THESE WALLS "CAN" TALK — Sharon Mark Cohen

Last week, my blog post, dated January 23, 2024, was If Those Walls Could Talk…Maybe I Can Talk A Bit For Them. That post offered my recollections of being in a house in the Catskill Mountains where the farmer’s wife churned butter as I sat with my parents in her warm and inviting kitchen.

In this week’s blog post, I offer These Walls “Can” Talk. In 1939, there was an addition built onto our 1914 house. The approximate date was verified when the electrician pulled a newspaper from the rafters while doing major electrical work in the basement in 2023. The electrical work was in a string of repairs caused by old termite damage to a support beam in the basement.

Before replacing the beam, the contractor needed asbestos removed first, and then plumbing pipes moved since some cut through the beam. Before moving the pipes, electrical work was necessary in case of any leakage from the pipes.

That crumbling newspaper dated from 1939 that the electrician found not only verifies the year of the addition to the house but reveals volumes about what was current over three-quarters of a century ago. The browning pages were overflowing with detailed advertisements. They showed the styles of the times with the costs of assorted sundries. That was fun to see and gave us a chuckle while giving us a feel for retail in the 1930s.

Not only were the walls talking when the old newspaper got pulled from the rafters, but I will add some history. When our older son and toddler daughter were in preschool, a teacher there introduced us to the school librarian, a friend of the teacher’s mother. The teacher knew we bought the house where the librarian's husband grew up, and they raised their children. We had the couple over one evening, and they allowed us to videotape them narrating the history of our house that he lived in for over 50 years.

Several years after that encounter, our younger son attended kindergarten with their grandson, and my husband met their daughter at a birthday party for a fellow student of the boys. We then learned more about the house we’ve lived in for nearly 43 years.

One fact was that the original owner became a widower, and his daughter-in-law said, “In those days, you didn’t let a man live alone; one of his sons had to move in." At first, his elder son was preparing to be the one to move in with his wife, but the bathtub in the master bedroom was too small for the tall woman. So, instead, the newly married librarian moved in with her husband, and they raised their four children with the help of several servants. There was a butler, a cook, a driver, and call buttons around the house for each. Plus, she had a nanny for the children.

The librarian and her husband eventually sold the house to an ob/gyn and his wife, who raised more than a handful of children here. That family lived in the house for ten years before selling it to us and moving to a larger home while intending to find a smaller one.

Again, many years passed until one day when one of their daughters drove by with her children. My husband and I were outside doing yard work when she stopped to greet us. We welcomed her inside, allowing her to walk from room to room and excitedly show her children the house she grew up in. That time, we got more tidbits of the history of our house, laughing as she showed the children the room she and their aunt slept in and the bathroom, which by then was our daughter’s.

Registered in the Montrose Historic District of South Orange, New Jersey, our house was on the historic district house tour in 2006. The decision to put it on tour then was that our children were all still living under our roof, and if it was going to be on the annual tour (later changed to bi-annual), I wanted it to be when all of our children were living here. Preparation for the day was intense, right down to the gardener coming to tidy up the lawn, but the house tour proved to be a wonderful memory.

While sitting out back on the patio on a glorious day in May with my cousins Alyce, Michael, and John visiting from the south, over 400 hundred people toured the house lined with volunteer docents from the neighborhood. The rooms filled with flowers also had the scent of accent candles presented by Max, the delightful Scottish woman who then owned Jardiniere Florist in South Orange.

When we bought our house, I was in my 20s and thought the taxes, while high, would stay where they were. That was naive. They’re over seven times higher, but with the midtown direct train to New York City and people looking to move out of the city due to rising costs and more at-home work since the COVID pandemic, the prices of local houses are spiking, with bidding wars to boot. The neighborhood houses are now selling for over seven times the cost in 1981.

Not that the soaring sale prices mean much to us. For now, we plan to stay where we are. We love to entertain and are happy to show our home improvements to our family and friends while paying tribute to the memories.