Steps to Niedermeyer Building, Cherry Street

Steps to Niedermeyer Building, Cherry Street

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
January, 2011

These steps belong to a building that has known many names.  From a women’s academy serving as the nucleus for Stephens College, to the Cottage Hotel, to the Gordon Hotel, to the Niedermeyer Apartments, and now Rooms on Cherry, this edifice has endured for 188 years in downtown Columbia.  This photograph was made in 2011, about 175 years into the Niedermeyer’s long and storied career as one of downtown Columbia’s most cherished and revered buildings.  A building that has hosted meetings and dinners, housed teachers and their students, served as a rooming house and an apartment complex, and yes, a building that did indeed host Mark Twain for a singular and historic night in June 1902.  When I made this photograph, I was fascinated by the curvature of the stairway leading up to the building from Cherry Street.  This kind of architectural detail is a graceful and inviting component of the building’s entrance, and a creative alternative to the usual geometry of concrete steps.  The stairway has a handrail running down the middle, creating an avenue of ingress on the right side, and a means of egress on the left side of the steps.  The brick exterior of the equally historic Hall Theatre looms just beyond the snowy tree, eighty years younger than the Niedermeyer and currently empty.