Scooter's Great Adventure, or, Raiders of the Lost Long Beach Temple

Thanks for all the comments on my Long Beach post, everyone. I’m glad to know that Midget Town is/was well-known – I wonder if kids today talk about it, too?
Troy’s comment about the Pacific Coast Club reminds me of the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life. In 1994, about a year before I departed for the northwest, I spent many a day exploring the city of my birth.
One day, I was making my way westward on…Locust Avenue, I believe it was, and got to about 8th or 9th Street, and I came upon a huge edifice, so large that I could hardly believe that I’d never seen it before. It was a Masonic Temple – six stories high, solid granite facing, with immense Doric columns across the front. In awe, I parked, and stood in front of the impressive building. If I recall correctly, the legend “ERECTED TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN” was carved into a frieze near the roofline. (I might be confusing this with the Portland Masonic Temple, which is now home to the Portland Art Museum).
There were two tall windows on the front of the building, the bottom sills of which were at about six feet off the sidewalk. I walked across the street to the building, and attempted to raise myself up to see inside. The massive front doors were chained shut, affording no entrance.
After I’d been there a few minutes, a man in a security guard uniform came around the corner and asked what I was doing. When I told him I was only trying to see inside, he said the words any urban spelunker would find delight in: “Well, we have the side door open over here, do you want to take a look inside?”
As I walked around to the west side of the structure with the man, I saw a large van with the name of a movie studio on it (Universal, MGM, I can’t remember at the moment). I saw several other men walking around as well, going in and out of a side door of the building. I asked the man I was with what was going on.
“Well, you know that kid who made the “Batman” movie, whatsis name, Burton? Yeah, he’s making some movie called “Attack of the Martians,”…no, “Mars Attacks,” and they’re using one of the ballrooms inside as a movie set of the Senate floor. You want to go inside and take a look around?”
He didn’t have to ask me twice. I sprinted back to my car, got my trusty Maglite flashlight, and proceeded in.
To describe the inside of the old Masonic temple as surreal wouldn’t nearly cover it. After my little foray into the building, I did some extensive research in the microfiche section at the Long Beach Public Library, where I found out some interesting facts. Notably, that the temple had been abandoned since the 1950’s. At the time, no one had officially occupied it in over 40 years.
Officially, but not unofficially. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
The building was seven stories, counting the basement, and had some mystical number of rooms (99, 256, something like that). One of the oddest things was that there were very few windows, anywhere.
On the main floor, I made my way to the front entrance, and was greeted with an insanely ornate marble entryway, inlaid with the Masonic compass and capital letter G in gold.
I don’t remember every single detail, of course, but I do remember that there was so much junk strewn about everywhere. Literally thousands of rave party flyers littered the floors of the old building, and old newspapers and various and sundry objects lay all about. One particular hallway I found on the second floor was alight in sunlight; one of the few windowed areas. This seemed to be in some sort of use by vagrants, as the entire hallway was knee-deep in old clothing, ancient record albums (Guy Lombardo, anyone?) and cast-off objects of all kinds. I studied an antique Tiffany-style lamp with half its glass shattered that was laying on the floor at the entrance to the hall.
On other floors, I wandered in complete, and I mean complete, pitch darkness, save for my flashlight beam. I found a room where a rock music video had been filmed at some point (I read about that at the library, too). The room was set up to look like a cave or something.
As I got higher up in the building, things got weirder and weirder. I found a ballroom (one of seven, I later found out) that was filled, no exaggeration, floor to ceiling with old office furniture. Desks, chairs, filing cabinets – all of 40s or 50s or maybe 60s vintage at newest. I found another ballroom that appeared to be the ravers’ favorite, as it was a completely open space. Above me hung the remnants of a crystal chandelier, suspended by a wire. It was here that I nearly took a wall thermostat cover, but thought against it – I felt I’d be, I don’t know, betraying the memory of the place, somehow. And, the idea of weird Masonic curses that are laughable at my keyboard in the light of my monitor seemed much more real and possible within the weighty darkness of that place.
I found another ballroom, this one on the north end of the building. It was another room with windows – big picture windows, with most of the glass blown out. The floor had obviously once been sumptuous parquet tiles, but the tiles had faced decades of weathering, and were now buckled and cracked. As I walked across them, they crackled like a sheen of ice over snow.
Up, up, up, past other creepy little rooms, up to the roof, where I found an impressive view of downtown Long Beach. On my way back down, I found some telling evidence of the building’s former and more recent inhabitants: I found, right in the same vicinity, a 1950’s vintage copy of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and a current, rather dog-eared issue of Playboy.
All this time, my heart was calm, as I worked my way through the passages and hallways of fifty years of neglect. I felt like an Urban Indiana Jones.

But, Indy often faced danger.

After exploring the upper floors to my satisfaction, I began to make my way down to the ground floor from whence I began my journey. Down, down, down the central staircase I traveled, past mouldering heaps of newspapers, old clothes, broken office furniture, the remnants of rave parties, until I reached the second floor, right above my exit. This was the floor with the odd, long, sunlit hallway that was a sea of old clothes and that broken Tiffany lamp.
I decided that one last look down that hallway was in order. I had just made my way into the vestibule leading to the hall, when I heard

CLINK!!!

Startled, I turned. The Tiffany lamp seemed somewhat askance from the way I had viewed it only moments earlier. It was then it dawned on me.

Something had hit the Tiffany lamp, and knocked it over. Something thrown.

With that realization, all the fear that had somehow been exorcised from my spirit came rushing into me in a whirlwind. Dear God, I thought, I might not be alone in here!

I turned and ran past the lamp to the middle staircase, taking the steps two at a time, not wishing to wait on who, or what, had thrown something at that lamp, and, by extension, at me.

I saw the sunlight-framed opening I had entered by at the far end of the first floor, and bolted for the opening into the daylight.

“Sheesh, man, it’s about time!” greeted me. It was the security guard, sitting on a folded chair by the studio van. “We were supposed to be out of here a half hour ago – we were about to lock the place up! Good thing you got out, huh?”

Umm…yeah.

EPILOGUE
To see what’s happening at the Masonic Temple these days, check this out.