This special bonus episode of the Memory Palace was commissioned by the Keybank Rochester

Fringe Festival in Rochester, New York.

It is the second of two site-specific pieces.

This one is meant to be listened to at the corner of Corinthian and State Street, downtown,

though you may enjoy listening to it wherever you are.

This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate Tameo.

What do we keep?

From a parking lot by a holiday in in Rochester, New York, downtown.

It's bustling, now not.

Can we really understand what was here once?

There is no plaque to tell you this, so it falls on me to point out that on this spot,

where this parking lot now stands, or just lays there anyway.

Once stood Corinthian Hall, beginning in 1849, constructed by the Rochester Athenaeum

and Mechanics Association, which was a kind of chamber of commerce-y men's club thing,

a majestic three-story building in white, with a library and reading rooms on the first

and second floors.

But the third, that was something special.

A grand hall for concerts and lectures, with soaring ceilings, glittering chandeliers,

in a stage frame by four Corinthian columns that would provide the name for the building

and for the street that now provides entrance to and egress from this parking lot by the holiday

in.

...