The Care and Feeding of Old Houses

Old houses and those that love them find out it's not all woodwork and stained glass.

Our house in Gilbertsville, Photo taken by me around 1972.

I grew up in an old house. I spent 17 years in a large 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 wrap-around 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 bought the property, which came with 254 acres, sight unseen, on the recommendation of my paternal grandmother. She and her family, for some never explained reason, moved up there from Harlem some years before. My parents paid $10,000 for it, which sounds like nothing now, but still came with a mortgage.

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 four-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 been the enclosed porch. Now we had our own bedrooms, with an empty bedroom in between 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 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 he 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 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 NYC 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. He was a NYC cabdriver who loved the noise, the crowds and the tall buildings. 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.

Convent Avenue block, Harlem, NYC. Photo: Place Matters

We started going to see listings in the neighborhoods she remembered; Striver’s Row, Mount Morris Park, Convent Avenue, and Hamilton Terrace; the very 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 in order to make them a 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. Old House Journal, now a glossy magazine is still going strong.

Back then, in the late 70’s, early 80s, they practically had to reinvent the wheel. There were very few vendors making old house products. Hardly anyone was still manufacturing tin ceilings, or fixing period lighting, or doing plasterwork. Wood stripping was also new territory. New-old products had to be re-introduced, and the methods of restoring these old houses had to be re-invented. 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 later. Many were just middle-class folk like teachers and civil servants 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. At the time, 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, 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!

1980s 3-ring binder issues of Old House Journal. Photo: Etsy

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 in a single room, or old people with their entire lives packed into a single brownstone room.  In all of them, the fireplace mantle would be covered with photographs of generations of relatives and children, weddings and 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 house 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 mantle were photographs of a black woman with various Hollywood stars, many of them quite recognizable. They filled the mantle 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 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 as a child. We’d look there.

321A Jefferson Avenue (center) 1940s tax photo, NYC Municipal Archives

Brooklyn in 1983 was certainly not the Brooklyn of today. That’s a mixed blessing if you ask me. My mother and I found a one family brownstone for rent in Bedford Stuyvesant through the Amsterdam News. We ran out from the Bronx to see it, and impressed the landlady and got the place. The house had only been purchased by the owner a few months before and had belonged to the last little old white lady on the block.

We loved the house. It was a three and a half story Neo-Grec brownstone. Our house was one of a group of four smaller houses amidst larger four-story buildings. The house was an old house lover’s dream come true – an untouched one family house, complete with just all the original features. About the only thing that had been done to the house since it was built had been the installation of electricity, and central heat. Even that was pretty old. Some of the wiring was still cloth covered cording, and the pan and glass fixtures from the early 20^th century were all either on pull chains or operated with push button switches. There were only two outlets in each room.

The checklist of Neo-Grec/Eastlake goodies was there. The house on Jefferson Avenue had been built in the 1870s. It still had the original front door, bottom gate and original ground floor decorative bars and original fence. The single large picture window on the parlor floor had the original one over one glass. The front gate opened with a skeleton key. I still have a copy. It had all its double doors, pocket doors and original woodwork. There were five marble fireplace mantels. All the shutters were folded back into the window cases.

Even though the house had remained a single family over the years, it had been painted multiple times. All the fireplaces had about six layers of paint on them, as did the woodwork and doors. Why would you paint marble brown?  Like just about every house in Bedford Stuyvesant, they all had that particular shade of institutional green and baby pink paint layers. Why would you paint a marble fireplace green? Someday I will find out who was giving this stuff away back in the 40s or 50s, because I think EVERYONE I ever met who was renovating their homes encountered a layer of pink and/or a layer of green paint. Everyone.

The house had a great scale to it, even though it was small, compared to the larger houses with extensions, and a full fourth floor. The house was only 16 feet wide, but the rooms were spacious and didn’t feel as narrow as they really were. There were only two rooms on each floor on the ground and parlor floors, and upstairs had two bedrooms with the bathroom in the middle and a pass-through with shared dressing room behind it. The dressing room had a patterned sink in a marble base in the middle and a cupboard and a closet flanking it on either side.

Upstairs were two bedrooms and two storage rooms. There was a marble sink and washbasin in the hall. The roof slanted down to nothing in the front, so it looked as if there were only three stories, but there were four full stories in the back. The front was storage space, and the hatch to the roof opened up in the center. When you crawled out, you were practically over the edge. I never went on the roof; not once. No way.

There were a lot of great features in that house, but I’d have to say my favorites were the pocket doors between the front and back parlors. The entryway was arched, and the double doors had beautiful etched glass panels. The same etched glass pattern was echoed on the regular door that led to the back parlor from the hall. The other great thing about the house was the built-in cabinets on the ground floor. There were two china cabinets, one in the original dining room, the other in the kitchen. The house was perfectly laid out, and very livable.

We had a lot of furniture from our Gilbertsville days, and we filled the place up and lived there very happily. Even though the house was not ours, we made it ours. I stripped the fireplaces, one at a time, although I never finished all five of them. We stripped some of the wood, and intended to strip more, but life interrupted. We painted, and had the floors sanded and finished. The first month we were in there, some ladies from the Brownstoners of Bed Stuy came by and asked us to be on their house tour. The house wasn’t perfect, but they advertised it as a “country house in the city.” We were quite flattered, and that October, several hundred people trooped through the house, and everyone marveled that the place had never been chopped up or altered.

I’d like to be able to tell you that everything was hunky dory after that, but life is often far beyond our control. In August of 1985, I lost my mother, very unexpectedly and quite suddenly. She was my best friend, as well as my Mom, and she was gone. I was alone in Bed Stuy in a single-family house that was filled with memories and her possessions. I called my landlady to tell her my mother had died, and she sent her condolences and then asked for the rent. We hadn’t even had the funeral yet. This was a foretelling of troubles to come.

I knew most of the people on the block, and they knew me. Most of the people on the block were hardworking people with all kinds of jobs, blue and white collar. Some of the homeowners owned more than one home; several owned three or four. Some were filled with extended family, most were rentals. Many of the homeowners were the second or third generation in their homes. Their parents had worked two or more jobs to buy them when Bed Stuy was redlined, and the big banks wouldn’t touch the neighborhood. The block was filled with children. It was good, and perfectly normal.

We had our less than savory element too. We knew who the dealers were, the junkies, thieves and crack heads, some of whom lived with indulgent or ignorant parents, or in SRO rooms on the block. We worked hard to keep their dealing, fighting and stealing off the block. We had a block association, although it waxed and waned. Although our block was relatively safe, you only had to go a couple of blocks into the local park to hear gunfights and witness turf wars. The police kept busy, and since one of our most influential residents was the brother of a judge and worked in the court system himself, we had no problem getting patrols coming by. But the corners sometimes belonged to the dealers.

I stayed in that house for 17 years, 15 of them without my mother. I lived through Bed Stuy’s crack wars, the shootings in the nearby park, and many other urban ills. I never felt afraid, and I was never a victim of a crime. During the course of those years, I had three different roommates to help pay for it all, but lived there by myself for at least ten of those years. I rattled around in that house, using every room. It was great. But by 2000, I really wanted to own a house, and my landlady was not going to sell the house to me. I asked many times. She never sold her properties.

If I had stayed on Jefferson Avenue, I would always be a renter in a house that was beginning to deteriorate, and needed a lot of upgrades that my landlady was not going to really do, or not have done well. The roof leaked very badly in the attic room, and water was literally pouring into my bedroom from above. My old house water nightmare had returned. Once an ice dam backed the water up so badly, I was emptying gallon buckets all night. Her handymen couldn’t fix it. It really needed to be redone, and she wasn’t going to do it unless I paid a large increase in rent, which she felt was long overdue anyway.

I never had a lease, and because I was renting the house, not an apartment, she didn’t have to give me one; a loophole in the law, I was told by housing experts. I protested, and since I was month to month, by that time for 16 years, she gave me an eviction notice. I paid the very large rent increase, and got another roommate. She withdrew the eviction. But it was time to go. When my neighbor told me he would sell me a foreclosure he had just purchased in Crown Heights, I took it. It was built as a gracious one family home, but had been divided into four apartments.

I loved that house on Jefferson. I loved that block, it was my home. But it was time to move on, become the homeowner I always wanted to be, and start somewhere else. I was only moving about ten blocks away. Meanwhile, I had to sort through 17 years of stuff and get rid of a lot of it, because I was moving to a smaller place. But I was becoming one of a rare breed; a multiple family homeowner in New York City. After dreaming of a Harlem house, then Bed Stuy and Brooklyn houses, I would own my own home.

1310 Pacific Street, center house with stoop. Photo: 1940s tax photo, NYC Municipal Archives

It should be mandatory that anyone who buys a house must take a class, especially if the building has more than two units. Someone needs to write a NYC Homeownership for Dummies book. There is so much no one ever tells you. Not your lawyer, not a real estate agent, which I did not have, and not the seller.  The book should be titled, “The Care and Feeding of Old Houses, aka, Buyer Beware!” Remember the person who had read all of the books, and thought she could handle an old house? How naïve!!

She found out that multiple family buildings needed inspections from several different agencies. She found out that sanitation will fine you for all kinds of little things. The garbage guys on Jefferson Ave. would reach over the fence and grab your cans, and then put them back. The garbage guys on Pacific wouldn’t do that if there were ten dollar bills attached to them. But the garbage cop following behind them would write a ticket for some infraction you didn’t know about.

I had inherited tenants who had needs, lots of them, and I was responsible for them. I had one really nice family on the top floor that paid like clockwork, but they were killing my house, there were too many of them up there, and when things broke, they didn’t tell me until way later. Like the tub whose water wouldn’t shut off, and I didn’t find out until I got the gigantic water bill. “We didn’t want to upset you,” they said. Trust me, the gigantic water bill upset me more than a plumbing bill would have.

The tenants right above me had signed their lease with my friend only a few months before I bought the house. I told my friend/the seller not to rent to them. I sat in on the interview, and I knew they were trouble. He didn’t listen to me. Four months after I bought the house the rent began to be late.  The couple fought like banshees in their bedroom right above mine. I learned some new words. They were also very enthusiastic when they made up with each other.

She was a hostess in a bar and stomped around upstairs in high heeled boots. I could practically feel her heels going through the wood. Then she got pregnant, they broke up and she went home to Arizona. He stayed, stopped paying rent altogether, and Con Ed turned his electricity off. I had to go to court.

Then I got laid off my job. The leaking roof in the Bed Stuy rental house was sure starting to look good. Oy.