Vertical House
(Corner of Hate and Murder, Central)

Given the decrepitude of the Hate Street area and the present occupation by Leaderguard Security and the New Scripture Mission it seems inconceivable that Vertical House is the self same building as that commissioned by the prosthetic limb millionaire Otto Goetz who told Hilary Spens to "make me a waking dream". As Wentz wrote in the Spring 1924 edition of Kunst und Stijl : " the penthouse suite is Spens' most sumptuous concoction. Every surface is covered with trompe l'oeil cartouches of exotic nudes intricately wrought by burmese craftsmen from porphyry, jasper, malachite, zebra wood, shagreen, abalone shell, bakelite, ivorine, giltwire and silverleaf. The south wall is a folding screen of ground glass by Lalique in verdigrised bronze which gives out onto a terrace paved in Venetian tesserae, screened with bamboo and horsetail ferns surrounding an oval swimming pool fed by a replica of the Neri fountain."

More notorious was the basement cockpit decorated with a Toltec frieze stolen from the ball court at Tula. In his diaries Wyndham Lewis recalls an evening "where I lost a thousand pounds in a minute, five hundred on the useless bird itself and the rest in bets to Ottoline, Winston, Aleister and a preposterous American called Hemingway who kept pulling off his shirt and offering to fight 'anyone of you faggots'. Churchill's luck with the birds is too depressing, even Goetz had to pay up though I don't suppose he cares."

Otto lived in his dream for less than a year. It fell to his wife Marissa (nee Mary Shrub, an entertainer from Scranton NJ) as part of an unprecedented divorce settlement after Goetz was arrested and imprisoned for the savage disfigurement of a transexual prostitute in Guildford. His release on appeal failed to clear his name and he was last seen standing at the bow rail of the night packet to Boulogne.

With sole custody of Max - their only child - an annual settlement of half a million pounds and twenty six Maltese terriers, Marissa retired from the world. Repeated efforts by Otto's sister Mitzi to see Max were all rebuffed. Mitzi recalled in later years the one occasion on which she gained entry to Vertical House during Marissa's occupancy: "I only got as far as the entrance hall where the stench was indescribable, floors and walls were caked in excrement, hampers from Fortnums and Harrods littered the hall, their spilled contents rotting and heaving with maggots. Swarms of flies filled the air while hordes of deformed and filthy little dogs ran barking and snarling from room to room. Marissa was emaciated and filthy, naked beneath a ragged greatcoat, she told me that Max was unwell and that I couldn't see him today. She began to sing "Rock of Ages" and then turned on me in a fury, hitting me repeatedly with a length of electrical flex."

There was no trace of Max when police, acting on Mitzi's suspicions, broke into the house two weeks later. Marissa was taken to Dr Klebers institution in Switzerland where after many attempts she finally succeded in killing herself by strangulation with an artificial hand.

Mitzi sold Vertical House to Aram Teggassian who restored it to something of its former glory, but with the occupation he was arrested and shot, the house became a billet for officers of the Security Police and was gutted by fire during the liberation.

Toby Oakes