings to emerge suddenly in the huge echoing atrium surrounded by the coil of walkway leading up to the heights where one of Wright’s skylights leaks perpetually. The conception of the Guggenheim Museum is akin to some of the effects that Jordan achieves in the House on the Rock compound.)
After the dark, sinister coziness of the “Streets of Yesteryear”, the visitor emerges into a huge vertical arena, dimly lit, in which a colossal squid is dueling a whale. The whale is about six stories high breaching upward so its mouth of man-sized teeth seems to hover overhead, high above in the dark void. The squid is embedded in the sprawl of blue that simulates the sea and it has a malign eye the size of the Volkswagen Beetle. Huge fleshy colored tentacles are lashed to side of the furious whale who seems to be ascending into the sky to escape its foe.
Display cases line a walkway that climbs by degrees up the side of the building’s interior. The cases are full of hundreds of scrimshaw artifacts, ivory celts and knobs engraved with spidery black lines showing ships at sea, wrecks, Victorian girls in crinoline courted by men with vast moustaches. I assume most of this stuff is fake, otherwise, the displays would constitute some kind of international offense, trafficking in bone and tusk from endangered species. There are four dozen miniature ships, some of them long as coffins, displays on the Titanic and the Bismarck and other famous ships, menus for elaborate feasts on ocean liners with silver cutlery and serving chargers and hundreds of nautical instruments and uniforms. It’s all too vast, a combination of a million little things to examine, and the enormous tableaux of the battling colossi and you can’t quite get your eyes to focus on any of it – the scale keeps shifting and the heights to which the ramps lead are vertiginous so that, in the end, you are staring down into the maw of the enraged whale, looking over its teeth, to where a full-sized fishing boat is rolling sideways in the jaws of the monster. At the highest point in the walkway skirting the void in which the kraken is battling the whale, a man occupies a diving suit and behind the glass in his bell-shaped helmet, you can see Alex Jordan grimacing and looking out over the spectacle. The Whale room was Jordan’s final project; he died in November 1989 before the exhibit opened and, at least, a replica of his body is interred in the diving suit near the top of the towering display. (In the official version, also crammed with lies and misrepresentations, it’s claimed that Johnson was cremated and that his ashes were spread over the Wyoming Valley where the House on the Rock is located, drizzled into the forests from a plane – this is as true and untrue, I suppose, as everything else about the House on the Rock.)
30.
Beyond the Whale Room, the corridors lead to more collections along dark passages. In some places, maze opens up like a cave into larger rooms where there are model airplanes hovering on wires overhead or horse-drawn hearses (all manufactured in Jordan’s shop) with elaborate funereal plumes, huge steam engines extruding belts and gears and axles, strange cars covered with fur or with tiles, kiosks with automaton figures, for instance a dying drunkard flat on his back in a bed that rocks and tilts, or workmen laboring in a quarry swinging miniature pickaxes up and down, religious statuary tucked in corners, beckoning naked mannequins. You can pause to buy slices of pizza in a white room decorated by wall-size posters advertising the exploits of a magician with a quotidian name – something like the Miraculous Howard or the Great Carter. A zigzag path follows, taking the viewer past increasingly grandiose music machines. At first, we see closet-sized spaces full of cellos and violins rigged with bows beneath registers of percussion. If you feed a token (two for a dollar) into the machine, it springs to life playing “The Blue Danube” or something on that order while the bows stroke back and forth over strings as if manipulated by invisible hands. These devices expand in size until they occupy entire rooms dimly lit by multitudes of crystal chandeliers, whole ranks of instruments connected to bellows that rise and fall like a human chest, dozens of bows moving rhythmically and levers that tap at drums and cause cymbals to clash. (It’s all fake: the instruments aren’t playing anything: the clockwork is configured to make the machinery move in time to pre-recorded music.) Then, there’s more darkness and, finally, one of Jordan’s most spectacular effects: the visitor turns a corner and sees a small square tunnel that leads toward some sort of spinning geyser of blood. The tunnel is jet black and it frames the whirling crimson flare as if on a movie screen – indeed, one’s first impression is that there is a film being projected at the end of the tunnel, something red and spinning like a centrifuge and casting off ghastly crimson light that shudders and twitches on the tunnel wall. It’s entrancing and you stagger forward to see, at last, that the tunnel is framing a vantage on a huge carousel. The spinning carousel is packed with chimerical animals, none of them horses, too small to be mounted even by a child and the whole display is lit by hundreds of chandeliers forming a dense thicket around the wooden creatures, all of them illumined by red light bulbs. Dangling above the carousel are hundreds of stuffed pigeons, store mannequins nude and equipped with swan’s wings, an aerial canopy of naked women and birds. The carousel packed with chimeric creatures whirls by, too fast for the eye to get any purchase on the spectacle and the whole thing seems steeped in bright, red gore. An old lady sits on a folding chair near the carousel, presumably to keep people from trying to seize one of weird animals – foxes and gila monsters and dolphins and alligators with wolf heads, all sorts of enigmatic monsters assembled from the most disparate parts – and hitch a ride on the spinning red mirage. The walls rising around the carousel are densely encrusted with all sorts of beasts and architectural details, fragments of buildings yanked out of context and displayed next to cascades of red velvet curtains. In the middle of the wall facing the carousel – the machine turns relentlessly, grinding away in its semi-circular alcove – there’s a Hell Mouth with bulging eyes and yellowish fangs over its entrance which tilts down into another huge room a few feet away.
At this point, the accumulation of stuff, the sheer multitudinous frenzy, becomes overwhelming and the boundary between kitsch and the sublime is pierced, porous and oozing some kind of gruesome red ichor.
31.
The Hell Mouth leads in a cavernous space shrouded in darkness. The upper edges of the space are black and the side walls also hidden in shadow and, so, the visitor has the impression that the immense furnishings in this place are suspended in the void. Giant vats and arcane-looking pewter kegs float in the gloom. Pipe organs tower over the pathway, ranks of huge cylinders glinting dully in oblique beams cast by hidden lights – the whole place has the aura of being illumined by flickering candlelight and there are the ubiquitous red candelabra upheld in the air as if supported by invisible caryatids. At the base of the room a rotor large enough to drive the Titanic through stormy, ice-heaped seas sits between the pots and pans and brew kettles made from battered pewter, the devil’s distillery as it were. A blood red carpet covers the walkway and a bulbous Tesla machine as menacing as a mortar towers over the clockwork gears and heaps of organ pipes. It’s a factory but designed for what purpose? The place manufactures nothing but a brooding dense darkness, shot through with rays of light that tease out the edges of the vast kettles and cistern-shaped pots. Some birch trees, white and fragile, provide a vaguely feminine counterpoint to the massive masculine devices. A column of tympani drums with huge rounded bellies rises up into the shadows. It’s all inert, gravid, the ruin of some sort of enormous and enigmatic industrial site – dangerous energies are coiled in the towers of machinery. If the right word were spoken, it might all spring into motion and the drone of the pipe organs with their cannon-shaped muzzles would reach a frequency sufficient to cause earthquakes and undermine the structure of the world.
(A explanatory plaque on the wall explains nothing: Alex Jordan is said to have imagined the place after looking at engravings by Piranesi, the artist’s Carceri or “Prisons.” But the huge room doesn’t look much like Piranesi – in fact, it doesn’t look like anything else in the world. An interpretive placard says that visitors are invited to enjoy the space without asking questions, as the embodiment of Jordan’s imagination.)
32.
After the “Organ Room,” the rest of the compound is, more or less, an anti-climax. There are circus wagons the size of locomotives, apparently cobbled together from various enormous axles and undercarriages and a room about the size of a football-field in which little automatons built for jewelry stores are displayed, hundreds and hundreds of yard-long mechanisms in which gnomes are mining for diamonds, or Noah’s ark traverses the flood, or newly wedded couples sprightly dance across a festively decorated ballroom, or cave men worship an emerald bowing to it and hailing its radiance with upraised hands; in workshops, jewelers are making rings and brooches; in the jungles, explorers in safari garb stumble upon quarries full of gems; a balloon rises up to the silvery moon that is studded with glass diamonds. Twenty of these things would suffice, but Jordan has five-hundred or more of them. By this time, the visitor is exhausted and the his or her objective, if truth is told, is to simply stroll through the final galleries without looking at anything – you want to reach the exit and emerge from these windowless cavities that seem to be far under the earth into whatever the hidden day holds. Dollhouses by the hundreds fill another large room that seems more like a storage space than a collection – reportedly, one of the dollhouses is tricked out like a brothel, but you would have to scrutinize the whole array of these things, an act of attentiveness of which no one will be capable at this point. Some cases contain facsimiles of England’s crown jewels and, then, a ramp tilts you up into a strange dimly lit space where thousands of dolls gaze out blankly from tiered crimson carousels, stacked up on what seem to be elaborate and colossal wedding cakes, forty feet high and turning like some sort infernal millwork. Within this terminal space, the upper reaches of glowing black void are full of mannequins, all female with their nipples enhanced and painted pubic hair on their exposed crotches. The mannequins have been explicitly sexualized and they hover over head in a vortex of flesh and wings, everything suddenly suspended and brought to a halt by the end of world. From above, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse burst out of the darkness and seem about to fall like an avalanche on the visitor about to the leave the place. An old woman on a stool points up at the suspended horses and their grisly riders and says: “Doom... the end of the World ... the Four Horsemen...” Then, you are outside, blinking in the sun, with fountains splashing on all sides, and huge iridescent dragon flies bobbing and weaving in the moist air.
33.
In Martin Buber’s collection of stories about Hassidic sages, there are several narratives that have this burden: a great Rabbi explicates scripture to a dozen students. After the Rabbi has finished speaking and departed, one of the students remarks to another that he is ashamed that the teacher spoke to him alone and didn’t say anything to the others. The person to whom this comment is addressed seems surprised. He answers: “No, the Rabbi was speaking only to me. I was puzzled that he didn’t address his interpretation of scripture to any of the others.” And, of course, on further questioning, it is revealed that each of the dozen students listening to the preacher are convinced that the Rabbi was speaking only to him and him alone. Somehow, the Rabbi’s words are perceived as providing intimate, exclusive, and individualized advice to each individual.
The House on the Rock has the same effect. Emerging from the experience, one concludes that, at least, the last part of the adventure, the traversal of the rooms with the crimson spinning carousels, the battle between the octopus and the whale and the huge space full of vats and boilers and pipe organs, that all of these things have been somehow tailored to you as an individual, that these displays are a private and intimate matter, an incursion into your imagination and dreams that is somehow unique to you alone. Your impulse is to declare no one else has really seen this place except for you. Others may have been present but their passage through these wonders is different (and lesser) than what you have experienced.
But this is an illusion like everything else involved with monstrous and secretive House on the Rock. Everyone feels that he or she somehow owns the experience and that it is intimate and private. But, in fact, many others have praised the place although often in the most equivocal terms – Jane Smiley wrote about the House on the Rock in the New York Times and, although her words are condescending, even patronizing, to the Rubes wandering through the attraction she seems to have been genuinely startled, even, shaken by the experience. Similarly, the famous and best-selling supernatural writer, Neil Gaiman, stages scenes from his novel American Gods in the House on the Rock and goes so far as to propose that the Hell Mouth is a threshold between worlds.
34.
Did my actual experiences at the House on the Rock supplant my recollections of the place? The initial labyrinth in the House itself remains, more or less, as I imagined it during the decade or so since I last explored the place. Once, the House is understood as a parody of certain motifs in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, this understanding organizes your perceptions and, perhaps, elements that don’t fit this paradigm are excluded from memory. The House displays signs of the mad profusion that follows it: for instance, Wright was fond of posing a single elegant Japanese antique, usually a lily-slim Bodhisattva at the center of his larger rooms; Jordan follows this practice but is not content with one sculpture, instead, cluttering the perspective with a half-dozen figures that would be serene, of course, and ennobling even if they were not competing for attention. The facsimile of idealized small town, “Streets of Yesteryear”, now reminds me of a similarly dimly lit group of storefronts in the History Museum in Milwaukee. It was about what I recalled from the earlier visits. However, the larger and more grandiose installations, edged with the black of the void, can’t really be assimilated to any other context and, therefore, the impression that they make is one of extreme and grotesque novelty, even though I have walked through those rooms before. Indeed, perception here exceeds understanding by an exponential sum and the spaces all seem new to me, even though I have toured them before. Primarily, everything is much darker than I remembered. And the carousel hemorrhaging red light all over the room and framed by the access tunnel is much brighter and more disturbing than I recalled just as the other rooms are gloomier and more shadowy. Memory makes maps and the House on the Rock evades mapping – I have a plan of the place showing pathways through the various exhibits (“A Dream Turned into an Evolving Reality”), but it’s beneficial only to help you find toilets. Probably, it’s best to follow the arrows on the walls showing the way through the maze and not try to mentally configure any sort of layout to the place.
35.
As you walk through the House on the Rock, you will see objects that are radically out-of-place. In particular, Jordan collected religious figures, terra cotta angels and saints, the Virgin Mary cradling baby Jesus in her arms. Jordan didn’t array these objects as a collection, nor does he overwhelm by standing these life-size statues all together in one place. (This is different from the way he manages most of his collections in which he just piles everything together in a single space – for instance, there is a towering wall in one room on which there are mounted, at least, 100 carved carousel horses.) Between facsimile newspaper clippings about the sinking of the Titanic and a case containing fifty daggers, Jordan installs a Spanish Colonial-style Gabriel (the angel is no doubt fake) winged and stomping on a loyal monster crouching below his feet like a lap dog. In shadowy nooks, one senses eyes and, peering into the darkness, you might see Joseph the carpenter with his tools or an Old Testament prophet or the Virgin and her child. None of these things belong here. In fact, they stripped of their context and transformed from icon into part of the spectacle. In a larger sense, everything in attraction has this character. In a museum, things are displayed in context, given provenance, and curated. In the House on the Rock, there’s no context, provenance is concealed or misrepresented, and nothing at all is curated – we don’t see the best of a collection of objects, but every single object, everything toppling toward us like some vast and obscene avalanche of things.
36.
Alex Jordan was a confidence man, huckster, and, by all accounts, a bully. Like W. C. Fields, he despised children – they were apt to put their dirty paws on his treasures. Although the House on the Rock contains elements that might be thought as fascinating to children, these aspects of the experience are distorted into grotesque parodies of childish fantasies. The naked women hovering like hornets over the carousels with their engorged nipples are certainly not devised for the delectation of children. And the carousel, a ride that ought to enthrall children, is a gory meat-grinder that is completely inaccessible – you can’t ride on the thing; indeed, if you were to venture too close, the carousel’s centripetal energy would tear you apart. There is something hermetic and impermeable about the place. So I take it for granted that the deplorable Alex Jordan was some kind of artist, perhaps, even a great one.
The question, of course, is what kind of an artist? Initially, Jordan was in thrall to Frank Lloyd Wright and the House itself is an exercise in irony – what would Wright’s work look like if taken to extremes and reduced to absurdity? This exercise in deflating Wright is useful – it demonstrates certain kitsch elements in the great architect’s sensibility that, perhaps, deepen our understanding of his work. Jordan’s critique doesn’t really diminish Wright, but makes him more approachable.
But, after he broke away from Wright’s influence, in the “Organ Room” and with the carousels, for instance, Jordan evolves into something very different – in effect, he becomes an abstract artist, devising a poetry of light and shadow in which objects, stripped of their original meaning, become impenetrable, examples of a sort of brute materiality, heavy, enigmatic, sphinxes squatting in enveloping gloom. The effect is immanent, not transcendent – nothing can escape the Stygian darkness that Jordan has captured and confined in these huge rooms; the sheer irrefragable weight of things drags them down into these cavernous abysses. I suggest that Jordan’s affinities aren’t ultimately with Wright, but more with John Portman, the luxury hotel architect who pioneered the vast atriums that are now de rigueur in big city hotels, or the nameless designers of the black boxes, devoid of day or night, that house casinos. This is fantasy architecture, in which form doesn’t follow function, but disputes it.
37.
Two ideas in Jewish mysticism seem relevant to the enterprise at the House on the Rock. First, there is a notion, often expressed in Hassidic stories, that the child in the womb knows all things; everything under heaven and on earth is within the fetal infant’s mind. When we are born, an angel touches our lips and everything is forgotten – this is both a blessing and a curse. Second, once everything was light; but this Urlicht shattered into innumerable sparks entrapped in darkness.
The vast dark vessels at the House on the Rock are the womb in which all things are gathered. All the secrets are there. But they are unintelligible. The interminable collections in which a few original artifacts are surrounded by thousands of fakes suggest the primal light broken into shards. A few things glitter within the colossal midden gathered around the rock.
I don’t think this is exactly “Kabbalistical”. But I don’t know.
38.
It’s about seven miles to Spring Green. The road is high in the sky on a ridge overlooking the lush, green Wyoming valley. Some steep grades drop down to well-watered meadows. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin shines on the brow of a wooded hill. Foursomes are playing golf at a course along the highway. The town is somewhere off to the side.
39.
The road to La Crosse is slow-going through narrow valleys filled with tangled jungle. I’ve come this way four times, perhaps, in my life. The hills are shaggy with trees and shaped like crumbling pyramids. In Richland Center, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first significant commercial building, a warehouse that is shaped like a Mayan temple, stands like a grim fortress over Main Street. When I first drove through this area forty years ago, there was a plaque on the building and it was in disrepair, elements of its elaborate overhanging cornice threatening to fall and brain passers-by on the sidewalk. The structure has now been restored and, by appointment, you can take tours. Wright was born in Richland Center in 1867 and he seems to have designed the warehouse there for A. D. German in exchange for the merchant’s forgiveness of an invoice that was long over-due. This story seems questionable to me: German was a grocer and it’s hard to imagine that Wright consumed enough of the merchant’s victuals to warrant the design of this complicated structure (although it’s true that Wright didn’t pay bills and was always in debt): the structure is poured concrete with a brick veneer resting apparently on a pad of cork, an innovative design, with a large fluted cornice featuring stylized masks of the Mayan rain god, Chak – the appearance of the structure, very striking, is consistent with the dense hilly forests in this part of Wisconsin, steamy places during the summer, and, more than a little like, the landscape around Palenque. But the building is radically out-of-place on the bucolic main street of the little town.
I remember driving to an implement dealership in Richland Center forty years ago to investigate a machine involved in a fatal accident at a southern Minnesota quarry. The machine that had toppled over was located in the dealership and I remember talking to some burly men wearing feed caps about the accident. I took some pictures and clambered into the loader’s cab where the seat cushions were gouged open and the air smelled faintly of cigarettes. It had taken me a half day to get to this place, driving the whole way on lonely country roads and, at that time, I knew nothing about Frank Lloyd Wright and, even, felt a faint disdain for those who admired him. But the warehouse in the middle of the town, a structure that looks impressive from all angles, amazed me so much that, after passing the building, and went around the block, got out of my car and took some pictures adjacent on the film to images I made of the fatal front-end loader, and, then, saw the plaque advising that this was Wright’s work, the A. D. German Warehouse (1917 to 1921).
40.
Angelica wanted to eat sushi at a place called The Sushi Pirate on Main Street in La Crosse. We found the restaurant and parked, but it was take-out only. Across the street, there was an Irish pub. We went inside and ate a late lunch. A man sat at a neighboring table courting a woman with a precocious, mouthy 7 year old daughter. The little girl was very opinionated and seemed anxious to interject herself between her mother and the man. He looked like a police officer, in good shape, with a military haircut – on his tee-shirt, there was a blue and black flag, the emblem of the “thin blue line” that protects us against chaos with the words NO ONE FIGHTS ALONE. The woman had blonde hair and some tattoos on her clavicle. She was wearing a tee-shirt that said SAVED BY FAITH BY GRACE ALONE.
Around the corner from the pub is the Bodega Lunch Club. A friend once told me that Frank Lloyd Wright used to meet clients in that café. My friend’s father himself met Frank Lloyd Wright when he was studying architecture at the university. The great architect wore a cloak with red velvet lining. He was very old. Mr. Wright told my friend’s father that, when he saw the work of the new generation, he despaired of the future of architecture.
July 1, 2023
