A bid notice, and the old hall’s last party

In November 1929, weeks after the stock market crash, a bid notice from architect Lamar Q. Cato’s office sought contractors for “a two-room hall and stucco addition to the present hall,” a job that may or may not have been the lodge’s. On December 31 the lodge held its nineteenth-anniversary watch party in the old hall, the last one it would ever host there.

Within three months the lodge would announce a $140,000 temple. The decision to build a major civic building into the teeth of the Depression says a great deal about the lodge’s confidence in its neighborhood.