this old house

I suppose it is the consequence of working in an historic house for so many years. I took my petsitting charge on a slightly elongated walk this mild morning and as he sniffed and poked his nose about, I gazed up at the Victorian architecture around me, speculating stories , inhabitants, and original purposes of architecture.

A lot of the homes I gazed upon this morning are halves of a one-time single family – middle class – house. I suppose it isn’t really surprising as my default location has been one of these residences for so long. But the inner anthropologist in me was trying to determine the culture of the original neighborhood… and how it shifted from a housing development of the early 20th century boom to a tightly compacted grid of multiple residences.

I don’t suppose Roslindale is unique to the rest of Boston – or Massachusetts – or the country even. We are talking a whole century of history between then and now, which included a great depression, two world wars, an industrial boom, a cold war, a couple non 'wars', a baby boom, a hippie revolution, a me revolution, and the withdrawal behind computer screens for communicating. There are a hundred thousand different factors that can explain the evolution of these houses.

But… I think as I walk along… how I once occupied such a Victorian by myself. It was a large house, with far too many bedrooms and space for myself. It wasn’t even built solely for the one family. There were servants who occupied the third floor and utilized the back stairs. So it wasn’t that the single family home really was meant for one group of people. Except that homes like that eventually proved too big for one resident group alone… and I guess the 1930’s probably had something to do with it.

I don’t know if we really are moving away from mirroring that decade right now. I find myself gawking with a train wreck fascination at photos of abandoned buildings and homes… and think, maybe we really aren’t. And then I think of all those obscenely and unnecessarily large houses people built in the last decade… and I wonder when and if they will be subdivided to become a multi-family.

Maybe they won’t. But who knows what some overly analytic history lover walking a dog might be speculating a hundred years from now?