Nate on Atlas Obscura

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This episode of Memory Palace is brought to you by LifeKid.

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Hey, it's Nate.

I am currently sitting in a rental car waiting to take a tour of Frederick Douglass's house, which is super on brand,

here in Anacostia, Maryland.

Later on tonight, I'm going to do a live book reading and book event in Washington, D.C.

And it is so cold, so I am keeping myself warm here rather than walk the grounds.

But this has been a really fun experience.

It has been great to meet people at these live events.

It has made me very excited to book some more in the new year.

So I hope to come to your town soon.

If you have an in on that, if you run a bookstore, if you run an event space or the like, I feel free to hit me up at nate at thememorypalace.us and let me know and maybe we can work something out because the events have been going great.

People have been coming out.

I've been having a blast.

I've been selling some books.

It has been lovely

and I want to keep rolling.

In the meantime, I'm going to have a new episode next week, but I have something for you right now.

A little ways back, I was on the Atlas Obscure podcast, and they did such a good job.

It was such a good format, and they asked me about favorite places of mine.

And in that conversation, I really got to talk about myself and about

the show and the book in ways that I really haven't before.

And it was fun and illuminating, and I think you'll enjoy it.

So here is my appearance on the Atlas Obscure podcast, and more new episodes on the way.

Hello, NateMayo, host and creator of the Memory Palace Palace podcast.

How are you?

I'm great, man.

How are you?

I'm good.

I wonder if we can start today by going to the club, the Club Baghdad.

Take me there.

This is a nightclub that my grandfather and his brother owned in Cranston, Rhode Island, which is just over the Providence border, just a mere 15 minutes away.

It was a nightclub that they owned from the late 30s up until just a little bit after World War II.

At this nightclub, they would get sort of, you know, like second and third tier touring acts.

You know, the bigger acts would go up to Boston or to Hartford or whatever, but some people would stop here at the Club Baghdad.

A story that I tell in my book is the origin story, you know, of my mom's arm of the family tree, which is there was like the flu was going through and a number of the showgirls took ill.

And he called up to a temp agency, a showgirl temp agency, some sort of talent agency up in Boston, and said like, hey, I need a couple of girls.

We have a big Christmas show coming.

Can you send some down?

And my grandmother, Barbara, was one of the showgirls that they sent down that night.

So my grandmother met my grandfather and fell in love under the Christmas lights of the Club Baghdad one Christmas, probably about 1940.

And it seems like the Club Baghdad closed long before you were born.

You probably, it seems like you didn't get the chance to see it with your own eyes.

No, I never did.

And it burned down in the late 1940s

under suspicious circumstances.

It was probably burned down by the mob.

The Club Baghdad, as was always told in these stories that my grandfather would tell and my family would tell sort of around their kitchen table, you know, really became this kind of like magical place of memory.

You know, it was this sort of like xanadu of the mind.

But Now that it's been gone, it only existed in their memories and then it existed as this sort of like, as this kind of fictional construct, you know, that is grounded in the real, but that existed in me then and exists in me still.

I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today I'm speaking with Nate DeMeo, the host and creator of the podcast, The Memory Palace, which conjures lost moments and forgotten figures from America's past.

Nate is also now the author of a book of Memory Palace stories.

Maybe we can think of this quick trip we just took to Club Baghdad as a sort of antechamber or like the jet bridge for today's episode.

Because now Nate is going to take us inside of his own personal memory palace.

It's a journey in three rooms from a beloved family home to a cluttered museum storage unit to a one-of-a-kind collection of super lifelike glass flowers.

Okay, room number one.

So, the Baghdad Club may have closed way before Nate was born, but a lot of stuff from the club and other family memorabilia all ended up in their house in Providence on Pierce Street.

Nate spent a lot of time in that house when he was a kid visiting his grandparents.

And then, after a short stint to California, he ended up coming back to Providence and living in that house for a while when he was in his 20s.

Here I was back in this really beloved space.

It was a wonderful thing because not only was it rent-free,

you know, it was cute.

Yes.

And so this was a house, you know, that was filled with,

that was filled kind of with ghosts, but it was also filled with the artifacts, you know, of my mom's life and her sister's lives that, you know, there were still in the bedrooms that they used to occupy that were now guest rooms or my grandmother's sewing room.

You know, there were still things like yearbooks and

roller skate keys or whatever, you know, all the like stuff of their lives.

And you dig deeper, and there were the stuff of my grandfather's life.

You know, there were the there was a wallet that had old bus passes and his old union card and all of these things, you know, up in the attic or down in the basement.

There was just the detritus of these lives.

The thing that is just like sort of entirely formative to the work that I do in the memory palace is this sense that I got living in that place

of my own time,

my own history taking place in this space that other people's history unfurled in the way that our lives

in a city or our lives in a family kind of like layer on top of each other.

And I find that I've never shaken the just kind of like strangeness and wonder of that.

And in that house and walking around Providence, you know, to and from that house was where I first was struck by that wonder.

And it's never left.

So you mentioned, you know, you came back to the Pierce Street house.

You were living there when you were in your early 20s.

And it sounds like you sort of became the unofficial archivist of the family.

Like people would call you up and be like, where's that thing in the basement?

Can you find it?

Are there any things that like come to mind that you pulled out of the bowels of the house?

There are a few like kind of treasured objects that I have from the house.

There's one that's really specific and very memory palace, which is at one point in a drawer that used to be in my aunt's

room that was where my grandmother's sewing machine was, at the bottom of a drawer I found a rolled up drawing.

And it was a pastel drawing that was done by some itinerant artist, like some guy who clearly like came up to like, you know, my grandmother on the street or as I saw like in the detail, like at some nightclub, you know, and like, hey, let me draw your picture, lady.

And you look lovely and that kind of thing.

And so it's this really lovely,

in every way, drawing of my very pretty grandma.

But the thing that made it more magic to me was the story that was attached to it.

Cause I went to her and I said, hey, I found this like really cool thing.

And she's like, oh, let me tell you about that.

And she said, well, your grandfather, you know, had this other girlfriend and, you know, another showgirl, there was this showgirl Dottie that

we were kind of in conflict over, you know, Ray's affection.

And, you you know dottie was the one who was age appropriate because ray was 11 years older than me and they were the same age and dottie was the one that his mom wanted him to marry and we were dating and we were kind of fooling around and it was very clear that this was a thing that was like I was like, wait a second, I can't be essentially your side piece.

Like, this is not going to work for me.

And so you need to make a decision.

And there was this guy who kept coming into the nightclub over and over again and asking her out all the time.

And so one day, to stick it to my grandfather, she decides that, yes, yes, she will go on this date with this guy.

And so he takes her to this fancy place in Boston.

They have drinks.

They go dancing.

She gets this picture drawn.

And that night, she says, I don't like this guy.

I'm in love with Ray.

I'm going to go back and I'm going to fight for this thing.

I'm going to tell him to make a decision.

And so not only is this a beautiful picture,

it is this, it is a picture that is attached to this story.

And that is what gives it this meaning, that it is,

this is a souvenir of the night that my grandmother decided, you know what, screw this.

Why am I on, you know, this date with this dude I have no interest in when the guy that I love is down there and I'm going to try to make this work.

And yes, the house was filled with cool things and like, you know, fun old gadgets and fun, you know, old, old timey stuff.

But the things that I kept and treasured are are the ones that are tied to stories.

Yes.

And I think that's ultimately what I try to do with the memory palace.

We're going to take a quick break, but after this, Nate is bringing us off the beaten path at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

We are going past the famous paintings, into the back hallways, and to a semi-hidden room where Nate loves to find inspiration.

And it's a storage room.

This was like America's attic.

This like uncurated kind of like chaos of American life was right there.

That's after this.

Nate found himself looking back in time more and more, and his interest in the past deepened after a day visiting New York City with an old buddy.

One day when I was in my mid-20s, I drove from that house in Providence and visited a friend from high school who was living in Greenpoint in Brooklyn.

And we took a walk and we walked from his place, we walked over the Williamsburgs Bridge and we walked, you know, much of the length of Manhattan and we wound wound up at the Met, at the Betsy Prolong Museum in the Upper East Side.

So we walked around and like, and like there are like giants of American art.

There are like, you know, landscapes by, you know, Bierstadt and Church.

And there are, you know, there's Washington Crossing the Delaware and there's Madame X by John Singer Sargent and all the,

exactly.

It's a good one.

But in the kind of belly of

this wing, there is this room that I'd never been before.

And like the next time I went, I could not find.

It is that sort of like obscure and hidden.

It is this large L-shaped room.

It might not exist.

It's in your mind.

Yes, exactly.

It's sort of, it's clubbag dead-like in that way.

And so, you know, there's this large L-shaped room that is called visual storage.

And in it is row after row of floor-to-ceiling display case, just case after case after case after case.

And,

you know, even though it's all, I'm sure, curated into an inch of its life, what it essentially is, is it's kind of like they have all this extra stuff and they they don't have any place to put it.

There are these landscapes by lesser landscape painters.

There are, you know, mantles that used to be on people's fireplaces.

There are, you know, little figurines at a time when people thought little figurines were cool.

And there are, you know,

portraits of people who were once prominent, but you've never heard of before in your life.

And I found that room on that day so powerfully overwhelming.

This was like America's attic.

Like, you know, this was this was just the sort of like uncurated kind of like chaos of American life was right there.

It was not just American art.

It was like American life.

Like that these are the chairs that not only did people sit on that,

this was a chairmaker's life for three and a half weeks.

Or look at these weird collection of steins that were like treasured and,

you know, collected and labored over and loved and like

purchased at great expense and then like held in the place of honor, you know, that like, I guarantee the next generation's, the next generation, the people who had to clean out that person's attic when they died was just like, what's the deal with all these signs?

And that is,

you know, and in that moment and to this day, like, to me, that is life, you know, like that is the same way that like, you know, that

one generation cannot expect the generation coming up behind them to, you know, care at all about the music that they like, or to value their celebrities, or

to maybe even value their most dearly held principles that they held for that summer back in 1969, or whatever it turns out to be.

Like, that is life.

The Met actually ended up being a really important place in Nate's life and career.

From 2016 to 2017, Nate was invited to be the artist in residence at the Met, and he created eight episodes of the Memory Palace inspired by objects in the collection.

And one of them is this really cool narrative-guided tour of visual storage.

I can find no better metaphor for what I try to do in the memory palace, and specifically in this book of memory palace stories, than visual storage.

Because, you know, like I really do think that like people ask me where stories come from, and the truth is they come from like anywhere and everywhere, in part because like there's just no shortage.

Like you can look back, you know, into history and there's just, there's a, there's, boy, there's a lot of it.

And boy, there are, you know, there are a million stories and a million people.

What I am doing, you know, with these stories is the same thing that like a curator might be doing in these shelves, which is finding the, the small figurine, finding the painting and bringing it to you, the reader, or you, the listener, and saying, look at this one.

Shall we go to the final room and

personal memory palace?

Yeah.

I love this room.

I've been in this room.

It's the collection of glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Sure.

There's this collection of glass flowers that are in glass cases that were done in the 19th century by these two Bavarian glass blowing geniuses.

These men spent decades of their lives creating these models specifically for study, you know, at some scientific institute in Germany.

And they are not merely flowers of unbelievable beauty and verisimilitude.

You know, they're not just like, boy, that's a hell of an orchid that these guys managed to make and color match and all this stuff.

Because they're specifically for scientific study,

they are also all the parts of that.

There's like a little thing that will just be labeled stamen or stem or seed pod.

And those seed pods will be rendered with incredible discipline and incredible specificity and in stunning artistry.

And that alone is worth seeing.

I'll just cut in quickly here and say, if the phrase glass flowers makes you think of like a crappy vase at the bottom shelf of a TJ Maxx or something, I swear that is not what these flowers look like.

They are so lifelike that it's almost kind of eerie.

They look more like the silk flowers you'd buy at a craft store, but they are made of super thin, expertly molded glass.

And some of these flowers are in full bloom, and some of them are actually in various stages of decay.

And so they're beautiful and sometimes gnarly and very, very cool.

I can think of almost no better way of understanding the idea that our moments are historical.

Because here is this way, this need

that scientists had to look at these flowers that they would only have

for

another, you know, 20, 30 years when photography would be better, you know, and that you could have color photographs with this thing,

or that refrigeration would be better so the African violet could be preserved, or that, you know, greenhouse technology could be better so that they could grow it themselves, or whatever it turns out to be.

This is a temporary thing

that has been made, that has been passed down permanently.

But it is also

the work of these impossibly gifted artists, that these impossibly skilled men with you know off-the-charts fine motor skills and and and you know uh like three-dimensional, you know, modeling that they could accomplish in their heads.

That this is how they spent their lives.

This is the art that they pursued for all of this time.

And there's simply no way it wouldn't have been different in a different era, that they would not have done different things, that they would not.

But this is what they could make.

And the notion that they have made these representations

of these impermanent things, of flowers in bloom, or plants in decay or plants or flowers before they open up.

You know, there's nothing that,

you know, articulates the wonder and strangeness of like living through time quite as well as those flowers.

It kind of reminds me of what we were talking about with the visible storage, where like, you know, there are these piles and piles of landscape.

paintings of the Hudson that are deemed at this moment in time to not be the one that we want to have out in the gallery.

But people's priorities and interests change over time.

And that's also kind of a beautiful thing, too, where maybe these flowers were originally made for a specific purpose, but today we can appreciate them for another reason.

I think that's something I also really appreciate about your show:

I feel like you're plucking stories of people who were not

given the ink or the dew in their time.

Perhaps they're not, you know, the

centerpieces of the historical models

or something.

Sure.

But they,

you know, as time goes on, we have different priorities and different interests in the stories that we're looking for.

Right.

And no, it's exactly right.

And I do think that, like,

you know, it's like

a question worth asking is like, why remember anything at all?

Right.

And it's essentially, because the answer is like, because I want to, because in this story, I find beauty.

In this person's, you know,

parenting journey, I find some lesson for myself in the way that the Ferris wheel was a terrifying throw ride for its first couple of years.

And now, you know, it's just a Ferris wheel.

You know, this is the most absurd thing to say, but it's just true.

It's just that like

people are beautiful and like life is just odd and we are all just sort of figuring it out.

I just find it valuable to remember how sort of like kind of arbitrary that our, our time is and how arbitrary their time is, but yet look what they made of it and look what we still can of ours.

Nate DeMayo, thank you so much.

The new book is The Memory Palace, also the name of the show, which I'm sure everyone listening to knows and loves.

It's such a great show and it's lovely to talk to you.

Nate DeMayo, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Total pleasure.

We've been talking with Nate DeMayo.

He is the host and creator of the Memory Palace podcast, and he has a brand new book called The Memory Palace, True Short Stories of the Past.

Check it out now.

And we will link to the Memory Palace podcast as well as the episodes from the Met that we mentioned in the episode description.

Radiotokia

from PRX.