Welch: Old concrete floors, the more cracks the better
Old concrete floors are trending. They shine as if proud of their checkered pasts.
I’m looking at one now that once was covered in 9-by-9 tiles, meaning it’s literally checkered. It gleams a little because it’s been treated with whatever it is they use to enhance the appearance of old concrete floors. Places of business, like this coffeehouse, have popularized the concept of an honest floor that reeks of the past, cracks and all. Never mind that the shine isn’t authentic.
The somewhat decipherable past of this floor makes it more interesting now than when it was a new expanse of boring blank uncracked concrete, awaiting tiles and not yet imbued with memories. You can see where walls used to be.
Bare concrete floors with a past haven’t always been popular. To wit, in 1985, when I was working in New Orleans for a guy who liked all things leading-edge, my assignment was to eat lunch in a French Quarter restaurant to get the inside story on what they’d done to their bare concrete floor.
It was cordovan to borrow a shoe polish color. I don’t remember anything they told me. Maybe they used shoe polish, except I’d probably remember that.
My boss could have asked them himself about the floor. For whatever reason, he liked the sneaky approach. So did I. And I got lunch.
Yep, exposing old concrete floors was just coming into its own back then. My aforementioned boss had just moved the family retail business to a big old warehouse and had expanded the operation. (When you relocate from a storefront to a warehouse, you gotta expand.)
He was absolutely in on the fashionable adaptive-use-of-old-warehouses trend. But he’d already covered the ground-level floor with something conventional (can’t remember what) when he sent me on the concrete mission.
It was the 1980s. Keeping up with every new trend was tough in those pre-Internet days. You mostly had to read about happening things in newspapers and magazines or catch a snippet on a morning television “news” show.
Niche topics, like how to remodel houses and warehouses, hadn’t been given their own channels because cable television had yet to rattle the three major networks. Now, even on the farm with just an antenna and no cable, I can keep up with all sorts of stuff, yoga to cabinet making.
The effect of having so much varied programming on television and information at our smartphone fingertips is that trends develop incredibly fast. To wit? Worship music. A musicologist friend of mine gets credit for that thought. He’s right. New songs come along much faster now than when they had to make the cut to get into hymnbooks.
Yep, it’s no wonder we like those old floors. They’re history encapsulated right beneath our feet. We are reeling from all things happening so fast. An old concrete floor gives us a solid connection to a past — one that shines, cracks and all.
Hanaba Munn Welch sums up her weekly thoughts in exactly 501 words and dashes, a tribute to the old Fort Worth & Denver steam locomotive Engine 501 or Levi’s jeans. Take your pick. Farm life often inspires her writing.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Welch: Old concrete floors, the more cracks the better
