son of a harnessman

Everyone's moved out, and I have the building to myself--except for during the day, when the handyman comes to tear the carpeting out of sailorsausage's old place and listen to Brooks and Dunn at top volume. But the nights are quiet, and the street feels bigger without the familiar cars parked out front.

Thursday night I walked through the empty apartments, trying to reassemble this house in my mind. What did it look like before it was carved into four separate dwellings? The staircase is intact, and the front doors original, and some places have the soaring ceilings you'd expect in a house build in 1880--but as Cliff pointed out last summer, the basement entrance we use was clearly cut sometime past that; the front porch was long ago converted into a sun porch and upper addition. And yet I have a Murphy bed, one whose frame shows its age, and there's some architectural details around the upstairs that indicates the upper apartments may have been carved out in the twenties. Plus I have a giant tub up here, one that no sane modern person would insist on installing. I can't guess how much my bathtub weighs, it being cast iron and all, but suffice to say that it has occurred to me more than once this year that if I were to slip and fall in my narrow bathroom, I would hit that thing with my face, and probably wake up three days later without any teeth.

This reason, coupled with a fondness for Jameson, led me to try to teach Truman to recognize the sign of me in distress. I wanted to train him to run downstairs for help a la Lassie, but every time I played dead on the bathroom floor, he just pawed at my face, licked it, and whined. By the time he'd manage to successfully communicate to anyone that there was trouble up at the old well, Timmy would be dead and rats would have carried off his fingers.

Cheery!

In the late 1960s, the city announced its plan to raze most of the buildings in this neighborhood. In response, the people who protested the demolition gathered everything they could about its history. If they collected enough to appeal to the National Trust for Historical Preservation, the demolition would be halted. And those folks actually managed to stop it--they camped out in the archives and walked the streets, photographing every structure. The info they submitted was enough to convince the National Register that the area held some significance, so the neighborhood stayed and became one of the largest urban areas to be added to the register.

The vast majority of the homes are apartments now (most were apartments then), and fewer than half are restored. A lot have sagging chimneys. But the notes from the original 1969 mapping project are easily found online, and it's interesting to click through the photos and research cards and see what this block used to look like.

Most of the research notecards are skimpy--either the information wasn't to be found, or the volunteer was in a hurry. But whoever put together the notes on my current residence must have been either a descendant of the original owner (I'm thinking an old woman, the kind who offers up cough drops as candy on Halloween and takes flowered hats very seriously and uses the word "forsook," as this one actually did) or just lucky, because it's a two-page document that outlines the entire career of Senator Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg, the man who once owned this place. If the notecard is correct, this place used to belong to "one of the city's most distinguished sons," a guy who rose from newspaper man to Senator. Somewhere in between taking over the city's newspaper at the age of twenty-two and being elected to the Senate, he bought this house. I like thinking that he was the one who demanded that the Murph be installed upstairs. I know he didn't, of course--what possible reason could he have, except possibly that he needed an in-house apartment for his nanny-turned-mistress--but pretending is fun. And good brain exercise!

So sometime in the next month we'll be setting up house in the living room of Senator Vandenberg, the son of a harnessman who went on to help shape the Marshall Plan. I would like to think that his ghost will approve of the curtains I plan to hang and our framed photos of various shenanigans. If it doesn't, I hope that we pull Young Vandenberg, and that he'll haunt us in full newspaper editor gear: green eyeshade and rolled sleeves, with a smear of ink on his forearm.

You have desecrated my hoooooooooouse, the Ghost of Young Vandenberg will say. He will attempt to hit us with a rolled edition of the Herald.

Wait! the B and I will cry. But sir! You can't waste your time haunting us! You're going to be a senator one day!

Really? he'll say. He will sit on our couch--the one we salvaged from the next-door neighbor's curb during a Minnesota thunderstorm and found full of pennies and cashews. He will not notice that it's not his original horsehair sofa. A senator?

Yes, we'll say. Woodbridge N. Ferris is going to die! Soon! Governor Green is going to appoint you as his successor!

Oh, sir, the B will say. They're going to name the elementary school around the corner for you! I mean, now it's been torn down and replaced with an empty lot where derelicts gather to urinate. I will elbow him at this point, and he'll hasten to add, But there's a statue dedicated to you downtown!

Hmmmmm, the ghost will say. Sounds like I don't have any time to haunt you two. I better go read up on foreign policy! See you later! And the B and I will have our house back.

Hey. Who says history can't teach you anything.