(A drawing of the enchanted Grand Midway Hotel by Paul Kazupas when he lived in this room.)

There is a sign-in book collecting guest letters over the years. It includes this one from Jonathan Rabkin:

Sept. 4, 2003

This place is a lot like PURGATORY.
It is between Heaven and Hell.
The music of creation floats through its halls.
The reek of decay sits on its walls.
You can linger in either.
And the only thing that you have to DO
is remember that each moment
the choice is yours.

-Jonathan Rabkin

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Our first year here I often associated our hotel with the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan, with the hotel being the "stately pleasure-dome", "Alph, the sacred river" being the Johnstown Floods, and "the caverns measureless to man" being the endless miles of mines beneath this coal mining community. Our early experience was just that enchanting.

KUBLA KHAN
Or, A Vision in a Dream, a fragment

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.