Saturday, April 2, 2016

A to Z of Grave New World 2016: B is for The Brownstone

Welcome to a Grave New World, where humans rub shoulder to shoulder with the monsters from folklore.




The Brownstone is social club on 8th Street in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The club was founded to offer a place to share and study theosophy in 1883 by Ramona Roebling-Taft and her brother, Tad Roebling. It became a sanctum for the psychic twins, Lana and Lora Dunlap and the romanian vampire, Cezar Sala, soon after and eventually became the preeminent center for occult study in the Midwest by 1886.

By 1889, the rooms above the club became the home for Tad and Cezar, who had fallen in love, which infuriated Ramona's husband, Oscar Taft. While the Roeblings has more money than the Tafts, Oscar managed all of their money and the only reason he didn't cut Tad off completely, was due to fear of the family name being drug through the mud.

After a supposed demonic possession and volatile exorcism in which Lana Dunlop perished in 1891, the club began to quickly lose favor in the waning days of the occult fad that had moved through the U.S.

While The Brownstone remained open, by 1896 Tad had passed away due to pneumonia, with Cezar refusing to ruin his beloved's soul with the taint of his vampirism.  This caused Ramona, in a feat of pique, to demand the vampire leave her city and made her sell the establishment, soon after. 

It remained open as a public house, passing through numerous owners until 2002.

In 2011, as part of the cities efforts to renew the downtown scene, Cezar bought the building and decided to draw on upon The Brownstone's theosophic heritage, his vampirism, and a renewed era of monster chic.

Since then, The Brownstone has become all the rage and has drawn attention from famous humans and inhumans, alike.
With luminaries such as supermodel, weretiger, and ecology activist, Isha Jain and Dr. Emeril Lake, a favorite guest of Oprah Winfrey, who has spent the last two decades researching a cure for vampirism.

Rumors even claim that the vampire, Cezar has been reunited with his lover Tad, now a ghost haunting the sight.

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Monster Monday: Obstrevoi for Shadowdark

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