Friday
Dec032010
ARCHIVES: NORFOLK HISTORY
Friday, December 3, 2010 at 12:40AM 
The Monticello Hotel's Cockroach Clock was a local landmark for several decades. "Meet me under the cockroach", men would murmur to their paramours. Paramours abounded in 50's Norfolk; love was in the air. Accountants would sit in their offices, ratcheting their adding machines and staring out the window, dreaming of crinolines. Mayor Finkel would slip out for a "late lunch" and find himself slinking through the lobby of the Monticello, taking in the green velvet armchairs and the cigar smoke, making for the bank of elevators with his heart in his throat. Those were the days.
Reader Comments (5)
But Wally, I was in the Starlight Ballroom in the Monticello for my high school formal "Snowball", wearing a white tulle gown. And eons later I stood alone on the white marble steps of the library across the street with an elderly white-haired lady who had watched it from the same spot afire and burning in the freezing snow storm in 1918. Huge icecycles had hung off the building and firetrucks. And then together we watched it be imploded by the art of perfect and controlled demolition.. And it went up in many puffy clouds of pure white, and fell into its own footprint perfectly... All images of profound purity...
But what happened to the clock?
Rennie's entire story is true. All with photographs.
All the best families kept suites at the Gilbert. Castro the doorman was who you talked to when you wanted to know what was going on around town. I've heard said he was the source of half the content in the Virginian-Pilot.
Looks like a huge bedbug. Probably describes what is in the rooms there.