Rambling on About Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th is supposed to be unlucky. Many skyscrapers have no 13th floor: and none of the buildings in downtown Loonfoot Falls have a 13th floor.

It's not that we're particularly superstitious. There aren't any buildings downtown with more than four floors.

There's even a 13th Avenue South on some old maps, south of the Grimm County Fairground. It doesn't actually exist: although there's still a stub at the end of Fairside Road, going about fifteen feet toward where South 13th would have been.

The street was part of the proposed Southside Addition: a residential zone between the fairground and the Interstate, along the Loonfoot River. Plans for the addition were going smoothly until the 1965 flood.

The Loonfoot River rose almost to the deck of the 12th Street bridge: and entirely covered what would have been the Southside Addition. The Southside Addition was on the council's agenda a week after the food's peak, rejected, and never brought up again.

I don't know that flood was "unlucky," though: if it had happened a couple years later, a lot of people would have lost their homes.

Then there's the Belvedere Union Grand's room 313. Haunted, maybe: unlucky? I'd say not.

There was that fateful Friday the 13th in 1908, when the Bijou Opera House burned down. Indirectly as a result of an anti-superstition club meeting. I've written about that before.

What's the point of all this? I'm obliged to provide 250 words for this column each week. Now I have.