45th Street Digs

This is the house I live in. It's been my residence than for more years than any other house except for my family's home where I spent most of my early years. I've live here for one tenth the life of the house.

The house stands on a section once called Satterly Heights, but now called Spruce Hill. The temporary Satterly Hospital stood here during the American Civil War to treat the Union Army wounded. The current name is for a spot three blocks North, where Spruce Street reaches a peak and one can see the skyline to the East. The name has nothing to do with spruce trees.

The house was built around 1902, and for roughly the first 25 years of its life, there was no row of houses facing it from across the street. That land had been owned by the Twaddell family since just after the Civil War, so the view was probably trees and some grassy areas. The Twaddell house was a stone's throw from this doorstep.

The interior of this particular "Victorian twin" (as it's called) is very unusual because it was originally built to be a rooming house rather than a single-family dwelling like all the other Victorians. There is a bathroom for each of the six bedrooms and one on the ground floor. That means three waste stacks need to be maintained and seven sets of plumbing fixtures as well. That makes the place expensive to maintain.

I first movarrived in 1989 and stayed here four and a half years. In those days it was owned by a retired pair of university professors and managed by a local realtor. By "managed" I mean that they collected the rent and responded to big emergencies such as when the heating oil was delivered into the wrong pipe and the whole basement became a lake of stinking petroleum, and when they had bars installed on all the ground floor windows after a break-in. Once they had this same bathroom refurbished that I have again now, but after all the years between, its shower has given up and needs replacement. I use the one down the hall. I left in 1993 and lived elsewhere --mostly nearby --for a dozen years. I've been back again since the fall of 2005.

One of my housemates, Richard, served as the point person between the tenants and the landlord in those earlier years. Rich first moved in in 1980 and by the late 1990s he was so well settled and had accumulated so much stuff and enough cats that he dreaded the idea of moving. When the University of Pennsylvania started investing tons of money in the neighborhoods near its campus, Rich, a longtime Penn employee, got a mortgage loan and snagged the house.

At that point Rich became the landlord. The university offered a generous home improvement insentive program, but Rich, unlike thousands of others in his position hereabouts, did not avail himself of it. The house has deteriorated from being one of the better-looking houses on the block to being the embarassing, dreary-looking wretch of the street. Of the seven bathrooms, three are fully operational now. Where I remember there being a full compliment of six tenants and a lively house, I am now the sole tenant, and of course there are six spoiled cats as well. No use is made of the attic (which it typically turned into an expensive rental apartment), nor of the full basement. The unoccupied rooms that could be rented are used to store absolutely useless junk, mostly abandoned years ago by tenants who moved out.

The back yard has had periods of use during its 110 years, but when i returned here in 2005 the vines and leaves had swallowed it, and so I dug out the brick patio and cut away the overgrowth to the surprise of the then-tenants who had never known any of it.

The front porch and little garden in this picture have also been revived by me and (occasionally) friends of mine. It's not a proper front yard but seven years ago, the bush and vines were enveloping the whole front and side of the house. Old litter sat in the little garden plot and vines were colonizing the sidewalk. The post and handrail between the twin porches has been dead, useless, and ugly for ages.

As anyone who knows me and this house can see, there are reasons I might wish to live elsewhere. All of that, however, is for another blip. Meanwhile, Here I Am!

I am grateful to all of you, my fellow blipsters, for all your great posts and your comments on mine. These 365 blips have been the first time I have ever kept a journal for more that a few weeks, and it has become a rewarding and important part of my daily life. I hope this continues for many years to come.