Know Your Home

Beth and I were lied to about the two homes we have owned, and I suspect that if you own an older house you were, too.

Oh, I'm not talking about dry rot, skeletons buried in the basement or a convoluted title showing that members of the Winter Hill Gang could swoop in here at any time and move into our basement. No, I'm talking about the dates of the homes.

I'm gonna work my way backwards. When we bought our current home, in Newton, Mass., in 2003 the sell sheet indicated the American Foursquare was built in 1915. We instantly fell in love with the original woodwork in much of the first floor, and other details including a plate rail in the dining room and built-in storage seats in the living room.

The house has a big porch and a finished attic, a great fireplace and a half-finished basement. Previous owners had completed renovations including closing off the door from the living room to the kitchen, adding a skylight in the attic and updating the kitchen. We've added a deck off the back, a mudroom off the kitchen and a master bathroom, and reconfigured the kids' bathroom.

For the most part, though, the house looks like it did when it was built. We take pride in knowing that our house is one of the older ones on the street. Most of the houses around us appear to date from the 1930's-1950's. Over the years we'd talked about throwing a party of some sort to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our home. With 2015 looming, I went to city hall and pulled the inspectional services file on our place. I wanted to find out who had built the house and the names of previous owners, and see if there were any useful bits of information that might help us personalize our celebration.

Maybe there will be pictures! I thought. Maybe we'll find out that there used to be a garage where the shed now stands. Or perhaps a map showing that the small lot next to ours used to be part of our land.

My big discovery? The house wasn't built in 1915. It was built in 1923. We need to wait eight more years to plan a 100th anniversary party. I'm not sure why the sell sheet said 1915. I don't believe there was anything here prior, but perhaps another party had applied for a permit to build in 1915 but never followed through.

The owner of the property, McKenzie MacLeod, filed for a building permit in January 1921, and then again in November 1922. I'm not sure why the house wasn't built after MacLeod filed for the permit initially. Perhaps he ran into financial troubles. The house was completed in the spring of '23, when the city issued a permit for plumbing.

When we added a master bathroom and tore apart the existing upstairs bathroom, the demo crew ripped out a LOT of cast iron pipes. The guys told me that a four-foot section weighed about 200 pounds, and they needed four guys to lift it up and out the second story window and into the dumpster below.

A few days later one of my neighbors asked me if we'd given permission for someone to remove the cast iron from the dumpster, because he'd seen somebody take it. I said no. So either thieves were eying the lode, or my builder allowed someone to come on the property and take it. Wonder how much they made off it.

The building was designed by Frederick Gowing, a Boston-based architect who wrote a book, Building Plans for Colonial Dwellings, Bungalows, Cottages, and Other Medium Cost Homes, in 1925. He also wrote a book called Building Plans for Modern Homes, copies of which are floating around on eBay. Maybe I'll buy one in the next eight years.

Our first home, in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood, has a bit of a more interesting story behind it.

Located on St. Theresa Avenue, the house is just a short distance from West Roxbury's commercial mainline, Centre Street. Situated directly across from the prestigious Roxbury Latin School, the house is a Dutch Colonial with a nice porch, a narrow lot with plenty of shade and cool curving staircase up to the second floor. Beth and I put a lot of sweat equity into the place, because we didn't have kids. We tore up wall-to-wall carpets and the tack strips from the living room, dining room, stairs, and bedrooms; stripped wallpaper in every room; patched, primed and painted the whole place; and ripped a giant spice cabinet off the kitchen wall.

Eventually, after we completed that work and had someone come in and sand the floors, we called in an electrician to upgrade some things. He told us that in addition to old gas lines (some of which he capped for us), we had knob-and-tube wiring, because when the house was built, people weren't sure whether gas or electricity would be the future.

"What year was this house built?" he asked.

"The sell sheet said 1930."

"No, this house is older than that," he replied. "Pre-World War I, for sure."

He told me I could go to the Boston Building Department to pull the file for the house. "1010 Mass. Ave.," he said.

A few weeks later I made the trip to Roxbury, got the file and started poring over it. I went right to the bottom of the stack of documents, invoices and permits, and learned that, as the electrician told me, the house dated to before The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.

The house was built in 1911. I was confused why the sell sheet indicated the house was built in 1930. How could there be such a disparity? Flipping through a few more documents, I found one that gave me the answer. In 1930, the city of Boston reconfigured what was then known as Cottage Avenue. The street was moved west a bit, curving away from our house, giving it a much longer front yard than houses that were built later. The street was renamed St. Theresa Avenue, after the Catholic parish at the foot of street.

With the answer to my question in hand, I continued to look through the file to see if there was anything else of interest.

That's when I noticed the name of the owner of the property when it was built: Earl Sloan. I don't recall all these years later whether the documents in the folder included information about Sloan, or whether I did an Internet search when I got home. What I found out is that Sloan was the "doctor" behind Sloan's Liniment, a pain relief product developed in the 19th century. The liniment is available online to this day.

In the early part of the 20th century, Sloan lived on an estate in West Roxbury known as Pine Lodge. Previous owners of the estate included bank presidents and Boston's fire commissioner. Our house was evidently one of several on the property; I assume a caretaker or some other employee of Sloan's lived in the house. There is a Pine Lodge road in the nearby vicinity, but alas no traces of the estate.

So if you own an older home, or are at least the second owner of your house, and you're at all curious about the place you live, it's worth asking your town or city clerk about accessing the building file. Every house has a story. I'd love to hear yours.

Your Holiness

Despite my sacrilegious ways (or is it "sacrilicious"?), I find beauty in houses of worship. Several months ago, I published the first post of what I promised would be a semi-regular feature here ("Holy!" from March 28, 2013).

Here's part two.

This stained glass window is one of many at Church of the Good Shepherd in Dedham, Mass. The church dates to 1876.

I love this doorway at St. John's United Methodist Church, Watertown, Mass. The building was constructed in 1895.

The former First Baptist Church, Watertown, Mass., is now known as Mount Auburn Village. It houses eight condos.

Grace Episcopal Church, Newton, Mass., built in 1873.

You Didn't Build This, FLlW Did

After several months, I finally finished Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, a dense, well-researched, mostly engaging 564-page doorstop of a book.

I put the book on my wish list after reading T.C. Boyle's The Women, a fictional account of the world-famous architect's tangled web of romantic relationships. Boyle's a gifted writer, and I've read and enjoyed many of his books, but while I was reading The Women, I found myself wanting to read a biography, wondering, "How true to life is this stuff? Were Wright and his wives and mistresses really as crazy as Boyle makes them out to be?"

Turns out, they were.

I'm not going to write a review of the book, because it's too damn long and I'm not a real strong critical writer. But I want to talk about a few things that I learned about Wright (who often signed his name "FLlW"), and discuss some of his amazing buildings, a few of which I hope to visit in my lifetime.

Wright was a complete and total narcissist, arrogant and too quick to judge and fight back against any perceived slight. He was absolutely terrible with money, often refusing to pay everyone from local grocers to building supply companies, and other times insisting that he be given things such as cars simply because he was famous, and the retailer would gain more value from being associated with him than they could if he paid them.

He fell easily for those who flattered him. It was not difficult, especially if you were a woman, to manipulate him.

Wright insisted that nobody had influenced his use of open floor plans, cantilevered roofs and non-traditional materials in the houses he designed, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Many of his buildings, especially houses, suffered from leaky roofs, drafty windows and poor heating and cooling systems.

Still, there's no denying Wright's incredible vision, and his tenacity in getting projects done the way he wanted. He is one of the most well-known architects in the world, alongside I.M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry.

Many of his most fantastic projects were never built, such as Washington, D.C.'s Crystal Heights apartment, hotel and shopping complex, and of those that were, many have either been torn down, or destroyed by fire or natural disasters.

Just last month, a house that FLlW designed for one of his sons in Phoenix was saved from the wrecking ball.

But, thankfully, so many great houses, office buildings and museums that he designed still stand.

I've been to New York City with my family each of the last three Aprils, but somehow have never made it to Wright's Guggenheim Museum. The next time I go to the Big Apple, I'm definitely checking out the museum.

Taliesin West, Wright's second home, is located in Arizona. I haven't been to the Southwest since my brief time living in New Mexico in 1988. It's time for a return, with the family.

Wright's primary residence for decades was Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. This building fascinates me for its architecture, of course, but also because the home was the place where Wright spent much of his adult life, where he designed so many projects, where he mentored architects and others in the building trades, and where tragedy visited his family on too many occasions (fires, murders).

Finally, I have to visit Fallingwater, the amazing house that Wright built over a river in western Pennsylvania. Just take a look at the video above, and at the pictures at the house's web site and you'll understand why I want to go.