Walkabout: The Care and Feeding of Old Houses, Part 1

This week is a celebration of Brownstoner’s 10th anniversary. Ten years! How time does fly! Instead of a story about a historic Brooklyn place or person, this week’s two Walkabouts are about old houses, brownstones, fixer-uppers and my Brownstoner journey.

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of this story.

I grew up in an old house. I spent 17 years in an old Italianate farmhouse in a small town in upstate New York called Gilbertsville, population 400. The house was built in the 1850s or 1860s, a vernacular Victorian farmhouse with a wraparound porch overlooking a beautiful valley.

We moved upstate from Queens when I was six, and I can still remember the first time we walked into the house. My parents had bought the property, which came with 254 acres, pretty much sight unseen, on the recommendation of my paternal grandmother, who for some never explained reason, had moved up there from Harlem some years before. They paid $10,000 for it. On a mortgage, of course.

I remember the house hadn’t been lived in for years, and the grass had grown so high around it, it was taller than I was. Whoever it was who took us to the house had to chop a path to the door with a scythe. Yeah, just like the one Death carries in most depictions of him.

To a six-year-old from New York City, it was the scariest thing I had ever seen. That is until the six-foot garter snake sidled up to me on the porch on another summer day. But that’s another story. Let’s just say my mother was a mighty ninja warrior, and that was soon one dead snake.

Anyway, the old house we moved into had 14 rooms, a palace to a family that had lived on the ground floor of what had originally been a one-family house in St. Albans. My bedroom there, which I shared with my younger brother, had once been the enclosed porch.

Now in Gilbertsville we had our own bedrooms, with an empty bedroom inbetween us. Space! This house came completely furnished; the previous owners had left rooms full of antiques, including tables, chairs, couches, bedroom sets and a piano. I still have some of them, including my Eastlake bedroom set.

I loved the old stuff, and I loved the house. My brother and I spent years exploring it, finding hidden closets under stairways, built-ins for all kinds of cool purposes and doors that opened up to closed-off walls for additions that were either never built or were torn down.

We explored the woods and fields and outbuildings and barns. The person I am today, the one that loves old houses and the craftsmanship expressed in antiques and traditional construction, was born in that house.

I also learned that old houses needed a lot of repair. As the years went by, a lot of work was put into the house. The most serious repair was to the large flat roof, which, by the time I reached high school, leaked like a sieve.

By that time, we were going through some serious economic hardships, as my Dad got laid off for a while, like many other local people, and we couldn’t afford to do much more than keep repairing the roof with buckets of roofing compound and tar paper. It didn’t really help. The water got in anyway.

By the time I went away to college, I had grown to hate the very distinctive smell of leaking water and soaked plaster and wood.

To this day, that smell takes me back to that house and the feeling of helplessness and the inability to affect change because of the lack of money. And that smell has followed me through almost every house I’ve lived in since, all seemed to be cursed with leaky roofs and persistent water damage.

When I moved to New York City in 1977, I lived for a hot minute with my grandparents, who had long ago come back to the Bronx. My grandfather hated the country. My mother and I ended up renting an apartment in their building, which was a classic six-story, Bronx Art Deco apartment building.

My mom wanted her own house, so we started to look for a house in Harlem. My parents had lived in Harlem when they first got married, and my mom had fond memories of both Harlem and the houses and apartments she had lived in.

We started going to see listings in the neighborhoods she remembered: Striver’s Row, Mount Morris Park, Convent Avenue and Hamilton Terrace — the best of Harlem. Those were my first brownstones, and I was fascinated by the way they were set up and the verticality of city living.

But most of the ones we saw were rooming houses, and had been chopped up, with kitchenettes, closets and partitions everywhere. We knew we’d have to do a lot of work to make them any of them a one-family house again.

So I started doing research. I discovered a magazine called Victorian Homes, and an enterprising collection of articles called Old House Journal, printed by a guy named Clem Labine in Park Slope. His first efforts were a newsletter of four or six pages, with holes punched in them so you could collect them in a three-ring binder.

He was part of a growing movement to take back the housing stock of the city; the row houses and the brownstones. The techniques of restoration and his discoveries of new/old products would be the beginning of his new career. Today the magazine is still going strong.

Back then, in the late ’70s, early ’80s, they practically had to reinvent the wheel. There were very few vendors making old house products. Hardly anyone was still making tin ceiling, or fixing period lighting, or doing plasterwork. Wood stripping was also new territory.

New-old products had to be reintroduced, and the methods of restoring these old houses had to be reinvented. You think it’s hard to find sympathetic old house contractors now? That’s why so many people back then did it themselves.

Most of the people renovating the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Chelsea were not rich. That didn’t come until much later.

Many were just middle class folk who invested in neighborhoods no one was really interested in, and had been redlined and consigned to ethnic and racial minorities and those who just refused to leave. People were heading for the suburbs, not the city.

There was a great spirit of doing it yourself back then, and almost everyone was learning a myriad number of tasks that hadn’t been done in years. Then they were writing books and magazine articles about it, and watching the movement grow.

People were once again discovering the beauty of natural woodwork, stained glass, period fixtures and built-ins, and the craftsmanship and beauty of old houses. Photographs of brownstone details and the houses we saw in our search just made us want a house even more.

The more people were doing, the more they were writing, and the more old house information was published in books and magazines devoted to the subject. I bought everything I could get my hands on, and absorbed it all.

I knew that by the time we had a house, I would be ready to restore that puppy. My mom and I could do what we could, and know enough about what we were doing to hire people to do whatever we couldn’t do. Bring on the houses!

We saw a lot of houses in Harlem in the two years we looked. We saw some amazing properties. We also saw some horrors. I know now that the row house architecture in Harlem is subtly different than Brooklyn. Many more of the houses in Harlem are five stories, and some of them are absolutely huge, especially those on Lenox Avenue and around Mt. Morris Park.

The history of Harlem had also shaped the housing stock. I don’t think we saw a single house that wasn’t a rooming house, or SRO. In spite of that, most of them were still dripping with details; the landlords had merely covered them up with partitions and sheetrock.

A lot of them were also heartbreaking. I had no idea that people could live in such cramped conditions, with mothers and several children, or old people with their entire lives packed into a single brownstone room.

Especially for the older people, the fireplace mantels would be covered with photographs of generations of relatives and children; the weddings and the births a reminder of the passage of time. A television would often be their only companion.

Often, the room would be only large enough for a double bed, an easy chair, and a small table. Sometimes the rooms smelled of talcum powder and rose perfume, other times, poverty and incontinence.

My mother and I would thank the people for allowing us into their homes, and we’d be silent for blocks afterward. Neither of us wanted to be the ones who tossed these people into the street.

Once, we were looking at a brownstone in Central Harlem, and we entered a room of a tenant who happened to be out at the time. The room was neat as a pin, the bed made, and the small room filled with furniture that should have been in a larger space.

On the mantel were photographs of a black woman with various Hollywood stars, many of them quite recognizable. They filled the mantel and were everywhere in the room.

It turned out that this SRO room was the home of Butterfly McQueen, best remembered for her role as Prissy in the 1939 movie “Gone with the Wind.” She was now an elderly woman, and had been involved in theater and movies for most of her life.

She was usually typecast as a mammy or maid, roles she longed to escape, but paid her rent. She was living here in Harlem, in a room surrounded by the photographs of the rich and famous.

We couldn’t say much after that, either. We decided to expand our search to Brooklyn. My mother had lived in Bedford Stuyvesant for a while as a child. We’d look there.

Next time: We move to Brooklyn. Twenty years in Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights brought me round the bend to Brownstoner.com. Finding my voice on a local blog made me a regular commenter, and a little knowledge led to a new career. So how did a blog about Brooklyn figure into the grand scheme of things? And is any of it really even remotely important in the world of mega-million houses today? The story continues, next time.

(Photo of Gilbertsville, N.Y. S.Spellen)