The 1920s was a glorious time for architecture, with grand designs taking inspiration from Europe, large homes with parlors that were built with entertaining in mind, and secret closets and hidden compartments under false walls to hide the booze. My distinctly Midwestern neighborhood was built up during that period, and constantly reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, although it is certainly not as grand as Gatsby’s home in West Egg. The area features homes mostly of English style variations, with my own being English cottage style, with a sunroom in front where I read the newspaper on Sunday morning, and a den in the back which my wife and I have turned into our office.
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As much as anything else, history is what makes a neighborhood – not just the history of your own lifetime but of the generations who have lived there before you.
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I can easily imagine what our home would have been like in the 1920s, and I imagine ladies sitting in the front room drinking martinis, wearing their hair in a short bob and a feather headdress, while jazz played on the Victrola and men in double-breasted suits smoke cigars and talk about the stock market as if the boom would never end.
If you have a home from that period, if you look closely, you may find a secret hiding place or two – a hidden door, a panel behind a wall, or a false ceiling which was used to conceal illicit alcohol, and my home is no exception. There is a small wall panel off the kitchen which opens up to reveal a compartment of about 12 inches wide and 18 inches high, which serves no obvious purpose other than to hide something, and given that the home was built during Prohibition, I can venture a reasonable guess as to what that something may have been. I have taken to using it myself to hide my best 18-year-old single malt Scotch when my boozy high school friends come to visit (leaving the bottom-shelf liquor out on the counter so that I may still appear to be generous).
It was during that period when my grandfather – an immigrant bootlegger from Poland – had a still in his attic, and an ingenious system with a tube leading through the walls and into a hidden compartment in the downstairs parlor where his home-made liquor could be dispensed through a faucet. Family legend has it that local law enforcement would tip him off as to when a raid was planned. Dzadza would hide the evidence, the cops would come up empty, and then return a half hour later to fill their bottles for personal use, “on the house” of course.
What is a neighborhood?
What’s in a neighborhood? I’ve lived in neighborhoods that were little more than groups of houses and apartments, with neighbors who were mostly annoying and never spoke to me. I’ve also lived in “emerging” neighborhoods where every Sunday morning I picked up discarded beer cans and broken bottles from the grass strip next to the street. In San Francisco, I had to step over the people who slept in my doorway. I’ve lived next to loud rock ‘n rollers, survivalists who patrolled the area with shotguns, and people who were fond of shooting their pistols in the air on Independence Day instead of waving sparklers like normal people. None of those places were neighborhoods.
Here, in my neighborhood with homes built in the 1920s by architects who were apparently enamored of English country homes, I have a neighbor who, after every snowstorm, brings out his snowblower, clears out the snow around his house, and then, just because he loves doing it, clears the snow around adjacent houses too, including mine, with no remuneration expected. He gets rewarded later in the summer with jars of my wife’s homemade jam made from our backyard strawberries. As my wife and I strolled through nearby streets taking photographs for a series of articles on architecture, an older woman we didn’t know stopped my wife, asked her what she was doing, and upon learning our mission, offered to help and talked to her about the history about the area. That’s what a neighborhood is.
Sometimes fictional neighborhoods are better than the real thing, and I’ve always wanted to live on Wisteria Lane, next to Bree Van de Kamp on Desperate Housewives. Regrettably, the neighborhood exists only on a backlot at Universal Studios. I do however, possess a copy of the Desperate Housewives cookbook, and have used some of the recipes at dinner parties where I may even occasionally bring out the 18-year-old Scotch from its hiding place.
Cookie-cutter houses and real homes
Every town has a section of cookie-cutter, crackerbox homes built in the late ‘40s and ‘50s – a time which saw rapid construction but little in the way of style compared to the glorious ‘20s. Most towns also have an area – often outside the city limits – where the McMansions are located, which are mostly stark, post-modern construction with fake ornamentation, windows that don’t open and columns that don’t support anything, asymmetrical design that seems to go on forever, an abundance of pretension and lots of square footage. They mostly show a lack of grace and style, and the architects who design them should have their licenses revoked simply for imagining such ugly creations.
I do like a big home with a yard – and that’s one of the biggest reasons I left California, where my son, who still lives there, has a 500-square foot rent-controlled apartment which is three times the cost of my entire mortgage payment. An imaginative architect can blend size with some sense of style though, and avoid the McMansion look in favor of something more creative, like these new home designs for country-style house plans.
After a lifetime of moving around, I have at last found my neighborhood, here in northern Indiana amidst English country homes and street names that should be in London. A neighborhood where my neighbors shovel snow off my driveway for the fun of it and where I walk my Boston Terrier every day at 5:00. He always stops to wag his stubby little tail at the old couple down the street who wave hello to us as we pass by. I don’t mow my lawn as often as I should but the neighbors don’t seem to mind that much.
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Photo by Charoenkwan Blacharski
