Hall of the Above: A Behind-the-Scenes Chat with Daniel Castor

I stopped into the former @Seed Bank on Sunday afternoon and met with Daniel Castor, lease holder and steward of the building he affectionately calls his "pet brontosaurus. Daniel is an architect by training, a self-described part academic, part artist, part architect, with 25+ years of single-family residential work out of his architecture office in Mill Valley. Daniel had thought of the name "Hall of the Above" before he had a space. It lived in a sketchbook for years as the kind of sacred space he might one day design, a place where the iconographic language is universal, not co-opted by one tradition. The name nods to looking up, to the sky, to the shared sense of awe that crosses every belief system. Then, on his way back from a business development meeting in Petaluma one afternoon, he drove past the For Lease sign. He then came back with his wife Jennifer Jerde, stood in the upstairs window looking out over the main floor, and just knew. Three years and a heroic renovation later (made possible by the late Rich Desmond, the contractor who carried the project through his own cancer diagnosis), the building is theirs to steward through a five-year lease with an option to renew. Hall of the Above resists a tidy description, just the way Daniel likes it. The name is also a play on "all of the above," and the venue lives up to it. They’ve hosted weddings, salsa nights, swing dancing, country line dancing, a Sonoma-wide mayors' conference, the Petaluma Women's Chorus (starting weekly rehearsals in August), a 500-person Throwback Prom for Valentine's, and a centennial birthday party for the building itself complete with a 1926 Model T parked out front. His All Hallows Halloween party draws a serious crowd. Daniel walked me through every corner, including a few that most visitors never see: the elevator, the roof with its restored flagpole (rescued by a real-life "steeple jack" whose father and son share the trade), the attic where he built a pulley system to hang his geometric sculptures, and the basement with its original wallpaper and his ever-growing collection of vintage thermoses. The attic peek is probably only for those who are into seeing a building's skeletal system, as I am. We crouched down and balanced on a wood plank to take it in. Daniel's bookkeeper of 15 years, @Diane Schlactus, lives a few blocks from Hall of the Above and has become its day-to-day heart. She fields the inquiries, runs the events alongside Daniel, and helped him say yes to the building in the first place when he was second-guessing the whole leap. He's quick to admit he hasn't broken even, and equally quick to point out how much fun he's having. He still designs the events, builds the bars, makes the paper sculptures that hang overhead, and writes all his own party copy. Daniel is generous with his time and his vision, and Hall of the Above is a true labor of love. Learn more at hallofabove.com. 📷: Porches team ♦️♦️♦️ This is an ongoing series from the team about local community members. If you have any recommendations of who we should meet, please message in the comments!