Storyworth: Homes (Sweet) Homes
Feb. 12th, 2021 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetDescribe the places you've lived.
Ravena: I spent the first fifteen years of my life living in the parsonage in Ravena, New York, a village of three thousand people twelve miles south of Albany. As a teenager I read an essay once about how every teenager believes they live in the most boring place in the world and I thought, with only a little sense of irony, “But in my case, it’s true!” I asked my mother once how come we never got to move and she laughed and promised that my time would come.
Puebla: For my junior year of high school I was a Rotary Exchange Student, assigned to Puebla, a city of about a million people a couple of hours southeast of Mexico City. I lived with two different families during my time there. It was a difficult year, but taught me a lot and definitely widened my perspective.
Columbia: I started my undergraduate career at Columbia College. My freshman year I lived in McBain, an older dorm a couple of blocks off the main campus, which I chose because I didn’t want to live in the First Year-only housing. My second year I had a single in a suite in Wallach, right in the center of campus.
Fenway House: After my first year at Columbia I went back to Ravena for the summer to help my parents move to the house in Clifton Park that they bought when they retired. Once that was accomplished, I hightailed it to Boston, where I stayed with my sisters in Somerville while helping out with a theatre production at MIT. That led to spending much of my time at Fenway House, an independent living group occupying a Georgian townhouse along the Fenway. For the next couple of years, Fenway House felt like “home,” even when I paid rent elsewhere.
The Restaurant: By the end of my sophomore year, I was ready to leave Columbia. After a summer at Fenway House I got an apartment on Central Street in Somerville with Rachel Mello and Pete Dilworth. We named it after the Arlo Guthrie song and the Douglas Adams novel, inadvertently jinxing ourselves to never having any food in the place. I lost about twenty-five pounds over the course of five months while working retail and making poor life choices.
Wellesley: I transferred to Wellesley College and spent my first term living in Claflin, one of the gorgeous old dorms by the lake. My first room was an odd en suite single tucked inside a gigantic room with its own terrace, but unfortunately I didn’t get along with the other woman sharing this arrangement and she worked out a deal for us to both get singles after the first month. After a summer back at Fenway I moved into Freeman, one of the “new dorms” built in 1953. I spent most of that year commuting between Wellesley and Fenway House several times a week and at the end of it I convinced MIT to let me officially live at Fenway as a Wellesley student and only went out to campus two days a week for classes.
Between June 1988 when I left Wallach and January 1990 when I moved into the 2-4 at Fenway, I switched rooms nine times and got to the point that I could pack all of my stuff in four hours and unpack it in six.
Cognito: Dave, Drea, Rob and I agreed to look for a place to live together, the summer after I graduated. We found a brand new duplex near Sullivan Square with two singles and a large finished basement that Rob and I planned to share. Only then he and I broke up, halfway through the month between signing the lease and moving into the new place. So Drea and I shared the basement and Rob took one of the rooms upstairs. After the first year, the other unit came available and—in a process that I would describe as “working out a deal” and Dave has described as “kicking them out”—we split the household, with Dave and Drea moving next door and recruiting Alex and Len to join them, while Rob and I remained in our original half with Id and Eva joining us from Fenway.
Winslow. After two years in Cognito (get it?) Rob decided to move to California and I agreed to live with my then boyfriend, Alan. We found an apartment on Winslow Ave in Somerville, right around the corner from the Davis T. The apartment included a room with its own bathroom that we rented to couple of different guys—Jonathan Williams and Dave Tames—but Alan and I were mostly focused on each other, for good and ill.
The Ranch: When Alan and I broke up, I moved out with no real plan. Friends of mine had a group house on Linnaean Street with an empty room they let me use for a few months. The house was in flux at the time, with several of the original housemates moving out and others moving in, with varying degrees of rancor and drama. It was clear that staying was not a long term option, but I was very grateful for their hospitality while I sorted out my future. The basement had been renovated in grand style with an 8-person hot tub, cold plunge, sauna, lounge, and gym. I spent a lot of time drifting in the tub, staring at the gold stars on the tiled ceiling, moping in luxury.
Hillside: steve & Tom had been living in a ground-floor apartment Hillside Street on Mission Hill for a few years at that point and when Tom was diagnosed with cancer, steve begged me to move into the vacant apartment on the 3rd floor, along with Id. This was long before gentrification reached the Hill and the place was falling apart. During our housewarming party the porch fell off its foundation, its outer edge suddenly about two feet lower than the door. At night I could often feel my bed shaking and eventually realized that the whole building was swaying in the wind. Then there were the repeated incidents when I thought I heard someone gasping for breath, only to realize—after making Tom come up to look under all the beds a few times—that it was the improperly vented plumbing losing pressure when a toilet flushed in one of the lower units. We paid $789/month for that three-bedroom apartment and when we moved out the landlord raised the rent to $2400.
Berkeley: In 1996 my boss decided to shut down the Cambridge office I had managed and focus on his contract in Germany. I had been more or less single since the breakup with Alan. And then Id decided to move in with his boyfriend. I remembered a conversation with Alicia about possibly being good housemates and called her to see if she were looking that fall. She said she’d love to live with me, but had just accepted a job at the library in Berkely, California. “You don’t wanna look for an apartment in Berkeley with me, do you,” she asked. I thought about it for a weekend and decided why not? We agreed that she would fly out there and find us a place, while I packed our belongings into a UHaul and drove them out. I had many adventures with my friend, Glen, along the way, while Alicia found us the best apartment in the Bay Area. It was the garden level apartment of a Victorian house recently bought by a young couple who planned to renovate it. They had started with the basement, planning to rent that out to friends and setting the rate accordingly, but those friends backed out the morning that Alicia happened to mention to another of their friends that she was searching. So we had a gorgeous, newly renovated three-bedroom flat in a prime location with friendly landlords upstairs for just $1200/month. I lived there for four years: the first two with Alicia, the third with Beth Dart (sister of an MIT acquaintance) and the fourth with Jason. He and I looked all over the Bay Area before deciding he should move in with me, but everything we saw that was remotely comparable was twice the price. If we’d had any idea of returning to that area from London, I think we would have sublet it and hung onto it.
London: Jason had long thought that he would like to take advantage of his company’s policy of letting employees transfer easily between offices to work in the UK and when we decided to get married he convinced me to quit my job and move to London. We found a huge three-bedroom flat in a maisonette on Green Lanes very near Manor House, just across Finsbury Park from the train that would take him up to the office in Cambridge once a week. It was recently renovated and the landlord had insisted that the entire place be painted a bright pineapple yellow. The builders said that he’d wanted even the ceilings yellow, but that they decided that was just too much and “forgot”. It was overwhelming at first, but we soon learned to appreciate it in the dark grey days of a London winter. We had a large deck looking out over a garden that stretched down to the New River—a canal dug in 1613 to bring fresh drinking water to the city and never renamed—so we were surrounded by green in the midst of the city and got to see foxes roaming the garden at dusk. In our two years there we had fifty-three overnight guests and many happy memories.
Arlington Heights: As the time approached for us to return to the States, we agreed that we would settle in Boston, where all of our siblings were living. We were debating whether to rent for a year, or try to buy a house immediately, and Beckie reminded me that she loves real estate and would be happy to help in any way she could. I told her to find us a house and she proceeded to do just that and with a power of attorney and five signed checks she bought 33 Rhinecliff Street. We did fly home to walk through it with the inspector, so it wasn’t quite sight unseen, but she gets all the credit. We lived there, less than a block from the elementary school, until Alice was five years old.
Infinity House: I really wanted to build a deck. In looking into what that would entail, we realized that it would make more sense to first install the ductless air conditioning we’d been considering, and that if we were going to that, we’d want to add the additional floor that the house was permitted to have before that…at which point I suggested that it might be simpler to just buy a different house. We looked at this one, in the heart of Davis Square, but decided it needed more work than we really wanted to undertake and kept looking. But the one thing you can’t change in real estate is the location and eventually we realized we weren’t going to find a better one, so we bought 13 Park Ave and had it gutted and rebuilt to be our dream house…with a deck on the third floor next to my office. It’s on the corner, so it’s on the odd side of Park Ave and the even side of Chandler (which becomes relevant during snow emergencies and street sweeping) and the only number that is both odd and even is infinity, so that’s our name for it, which no one else ever uses, but makes us chuckle.
Where next?
Ravena: I spent the first fifteen years of my life living in the parsonage in Ravena, New York, a village of three thousand people twelve miles south of Albany. As a teenager I read an essay once about how every teenager believes they live in the most boring place in the world and I thought, with only a little sense of irony, “But in my case, it’s true!” I asked my mother once how come we never got to move and she laughed and promised that my time would come.
Puebla: For my junior year of high school I was a Rotary Exchange Student, assigned to Puebla, a city of about a million people a couple of hours southeast of Mexico City. I lived with two different families during my time there. It was a difficult year, but taught me a lot and definitely widened my perspective.
Columbia: I started my undergraduate career at Columbia College. My freshman year I lived in McBain, an older dorm a couple of blocks off the main campus, which I chose because I didn’t want to live in the First Year-only housing. My second year I had a single in a suite in Wallach, right in the center of campus.
Fenway House: After my first year at Columbia I went back to Ravena for the summer to help my parents move to the house in Clifton Park that they bought when they retired. Once that was accomplished, I hightailed it to Boston, where I stayed with my sisters in Somerville while helping out with a theatre production at MIT. That led to spending much of my time at Fenway House, an independent living group occupying a Georgian townhouse along the Fenway. For the next couple of years, Fenway House felt like “home,” even when I paid rent elsewhere.
The Restaurant: By the end of my sophomore year, I was ready to leave Columbia. After a summer at Fenway House I got an apartment on Central Street in Somerville with Rachel Mello and Pete Dilworth. We named it after the Arlo Guthrie song and the Douglas Adams novel, inadvertently jinxing ourselves to never having any food in the place. I lost about twenty-five pounds over the course of five months while working retail and making poor life choices.
Wellesley: I transferred to Wellesley College and spent my first term living in Claflin, one of the gorgeous old dorms by the lake. My first room was an odd en suite single tucked inside a gigantic room with its own terrace, but unfortunately I didn’t get along with the other woman sharing this arrangement and she worked out a deal for us to both get singles after the first month. After a summer back at Fenway I moved into Freeman, one of the “new dorms” built in 1953. I spent most of that year commuting between Wellesley and Fenway House several times a week and at the end of it I convinced MIT to let me officially live at Fenway as a Wellesley student and only went out to campus two days a week for classes.
Between June 1988 when I left Wallach and January 1990 when I moved into the 2-4 at Fenway, I switched rooms nine times and got to the point that I could pack all of my stuff in four hours and unpack it in six.
Cognito: Dave, Drea, Rob and I agreed to look for a place to live together, the summer after I graduated. We found a brand new duplex near Sullivan Square with two singles and a large finished basement that Rob and I planned to share. Only then he and I broke up, halfway through the month between signing the lease and moving into the new place. So Drea and I shared the basement and Rob took one of the rooms upstairs. After the first year, the other unit came available and—in a process that I would describe as “working out a deal” and Dave has described as “kicking them out”—we split the household, with Dave and Drea moving next door and recruiting Alex and Len to join them, while Rob and I remained in our original half with Id and Eva joining us from Fenway.
Winslow. After two years in Cognito (get it?) Rob decided to move to California and I agreed to live with my then boyfriend, Alan. We found an apartment on Winslow Ave in Somerville, right around the corner from the Davis T. The apartment included a room with its own bathroom that we rented to couple of different guys—Jonathan Williams and Dave Tames—but Alan and I were mostly focused on each other, for good and ill.
The Ranch: When Alan and I broke up, I moved out with no real plan. Friends of mine had a group house on Linnaean Street with an empty room they let me use for a few months. The house was in flux at the time, with several of the original housemates moving out and others moving in, with varying degrees of rancor and drama. It was clear that staying was not a long term option, but I was very grateful for their hospitality while I sorted out my future. The basement had been renovated in grand style with an 8-person hot tub, cold plunge, sauna, lounge, and gym. I spent a lot of time drifting in the tub, staring at the gold stars on the tiled ceiling, moping in luxury.
Hillside: steve & Tom had been living in a ground-floor apartment Hillside Street on Mission Hill for a few years at that point and when Tom was diagnosed with cancer, steve begged me to move into the vacant apartment on the 3rd floor, along with Id. This was long before gentrification reached the Hill and the place was falling apart. During our housewarming party the porch fell off its foundation, its outer edge suddenly about two feet lower than the door. At night I could often feel my bed shaking and eventually realized that the whole building was swaying in the wind. Then there were the repeated incidents when I thought I heard someone gasping for breath, only to realize—after making Tom come up to look under all the beds a few times—that it was the improperly vented plumbing losing pressure when a toilet flushed in one of the lower units. We paid $789/month for that three-bedroom apartment and when we moved out the landlord raised the rent to $2400.
Berkeley: In 1996 my boss decided to shut down the Cambridge office I had managed and focus on his contract in Germany. I had been more or less single since the breakup with Alan. And then Id decided to move in with his boyfriend. I remembered a conversation with Alicia about possibly being good housemates and called her to see if she were looking that fall. She said she’d love to live with me, but had just accepted a job at the library in Berkely, California. “You don’t wanna look for an apartment in Berkeley with me, do you,” she asked. I thought about it for a weekend and decided why not? We agreed that she would fly out there and find us a place, while I packed our belongings into a UHaul and drove them out. I had many adventures with my friend, Glen, along the way, while Alicia found us the best apartment in the Bay Area. It was the garden level apartment of a Victorian house recently bought by a young couple who planned to renovate it. They had started with the basement, planning to rent that out to friends and setting the rate accordingly, but those friends backed out the morning that Alicia happened to mention to another of their friends that she was searching. So we had a gorgeous, newly renovated three-bedroom flat in a prime location with friendly landlords upstairs for just $1200/month. I lived there for four years: the first two with Alicia, the third with Beth Dart (sister of an MIT acquaintance) and the fourth with Jason. He and I looked all over the Bay Area before deciding he should move in with me, but everything we saw that was remotely comparable was twice the price. If we’d had any idea of returning to that area from London, I think we would have sublet it and hung onto it.
London: Jason had long thought that he would like to take advantage of his company’s policy of letting employees transfer easily between offices to work in the UK and when we decided to get married he convinced me to quit my job and move to London. We found a huge three-bedroom flat in a maisonette on Green Lanes very near Manor House, just across Finsbury Park from the train that would take him up to the office in Cambridge once a week. It was recently renovated and the landlord had insisted that the entire place be painted a bright pineapple yellow. The builders said that he’d wanted even the ceilings yellow, but that they decided that was just too much and “forgot”. It was overwhelming at first, but we soon learned to appreciate it in the dark grey days of a London winter. We had a large deck looking out over a garden that stretched down to the New River—a canal dug in 1613 to bring fresh drinking water to the city and never renamed—so we were surrounded by green in the midst of the city and got to see foxes roaming the garden at dusk. In our two years there we had fifty-three overnight guests and many happy memories.
Arlington Heights: As the time approached for us to return to the States, we agreed that we would settle in Boston, where all of our siblings were living. We were debating whether to rent for a year, or try to buy a house immediately, and Beckie reminded me that she loves real estate and would be happy to help in any way she could. I told her to find us a house and she proceeded to do just that and with a power of attorney and five signed checks she bought 33 Rhinecliff Street. We did fly home to walk through it with the inspector, so it wasn’t quite sight unseen, but she gets all the credit. We lived there, less than a block from the elementary school, until Alice was five years old.
Infinity House: I really wanted to build a deck. In looking into what that would entail, we realized that it would make more sense to first install the ductless air conditioning we’d been considering, and that if we were going to that, we’d want to add the additional floor that the house was permitted to have before that…at which point I suggested that it might be simpler to just buy a different house. We looked at this one, in the heart of Davis Square, but decided it needed more work than we really wanted to undertake and kept looking. But the one thing you can’t change in real estate is the location and eventually we realized we weren’t going to find a better one, so we bought 13 Park Ave and had it gutted and rebuilt to be our dream house…with a deck on the third floor next to my office. It’s on the corner, so it’s on the odd side of Park Ave and the even side of Chandler (which becomes relevant during snow emergencies and street sweeping) and the only number that is both odd and even is infinity, so that’s our name for it, which no one else ever uses, but makes us chuckle.
Where next?
no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 02:37 am (UTC)I marvel at my short list...how I resolved after college never to move again and I did pretty well with that!
1) Ravena,
2 150 Elm at college, and
3) Park House- 3 rooms at college,
4) Renting the triple decker in Somerville for 9 years,
5) Buying the Cambridge condo for 30 years, and now
6) Woburn!
no subject
Date: 2021-04-21 05:37 pm (UTC)