Open Houses

When it comes to open houses in Crocus Hill and Ramsey Hill, the ones that real estate agents put on, I have always been a voyeur. Unless the previous occupants had decamped with absolutely every possession, I have taken a guilty pleasure in roaming among other people’s things. A few decades of this harmless brand of voyeurism have taught me several things.

Back in the 70’s, it seemed, open houses revealed families in decline. The large frame houses that had served to raise large families (how did they do that with a 60 amp service, anyway?) were turning over. On the dressers were lots of black and white photos of young men in uniform. They stared out at me with jaunty confidence. But they had moved out. Oh, maybe the youngest child was still at home, but in those cases where I knew the family, it seemed like the youngest had received the dregs of the gene pool. Something heroic or at least substantial had been lost.

Open House at Garrison Keillor’s

I showed up at one open house in Crocus Hill and met the woman who was the seller. Apparently, she couldn’t stay away, as most sellers who are still in the house do. She was eager to explain that she had bought the house from Garrison Keillor, whose lasting contribution was to install a substantial sauna in the basement. I recalled how he used to describe St. Paul as the “city of private lives” and how the people were so civilized that they didn’t acknowledge him when he went for a walk. Well, some people, anyway. There was that kerfuffle when the Pioneer Press printed the address of Garrison’s newly purchased house in Ramsey Hill, which apparently prompted thousands of fans to drive out-of-town visitors past the place. Garrison raged at this breach of an unwritten rule about printing the addresses of local celebs. He lit out for the territory of Western Wisconsin, at least for several years.

Back to the woman selling Garrison’s former house. Even better than the sauna was a photo she produced of F. Scott Fitzgerald standing in the front yard. It must have been 1922, when Scott and Zelda rented the house across the street for six months or so, before moving on to Dellwood.

Most of the houses I have passed through were dumps, or at least had seen a lot of hard wear. It takes some imagination to see how they could be restored to something like their original condition. There was a Summit Avenue place I saw recently, for example. You might call it a mansion if it were not in such tough shape. A million dollar fixer upper, as it were. The rooms were empty, except for some boxes in a second-floor bedroom. In one box were framed certificates, including one admitting the house’s former owner to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. I had heard of this man, a prominent attorney in town, and here was proof of his exalted legal standing. But it was surrounded by an Ozymandias feeling, since the house was so decrepit, so tattered and worn out.

So many houses were like that, except not on the grand scale of this one. In every one I think about this memento mori aspect, the tendency of all things toward entropy, which in this case means dilapidation, painted-over wallpaper (why didn’t people strip wallpaper, anyway? Shoe molding that had long ago been ripped out to accommodate wall-to-wall carpeting that was now threadbare or missing. Hideous bedrooms with loud pink or green walls. Ceilings sporting nipples that once held lighting fixtures but were long gone. Peeling paint everywhere. Had the owners once been proud and prosperous? Had the family business fallen on hard times? Had someone taken to drink and let his business decline? Had the servants been dismissed, and had the elderly couple stayed on, living in just a couple of rooms, with the rest of the house shut up and moldering about them? It was easy to fashion a narrative to explain what one saw.

Of course, not all houses were like this. Some were marvelous renovations. Aga cookers, Subzero refrigerators, beautifully restored pantries with zinc counters and windowed cabinets holding china and crystal. One such house in my neighborhood had been lavishly and beautifully renovated, and the owners invited the neighbors in.

On the second floor, a small bedroom had been combined with a small bathroom, to make a much larger new bathroom. There was more than enough room to swing the proverbial cat, and the fixtures and accessories were perfect. One elderly neighbor gasped when she saw it. “It’s not Crocus Hill,” she said, and I knew what she meant.

The old-money people in the neighborhood prided themselves on not being ostentatious. They might have big houses, but they didn’t spend a lot to improve them. Their kitchens often looked like not much had been done since the 20s or 30s, for example. Perhaps that was because there was still someone cooking for them. Or perhaps it was just Olympian indifference. Better to use the money for a favorite charity, it seemed. I was in one such house for a small benefit concert once. It’s an enormous brick pile, where the drapes in the living room were tattered, the walls had probably been papered when FDR was president, and the kitchen looked like time stood still around 1910.

There is something quite romantic and admirable about the people who owned these places. Not the least of their virtues is that they gave some cover to those of us who were simply too impecunious to make improvements to our own old houses. But I fear those old-money folks are dying off, and taking their protective cover with them.

Antiwar Protesters at Macalester

On Sunday, I went for a long walk, which took me down Summit Avenue past Macalester College. There was a small group of demonstrators holding signs about how bad war is and how good peace is. There was nothing on the signs about the Russian aggression against Georgia, however. I thought it would be fun, in the spirit of Protest Warrior, to join the group holding a sign that said "Peace at Any Price" and then in smaller letters, "even at the price of war." It''s a quote from Chesterton, and I savored how the demonstrators might gasp for a half-second, in the manner of the AFLAC duck reacting to Yogi Berra, before descending on me in an unpacific manner.