Hitting the dance floor at hall of the above

As you may have seen, there has been a flurry of dancing events added to the Hall of the Above calendar the second half of this year. Part of our dream of opening this gorgeous building back up was making it a space for the community to gather. And what better way to gather is there than dancing?

However, the road to get here wasn’t smooth—it was quite literally uneven, which you simply cannot have when it comes to dancing.

When our building first opened as the Sonoma County National Bank in 1926, a photograph of the building in its pristine state shows a marble floor lined on either side with marble half-walls and brass “cages” that separated bank tellers from customers. 

At some point, the half-walls and cages were removed as part of an adaptive re-use of the building. Demolition of the flooring behind the half walls must have been significant, because travertine tiles were added to cover the damage. This created a one inch step between the original marble floor in the center of the space and the Travertine flooring to the sides. 

1” might not seem like a lot, but the transition strips that had been installed as part of the renovation were trip hazards and did not meet current building codes. 

Here you can see the transition strips between marble and the travertine tiles on the sides

We knew when we took over the building that we had to level the space, but were faced with an awful choice. To save the original marble floor in the center, we would need to remove the Travertine tile at great expense, not knowing what we would find underneath.  The more sensible option was to raise the flooring in the center of the room, but this would mean covering the original marble floor. After extensive discussions with our contractor, we made the decision to say good bye to the original floor. However, we did find a way to install the new floor over it so that if in the future someone wanted to remove it, the original floor would be undamaged. 

Now, the entire floor of the Hall is level, and the new center area rests on a layer of plywood.  The new surface has been getting rave reviews at our many dance events, and we now realize in hindsight that the marble floor would have been a terrible surface for dancing! A happy ending to the story. We hope there are many, many more nights of dancing to come.