Read online book Katharine Rice Kriebel - Gargoyles in the Library FB2, DJV, DOC
9781413489064 English 1413489060 People buy derelict houses for a lot of reasons, but one of the less sensible reasons was ours. We decided that the Christmas tree would look great in the library. It does. People often buy derelict houses and fix them up, but most people don't move right into those houses as is and fix them up over many years while living in them. We did. Twice. Most people have the sense not to take major steps like buying derelict houses and moving into them or undertaking wholesale gutting and renovations when they are expecting a baby at any moment. We did. Twice. Our first house was a simple, tiny working-class house. We had to completely gut and redo it to make it really nice, although we lived in it for two years before doing that. Our second is much larger and is filled with the eccentricities of its previous owner including the only Mercer tile façade in the world. People stop in the street and stare at it. Inside we have gargoyles and carved heads and gothic fireplaces. The eccentricities we haven't changed, but the plumbing we had to. And the electricity. And the kitchen and bathrooms. We did all this piecemeal over the years while living in the house with our three sons. The roof leaked, too for 39 years. We love it, but it has certainly been a lot of trouble. My husband bought our little house about the time we met, but we renovated it two years after our marriage when we were expecting our first child. We bought our big house and moved in when we were expecting our second child. We managed to have our third without moving or renovating, but when he was two the termites ate the old kitchen and we had to tear it all up and redo it. He helped paint when it was done. In the fifties most U.S. population movement was to the suburbs, but a few hardy souls opted to be urban pioneers, restoring or remodeling houses in downtown areas sometimes in real slums, sometimes in working-class areas. Our area, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia, never really "went down," as people say: in the apartment houses surrounding the square lived such notables as Eugene Ormandy; the Curtis Institute faced the square, some old-money Philadelphians refused to part with their Delancey Place houses nearby. But most of the gracious row houses lining that and other streets were converted to apartments some attractive, some dingy and the surrounding working-class neighborhoods, with their much smaller houses, were plain and bleak. This area became a hotbed of urban pioneers many of whom were architects who could see the potential in neighborhoods that at that time had little to offer. A few developers shared their vision, buying up whole blocks of little houses and remodeling them to modern standards often cheaply and badly, but attractively enough to bring buyers. The pioneers weren't baby boomers, who came later: they were depression babies, frugal and with very little money. They made do. They developed their own community, with a baby-sitting cooperative, new nursery schools, and a new public school. My husband was one of these pioneer architects. Like most of them, he had no money. Like most of them, he was a do-it-yourselfer. And like many of them, he has been prepared to live in an amazing amount of chaos to reach his vision of what a house should be, dragging his family along. This is the story of that chaos: two houses, three children, life in the city, and forty-five years.
9781413489064 English 1413489060 People buy derelict houses for a lot of reasons, but one of the less sensible reasons was ours. We decided that the Christmas tree would look great in the library. It does. People often buy derelict houses and fix them up, but most people don't move right into those houses as is and fix them up over many years while living in them. We did. Twice. Most people have the sense not to take major steps like buying derelict houses and moving into them or undertaking wholesale gutting and renovations when they are expecting a baby at any moment. We did. Twice. Our first house was a simple, tiny working-class house. We had to completely gut and redo it to make it really nice, although we lived in it for two years before doing that. Our second is much larger and is filled with the eccentricities of its previous owner including the only Mercer tile façade in the world. People stop in the street and stare at it. Inside we have gargoyles and carved heads and gothic fireplaces. The eccentricities we haven't changed, but the plumbing we had to. And the electricity. And the kitchen and bathrooms. We did all this piecemeal over the years while living in the house with our three sons. The roof leaked, too for 39 years. We love it, but it has certainly been a lot of trouble. My husband bought our little house about the time we met, but we renovated it two years after our marriage when we were expecting our first child. We bought our big house and moved in when we were expecting our second child. We managed to have our third without moving or renovating, but when he was two the termites ate the old kitchen and we had to tear it all up and redo it. He helped paint when it was done. In the fifties most U.S. population movement was to the suburbs, but a few hardy souls opted to be urban pioneers, restoring or remodeling houses in downtown areas sometimes in real slums, sometimes in working-class areas. Our area, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia, never really "went down," as people say: in the apartment houses surrounding the square lived such notables as Eugene Ormandy; the Curtis Institute faced the square, some old-money Philadelphians refused to part with their Delancey Place houses nearby. But most of the gracious row houses lining that and other streets were converted to apartments some attractive, some dingy and the surrounding working-class neighborhoods, with their much smaller houses, were plain and bleak. This area became a hotbed of urban pioneers many of whom were architects who could see the potential in neighborhoods that at that time had little to offer. A few developers shared their vision, buying up whole blocks of little houses and remodeling them to modern standards often cheaply and badly, but attractively enough to bring buyers. The pioneers weren't baby boomers, who came later: they were depression babies, frugal and with very little money. They made do. They developed their own community, with a baby-sitting cooperative, new nursery schools, and a new public school. My husband was one of these pioneer architects. Like most of them, he had no money. Like most of them, he was a do-it-yourselfer. And like many of them, he has been prepared to live in an amazing amount of chaos to reach his vision of what a house should be, dragging his family along. This is the story of that chaos: two houses, three children, life in the city, and forty-five years.