The Story of an Ordinary House

 

 

     I have been living in the same place for such a good while that I feel by now I owe the house a few words.  Every building, since it embodies aesthetic judgements, may be read like a work of art, though, if it has been remodeled over the years, it may resemble more the layering of old Troy or a medieval palimpsest than an objet d’art which is fixed after its completion. 

     Patricia and I had always been renters and had moved about in roughly six-year intervals for the first half of our lives – the West Coast, the Mid-West, the East --   before coming to the Hudson Valley, an hour north of New York City.  Due to chance circumstance (a job offer for my wife) we ended up in Goshen, the county seat of Orange County, a place where there are no oranges, though many orchards of apples, and there lingers only a faint reminiscence of a seventeenth century prince named William of Orange, whose name, of course, had itself nothing to do with citrus fruit.

     We looked for an old place, eschewing the treeless and sidewalk-less developments where dogs will bark madly from inside their picture windows at the rare passer-by who ventures to stroll in front of their territory.  Such homes are common on the outskirts of Goshen, and are popular with most of the younger set, but in the village’s center one finds the style of an earlier era, or rather of several earlier eras.  The town offices occupy a building a part of which had been the 1773 Farmers’ Hall Academy where Noah Webster briefly taught, the village hall was built in 1816, a track for trotters still functions that had opened in 1838, and the 1841 Greek Revival courthouse is still in use not far from a police station housed in an 1867 former New York and Erie railway station.  In the village a good share of the homes are over a hundred years old, historic by American standards.

     After a year of searching we bought a house built in 1892 in what is called the “folk Victorian” style, lacking the showy towers of Queen Anne and Italianate styles and the mansard roofs of the Second Empire homes, but spacious with four bedrooms, a full basement, and a walk-up attic.  Its very lack of pretension, its ordinariness, marks its value as an index of late nineteenth century small town upstate New York taste.  Once it boasted the era’s usual gingerbread: porch trim and brackets, gable treatments and corbels, but all these ornaments were removed during the 1970s when the house underwent major changes, including acquiring a cover of siding.  In the interior the pocket doors between entrance hall, living room, and parlor were dismantled, and two panes of stained glass removed.

     The loss of decorative elements is not, however, the sole alteration that the modernization a half century ago brought.  What had been a back stairway was removed to make more room for closets in the biggest bedroom and a second  toilet downstairs was added.  While a large porch already wrapped around two sides of the structure, at that time an even bigger back deck was added, signifying the social shift toward privacy and away from the welcoming openness of porches and front stoops.  So the traditional back entry became a pantry and the kitchen gained a new sliding door allowing access to the spacious deck.  A large in-ground swimming pool was added in the back and a fence erected.  The old bluestone sidewalks were replaced first with concrete and later with asphalt, and the hitching post was hauled off, perhaps to be sold then to the builder of a new faux Victorian. 

     The renovators of the seventies seemed to have a decided predilection for the artificial.  Apart from the siding, a fireplace was built in the living room using imitation stones made of plaster which look entirely unconvincing to us but which have inspired visitors to exclaim how grand our “old stone fireplace” looks.  At the same time horrid drop ceilings were put up in parlor, dining room, and kitchen and the very ugliest tone of shag carpeting installed.  The walls of the living room and on the new fireplace chimney upstairs were covered with simulated bricks, quarter-inch slices glued to the wall, though real bricks had been used  only in the foundation of the original structure. 

     So the first residents’ preferences, expected at the time and preferable to some of us even now, for decoration, natural materials, and a welcoming face to the community around all turned in time toward their opposites: plainness, artificiality, and a preference for enjoying one’s leisure in private.  We did ameliorate some of the most egregious results by removing that carpeting and refinishing the hardwood floors throughout the downstairs and in the corridor above, and by painting the dark fake bricks white, leaving us with what Patricia calls “a cross between a Victorian and a Barbie Dream House.”

     We continue to relish the house’s vestiges of original style: an unusual mechanical front doorbell, for instance, and the decorative interior brass doorknobs and keyholes.  The swimming pool is gone, at what was surely a price greater than that of its construction, but we still have a hand pump in the yard, a somewhat puzzling relic since I read that the village’s water system has operated since 1872.  Many of our neighbors have unnecessarily removed trees and shrubs, and we are glad that our own were never cut.  We are grateful that the greenery is still there, producing lawn waste in profusion when we choose to hack back the foliage, and the birds, groundhogs, squirrels, and deer, whose taste does not change as people’s does, are able to continue eating the black walnuts, Concord grapes, and white mulberries that  grow in profusion, just as they did when the house was first built.