The Nostalgic Traveler: The Dresser

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Photo by Susan Harlan.

I went to High Point, North Carolina to see the dresser. I had heard it was on the side of the road: a marvel for road-trippers. Visitors describe it on travel sites as fun, hilarious, and whimsical. It is so random, they say. But really, it is a domestic monster.

High Point is known primarily for its furniture industry. In April and October of every year, the High Point Market takes over ten million square feet of the city. The market started out in smaller form around the turn of the century, and now, it is the largest home furnishings industry trade show in the world.

The city is also known for High Point University, a manicured universe that more closely resembles a country club than an institute of higher learning. The university’s president Nido Qubein teaches life skills courses aimed at “Instilling the Entrepreneurial Spirit.”According to Forbes, Qubein has overseen $700 billion in campus improvements, including forty-seven new buildings, four new residence halls, two stadiums, and a tennis complex. So many rooms. So much furniture must be needed to fill these rooms.

As I drove past the retro Krispy Kreme Doughnut sign on North Main Street, I wondered: Do the undergrads at High Point decorate their dorm rooms with Chippendale cabinets? Do they have elaborately carved coffee tables instead of plastic crates from Target? I have no idea. Although the decorative contents of this manicured university are unknown to me, I was determined to see the city’s iconic 38-foot tall dresser with two socks hanging out of a drawer. One is argyle. One is filthy. The socks do not match.

This enormous household object – technically a Goddard-Townsend block front chest – is made of painted concrete that, from a distance, resembles wood. It has shiny brass drawer pulls. The dresser was built by the Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s and renovated and enlarged in the 1990s. It was modeled on a real chest of drawers that is now on view in the city’s Visitor Information Center.

Originally, the huge dresser was referred to as the local “Bureau of Information.” It even has some competition now in nearby Jamestown: an 80-foot high highboy dresser attached to the Furnitureland South Complex. But travel guides still refer to High Point’s dresser as “The World’s Largest Chest of Drawers,” which suggests that it has more of a hold on the local imagination than the newer structure.

I saw the dresser when I turned off Main Street. It sits at a T-intersection of Westwood and Hamilton Streets: Westwood ends when it hits the dresser, its termination marked by a traffic light that hovers over the sidewalk. Hamilton is lined by vast furniture showrooms, their entryways framed by marble columns and arches. Black iron gates are welded to the front of the JEFFCO building. Francesco Molon Furniture stands across the street, its front lawn decorated with ersatz Greek statues of women draped in robes. And the banners that hang in front of TRS Furniture read: Reputation and Discerning. The buildings look exactly like mausoleums.

Several small shrubby trees have been planted at the foot of the dresser: landscaping for furniture. As I walked on the lawn in front of this colossus, passers-by stopped to comment. “Amazing, isn’t it?” one woman said. “It’s really something,” a man offered as he slipped into the building next door. Several other people encouraged my approval.

It is the Platonic ideal of a dresser. If you conjured up a dresser in your mind, this would be it, warped by magnification. I have a dresser in my bedroom, but I’ve never really thought about it before, beyond simply appreciating it for its general ability to perform dresser-like tasks, including storing things and providing a surface on which to place things. It is long and white with six drawers: three on each side. It’s a different style from the enormous dresser. And it’s a normal size.

The High Point dresser destroys your sense of scale, your way of measuring yourself in relationship to the external world. You feel like a doll. You feel what a doll feels, how she feels her size. My mom used to take my sisters and I to a little theme park called Fairytale Land in when we were kids. It opened in the late fifties as a way of capitalizing on the popularity of Disneyland. But in Sacramento, California. The park was a bit worn out and old, shaded with big Northern California trees, and usually abandoned.

There was a slide in the shape of a huge Victorian shoe, lined all the way up with buttons. This shoe was the house of Mother Goose’s Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, a figure overwhelmed by children she semi-starves, beats, and then sends to bed. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. I’ve heard that this story is a political allegory for George II, a fact that only makes it more terrifying, like the shoe itself: an object both playful and fearful.

The World’s Largest Dresser is also a house. It has windows with drawn blinds and, in the back, the front door. No one seemed to be home. There was a small parking lot behind the house, an unexpected revelation that suggested the dresser might actually be an office building. Maybe people sell furniture in this piece of furniture.

Looking up at this thing, I felt incredibly sad, as I did peeking into the windows of the furniture stores, all of which were closed. The endless model living rooms provide visions of what a living room should be, but a showroom is a place no one will ever live.

Why a huge dresser? Why not something else? A table? – Or a giant chair, as in the other nearby furniture-oriented city of Thomasville. Thomasville’s chair recalls the chair of Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann: an object so large that it transforms an adult into a child. Edith Ann was trapped up there in her chair. She would grasp the arms and throw her weight back and forth to rock it. It was an inescapable trap in which she hovered, high above the ground. It kept her apart from the world.

A chair just holds your body, but a dresser is more personal as it holds, and hides, the things you own. You do not go through someone’s dresser drawers. Drawers contain secrets. Letters. Objects that only the owner understands: a feather, a pill box, old tickets held together by a rubber band. If you go through someone’s drawers, you are a transgressor. A snoop. You’re only allowed to go through the drawers of the dead.

Driving to High Point, I had passed a dead deer on the side of the road. He was large, and he had been torn almost in half, but his head was propped up so his open eyes stared right at me. Standing in the shade of this dresser, I wondered how long that deer had been by the road, and whether he would still be there when I drove home.

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