Manor: Here today, gone on the morrow

by cory saul
features editor

In this house of quirks, I’m a stiff. Below me is a makeshift bunk bed bolted to the bedroom wall. Above me is an attic fort of sheets. I sit with a Moleskine and pen, watching Dane Cardiel and Sean Sand chop vegetables. Chicken curry. I just met them.
They’re feeding me.
That part is important.
~~~
Before, when Dane was giving the tour, he showed me a bedroom that used to have trinkets and ornaments hanging from the ceiling, and he showed me the garden, now overgrown and untended. A couple people have already moved out.
Once in the back yard they had a two-person play that ran for three nights. Much-needed overflow seating was at the bottom of the empty concrete pool. They had a carnival-themed fundraiser for a friend’s knee surgery. An engagement party. A bachelor party. Filmed multiple movies. Held countless concerts.
He tells me all this without smiling. The atmosphere is apocalyptic.
In the large family room of the house known as the Manor, they fill me in. For more than two years, Sean Sand (known affectionately as “Papa Sean”) had been paying rent to the wrong person. The previous owner of the Manor was renting out a property that he no longer owned. It had been foreclosed. Now a real estate company was coming to them, claiming they had bought the house and that those living in it were to vacate the premises.
Tenant Deleir Georges puts it bluntly: “Our time at the house is coming to an end.”
But they’re still there. Eight in all. Those who remain are not being stubborn, nor are they just desperate. Finding another place to live wouldn’t be too difficult. They aren’t fighting for an ideal or eager for a standoff. No, something else is keeping them there.
~~~
I ask them what the Manor means to them and it turns into story time.
Sean, a 2007 PLNU grad, tells me the house has done its fair share of dumpster diving.
“It was 5 a.m. and we needed to make breakfast, so we went to a place we knew we could find eggs,” he says. “We ended up finding four cartons of orange juice, a full thing of cinnamon rolls, plenty of eggs and some raisin bread. We made a full breakfast for 15 people, and they had no idea where it came from.”
I wonder briefly where they got the ingredients for the chicken curry.
Senior Jeff Allen recounts his first night as a resident of the Manor.
“There were tons of tomatoes growing in the backyard, so me and a friend decided to make tomato soup,” he says. “We picked them and boiled the tomatoes and everything. It tasted like dishwater.”
It’s Dane’s turn. The 2010 PLNU grad takes me to the pantry and leads me up a stepladder to the attic. Icicle Christmas lights hang from the rafters, surrounding draping sheets and thin cots set up in a row.
He sits with his back to the living room’s brick chimney and says, “We were having a going away party for Andrew [Gumm]. Late in the night, after many of the guests had left, we shared stories about his time at the house with us. When we were finished, he spoke, talking for a while about every person in the room, saying what they meant to him. Then he said he had a surprise for us and gave us the end of a thread and told us to follow it. It took us all around the house, into the backyard and even up on the roof. Finally it took us back inside and into the pantry. We climbed up and found this.
“It took him nine months to build it, hammering plywood for a floor and making insulation. And we had no idea. He kept it a secret until that night.”
~~~
In a relatively short amount of time, the Manor became known as a place of creative expression.
Dane currently runs a journal of creative arts called Manor House Quarterly. Its third issue, due this spring, will be tied together with the theme of “Space.”
2009 PLNU alum (and Manor alum) Andrew Gumm is an actor and writer. Aside from putting on a play in the backyard during his time at the house, he starred in a short film by friend Bryan Bangerter called “Repeat After Me.” The piece, which was filmed entirely at the Manor, won Best Comedy at the 2011 International Independent Film Festival.
Now living in Nashville, Tenn., Gumm wrote about the environment of the house via e-mail.
“As a household of wayward 20-somethings, we had lengthy conversations about inner architecture; meaning, what the interior aspects of our personalities and souls would look like if they were expressed in an exterior fashion,” he wrote. “Sean Sand’s interior architecture would look like a father’s well lived-in den, Wes Bruce’s would be a house on stilts somewhere where he could see the northern lights. Slowly, we let that interior architecture spill out into the house around us, until it was like we were haunting the place with our own ghosts. We gave each other encouragement in pursuing all the mad tangents that our wilder sides were drawn to.”
Even with its days limited, the Manor’s walls hang heavy with expression. Paintings, photographs, collages, books, records and wall ornaments surround us.
Dane says the tenants inspire each other.
“I came without much confidence, but this place is full of people who push each other to just go for it,” he says. “They are who they are without question, and they make you feel comfortable in your own skin.”
“It’s a place of creativity, conversation, and being a part of something,” says Sean.
The people are their palette and the house is their canvas.
~~~
When I arrived at the Manor, I saw a hand-written note on the front door. “We are current paying tenants. We rent from our landlord. Please contact him regarding any further info. You can get his information through the court system.”
I knocked, and yells came from inside telling me to come in. After getting acquainted, they confessed that they were nervous when they heard my knock.
“Only the people who are trying to evict us knock,” said Jeff Allen.
They’re hesitant as I take notes, but it isn’t long before the walls break down and I’m just a regular guest. A stranger at home in moments.
“There is kind of this effortless understanding of hospitality,” says Jeff.
He recounts the story of a man who came to tell them to vacate the premises. After he was finished telling the tenants to leave the property, he went out to his car, but the battery was dead. Jeff and then-tenant Ethan Linstrom, a senior, ended up giving the man a ride to an auto parts store.
Senior Josh Rap says he was hesitant when he moved off campus to the Manor.
“I lived in the dorms for three years, and I had to move off campus to save money,” Josh says. “I was nervous I’d lose out on that community, you know? But today I feel a bigger sense of community than I ever did in a dorm.”
Deleir Georges, a 2011 SDSU grad, talks about how the Manor has become associated with the arts, but that isn’t why it is special to him.
“We’re not making art, but community.”
~~~
Only a few of us are left at the table. We’re talking about the art scene in San Diego. Jeff and Dane talk about what needs to happen to make an environment where the arts can be fostered.
In the end we agree that it’s about creating a community of people inspiring one another, artists who challenge one another to improve, to do their best.
I look at the paintings and drawings stuck to the walls around me. They’ll most likely be up for only a few days more. Soon the walls will be stripped, spackled and repainted.
For San Diego, a community like that would be priceless. It would be communion. It would be competition. If such a thing is fostered, even if its existence is fleeting, there is no limit to what its artists can do.