Dante DiGenova says he assumed the Jan. 2 evacuation of the storied Northtown Books, which he’s owned for 19 years and worked at for 35, was for caution’s sake. “Dog and keys,” were his only priorities on the way out.
The store opened in 1965 in Northtown and H Street was its third location, though all the records of those early years burned. Immediate shock has been supplanted by the work of creating a manifest of what was lost for the insurance company. DiGenova has marked out a map of the shop in his home and moves through a kind of ghost space to recall items he passed and touched every day at the register and among the shelves. “It sort of forces me to relive and go over everything that was lost,” he says.
“I can go to the site and look at the rubble, and it’s so abstract to me that it doesn’t really affect me,” he says. But at the recent Zombies of Eureka screening he attended with a coworker, the Lost Loves music video shot at the bookstore took him by surprise, opening with a shot of shoes tapping on the checkered floor and the camera panning around the room. “That was a difficult moment for both of us, just seeing it all again,” he says, “everything we had there and how beautiful it was and knowing that it’s gone.”
Patrons and friends felt the loss, too, and the outpouring of donations and good wishes has been a surprise as well. “Jada Brotman set up that Give a Hand site for us, I think the night of the fire,” he marvels, adding people have very generous. “You know when you work a job, it’s a job to you and you don’t really think about the effect it will have on people,” he says. “The notes that people left, it brought tears to my eyes.”
And those messages about what the store meant to them made him determined to reopen. “It almost feels like a home not just to us but to our customers.”
DiGenova says the store has always defied convention, hanging onto books the staff thought were worthy instead of dumping them after six months like so many booksellers. “If it takes three years to sell something, that’s fine … we know eventually someone’s going to come in and be thrilled to find it on the shelf.” He hopes to reopen as soon as possible, at least in a temporary spot, and hopefully with his longtime staffers. He’d like to stay close to the plaza, where he still takes his black poodle Tovi for walks.
DiGenova is already hunting for a new rocking horse like the old one, but it’s proving elusive. Some of his adult customers he saw “as tiny kids on that rocking horse in the store.” It will be tough, but he says, “I love that place and I want to bring it back.”
Owner of neighboring shop Dandar’s Boardgames and Books Doranna Benker-Gilkey (a Journal contributor) says she deals with stress with sarcasm, so when the insurance company asked for a photo of the damage, she sent them one photo of the flame-engulfed shop and another of the resulting rubble with a circle indicating Dandar’s portion. Benker-Gilkey had a good cry alone in the house with their dogs a week ago, “Then, onward,” she says with a grim laugh. But at her first State of the City event last Thursday, sitting in a room full of people who were talking about the fire was difficult. “I didn’t expect it to get to me like that, just seeing the pictures.”
She and husband Dan Gilkey had only moved to H Street from their old location in May, but they were all in. “I’d quit my day job and we were going to grow old there,” Benker-Gilkey says. Dandar’s “is just an extension of us,” she says, explaining the toys and collectibles decorating the space and stored in the back made up Gilkey’s entire personal collection amassed over 40 years. Also lost were their son’s childhood Star Wars costume helmets and the plaster cast mask she made for her late sister. Family photos, her father’s artwork and things to keep “what’s left of the family around” are gone as well, and she expects to feel it keenly again when they move into a new spot without all that. “It’ll be hard, but it’ll be OK,” she says, adding she’s grateful not to have lost any people.
People, Benker-Gilkey says, are the heart of the business, which has become a hub for game nights and connecting with fellow players. With the help of other business owners, they’ve only missed a week of game nights. “Outer Space literally opened their doors to us,” hosting Star Wars Tuesdays and Magic the Gathering Fridays. “Septentrio also stepped forward right away with a general offer,” she says, and now the Magic the Gathering players meet there on Saturdays. Nearby Rain Delay Card Co. is also setting aside a case for Dandar’s to sell cards.
The response to the shop’s GoFundMe and the Give a Hand effort, as well as fundraising by other businesses including PG&E was beyond what she imagined. At first, it felt awkward, Benker-Gilkey says, “We work for money.” But she realized they weren’t alone and so many people were affected. “It’s important to allow people to help you,” she says, “and it’s a reminder we aren’t in this alone. Dan and I didn’t make this store alone, we did a lot of heavy lifting, but it wasn’t going to work without a community behind it.” Still, the thought of the three-day fundraiser coming up makes her swoon a little.
The donations, says Benker-Gilkey, are going to make it so they can set up a new spot, inventory and, most importantly, gaming tables to reestablish their game nights. “We gotta get that back.” Wherever they find a temporary place, the plan is to return to H Street. “We wanna be right back where we were in a new building,” she says, “with sprinklers.”
In September, after losing their spaces at Cal Poly Humboldt’s Stewart Building, Laura Corsiglia, Carol Andersen, Peggy Rivers and her husband Van Shields made a shared studio of a storefront on 10th Street. “It had beautiful light and just a quiet, open space to draw in,” says Corsiglia.
None of the artists were on site when the flames started, but Rivers says, “We got to the fire just in time to see the front of the building fall off.”
“Not only is it a place to create new work, but sadly, also a place to store work,” says Corsiglia, “it was a place that contained a lot of art and a lot of fragile works on paper.”
For some of them, it was the bulk of a life’s work. “I think we’re all still in a certain degree of shock,” she says, and while she’s grateful nobody was hurt, “It’s disorienting to lose so much work.”
“We all lost thousands of paintings,” says Andersen. But knowing she has so many paintings out in the world, especially locally, has been some comfort. In fact, an ongoing exhibition of work by the four artists at the Morris Graves Museum of Art spared some of their pieces.
Shields, who says he’s only recently been able to dedicate himself to making art, laments, “Peggy lost so much more than me. … But her loss is my loss as well.”
Along with the art itself, Rivers’ documentation of a lifetime of shows, and decades’ worth of journals and slides burned. “Nobody died but a part of me died, for sure,” she says. Realizing she had “not one single tool to make anything,” she wanted to give up, “but I didn’t want that to be my story.”
Each of the artists say the community support has been wonderful, not only financially, but emotionally. Andersen says, “I can’t even talk about it without crying. I was overwhelmed. … People in the community and people who collect my work were so generous … it was such a validation.” An artist’s work, she says, is often solitary and she didn’t expect the outpouring.
Echoing the sentiment, Rivers says, “When you’re an artist you’re working alone in your cave and you’re lucky if someone sees it. … but to see that your work is valued,” she trails off. So many people have reached out with love and assistance, she says. “It’s hard to be the recipient of all that love but I’m trying to take it all into my heart.”
Shields says talking through their grief with a therapist has been helpful, “and the community response to take care of everyone in this situation has buoyed us.”
Corsiglia says renter’s insurance will cover the cost of her tools but not lost work. Her husband set up online donation for the group separate sites have gone up as well. “We’re so grateful for all of that and so much mobilization and community,” she says. “It is a deeply creative community and a community with a lot of solidarity and that’s very beautiful also.”
Corsiglia has been drawing at home and making a series on black paper called “Aftermath.” She says, “This fire destroyed so much of our work, but it did not destroy who we are as artists or our capacity to respond to the world by creating art.” Painting is “not always just making something but finding out something.”
Rivers and Sheilds have started sketching again, too. River says, “I’m trying to think about where does my work go from here? … In the midst of this beauty all around us there is this tragedy and I want to put that into it somehow.”
For Andersen, painting has been a balm during difficult times before, and she intends to return to it. “I figure I’ll apply the same energy to this crisis and that will be my way.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in ‘Bigger Than All of Us’.