Playing the Prelude for Pullman Square

#135 / Flood Time Capsule: 2000

Twenty-two years ago today, The Flood was invited by Huntington Mayor Jean Dean to come downtown and entertain folks who gathered in a vacant storefront in the 900 block of 3rd Avenue to hear the latest dream for developing the city’s long-delayed “Superblock.” It was the project that ultimately became the town’s much-loved Pullman Square of today.

Honestly, though, despite Mayor Dean’s enthusiasm —“This one’s happening!” she enthused to readers of The Herald-Dispatch the next morning — listeners on that October 2000 afternoon were anything but optimistic. For 30 years, after all, “superblock” had become a bitter joke in Huntington. The term called to mind the nine-acre tract that was just an ugly, weed-infested parking lot, defying every effort to develop it.

In 1970, for instance, when buildings were leveled on the track bounded by 8th and 10th street, 3rd Avenue and Veterans Memorial Boulevard, a nationally known developer spent two years unsuccessfully seeking tenants for an indoor shopping mall, then filed for bankruptcy, as legendary local historian James E. Casto recounted in his “Lost Huntington” series in The Herald-Disaptch.

Then in 1978, after the civic center was built on the western end of the tract, a group of local entrepreneurs proposed building a hotel, retail stores, an office building, even a TV station.

“It didn’t happen,” Casto noted. “In 1983, a national firm leased the Superblock and started seeking tenants. After two years, it gave up. An off-track betting casino was proposed. It didn’t happen. A 1987 plan for a 20-story office tower and a proposed outlet mall were equally unsuccessful.”

So, “when talk started about yet another Superblock development,” Casto wrote, “many people found it difficult to get excited. They’d been disappointed too many times.”

The Flood’s Own Problems

We in the band didn’t really have an opinion on any of that. “A job’s a job,” Dave Peyton had commented with his ironic grin when he delivered the news that Mayor Dean was inviting The Flood to provide ambient music for this latest announcement of a new deal for The Superblock.

Besides, we had our problems. An hour or two before the gig, we learned that Doug Chaffin, our brand new bass player, would not be joining us. Earlier in the day he had broken his wrist while working on a car in his garage. He would be out of commission for the rest of the year.

Still, the original Flood bunch — Joe, Dave and Charlie — soldiered on, playing a lively mix of fiddle tunes, folks songs and those great old swing tunes that the band lately had begun sampling. It was those latter numbers, incidentally, that attracted a couple sets of especially well-tuned ears. Two Floodsters-to-be were in the room that day.

-- Chuck Romine hadn't heard The 1937 Flood since the previous spring and that latter style of song — “Sunny Side of the Street” and “Up a Lazy River,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “My Blue Heaven” — drew him to the bandstand to chat us up during a break. Chuck once led his own group — The Lucky Jazz Band, a much-loved local Dixieland outfit — and lately he had started to miss making music. He missed it so much, in fact, that two months later, Chuck, with trusty tenor banjo in hand, showed up at our door to sit in at a Flood practice. Chuck joined up and would play with the band for the next six years.

-- Dave Ball -- whom we would rechristen as "Bub" -- was also on hand at the Superblock announcement and would still remember his first exposure to full Floodery when he too was brought into the band in the autumn of 2003 to relieve Doug on bass.

And it all started that October afternoon in an empty store front on 3rd Avenue.

Pullman Square is Born

Of course, that’s not all that started that day. As Mayor Dean predicted, this time it really did happen. Steiner + Associates, a Columbus, Ohio, real estate development company, launched its plan to build a $60 million leisure destination complex with a town square surrounded by retail stores and restaurants. It would be named “Pullman Square,” a shoutout to Huntington’s railroading heritage.

“And when Pullman Square was dedicated in 2004,” Jim Casto wrote, “it put a long-overdue end to the Superblock saga.”

The Flood Gives Its Blessing

A year after Pullman Square opened, The Flood was at the venue for the first time, not for a celebration but for a fundraising. Fifteen days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, we joined other local musicians in a benefit concert at Pullman Square to raise more than $16,000 in disaster relief.

Dave Ball — “Bub,” in Floodlandia — organized the show, the first of a number of Katrina fund-raisers held in the Tri-State Area in the months that followed.

Along with The Flood, the Pullman Square show featured, among other, Big Rock and the Candy Ass Mountain Boys and Dale Jone’s Backyard Dixie Jazz Stompers.

Speaking with The Herald-Dispatch on the morning of the Sept. 7, 2005, benefit, Dixielander Jones said what was in the hearts and minds of many of the musicians that Wednesday night:

"The music that comes out of that place is in my heart,” Dale told Dave Lavender of The Herald-Disaptch. “I have been playing this music for more than 20 years now and it is heartbreaking to see all of the disasters in all of the states along the Gulf. The best we can do from far away is help out. This is just a natural for us."