The New House, Part 1

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EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTIONS
by Patti Liszkay
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The New House, Part 1

...Continued from yesterday:

   I was nine years old in the summer of 1961,

...when my family moved eight miles up the Roosevelt Boulevard from Mayfair in Lower Northeast Philadelphia to Somerton in Far Northeast Philadelphia (see yesterday's post), to our new house on Byberry Road between the Boulevard and Bustleton Avenue.

    Though Byberry  Road was a busy thoroughfare and our new house was a short block from the Bustleton Avenue commercial district, still, compared to the population and row house density of Mayfair this new neighborhood felt downright pastoral.
​      The view from our Byberry Road house.

     We moved to this particular house because while my mother was raising her five children in a 1300-square-foot, 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom row house she was dreaming of acquiring a big old fixer-upper of a house that she could transform into her vision of a beautiful home.
    Though someone else would doubtless have dubbed the 6-bedroom, 3-story behemoth on Byberry Road a teardown – it was already over 100 years old in 1961 –

...my mother fell in love with it and, with my father’s acquiescence, bought the house on her own for $11,000, a pittance even back then, and sunk into it $5,000 worth of contractor work before my father or any of the rest of us laid eyes on it.
     When we finally did lay eyes on and set foot inside the house it was still in a rough state, but all that summer long every day my mother would load us children into the car and drive out to the New House where she’d work, steaming wallpaper off the walls, spackling and painting the walls, repairing the window frames and tackling all sorts of repair and home improvement jobs that most kids’ mothers would have no idea of how to do.
       My brothers and I, meanwhile, with our 3-year-old baby sister in tow, ran around the new neighborhood meeting the new neighborhood kids.          
       Every day at lunch time my mother would stop working to fix us cold cut sandwiches, sodas and Tastykakes which we ate picnic-style on the bare wood living room floor, sometimes with a new friend or two whom we’d invited to join us. That was the best summer.
​        As it turned out my mother was never able to fulfill her dream of renovating the house the way she wanted to. Why I'm not sure, though I suppose it was a matter of expense and maybe the fact that she was the sole member of the household with any  interest in home decor or improvement beyond the basic functional and structural necessities.
      Still, my mother did what she could.
      For example, if she couldn't get the front porch step repaired she'd just plant flowers where the step should be.

​    My sister Romaine. Above, with our dog Brownie.

     Nonetheless my mother never tired of talking about her ideas for the house, how she wanted to extend the wall of this room, knock out the wall of that room, reconfigure one room and transform another.
       But in the end, for all the years we lived in it, the New House, it stayed an old house,

...and it wasn't until 25 years after my parents moved out that someone else caught sight of the old house on Byberry Road, by now abandoned and decrepit,

...and saw in it the same kind of potential that my mother had seen in it almost 50 years earlier.
     And it would be this person who would finally do with the house what my mother had always wanted to.
      To be continued...