So on the route I take back and forth to work, there used to be this great, dilapidated old house. I don't know much about architecture so I couldn't tell you anything very informative about it, except that it had a turret, was dirty white, and had a very Slasher Movie Golden Age look to it - creepy, but a little bit small potatoes. Less Gothic, more sleazy. Nonetheless, this is one of those houses you make up stories about when you're a kid (or, you know, me): this is where the killer comes back to when he busts out, the house that doesn't get torn down because the workers won't take any amount of money to drive their bulldozers onto that property, etc. The house even came with a mystery: although deserted and clearly uninhabited for some time, not a single window was broken and someone was delivering newspapers to the house every day...newspapers that never got picked up. Oooooh!
But. Several months ago, the house met its match in the form of some developers. They tore it down, poof, over the course of a weekend: a shocking house hole greeted me on my way to the office one Monday. In its place, they have been erecting a huge, ugly and offensively overpriced condo establishment. It's beige, and made in that sort of matchbox luxury style. Vinyl siding rubs shoulders uncomfortably with misguided decorative flourishes; the doorways to each unit are disproportionately big and grand, so new-minted yuppies feel like "The King is Home!" when they slosh home from the office, the day care, the gym, the club.
For a long time, there was a chain-link fence erected around the site, adorned with a sign crowing some blatantly insincere sentiment about being "part of the neighborhood," complete with drawings by children. Awww. Mud and tools and pieces of house-to-be have been strewn around the site for months now. The passerby is in constant danger from the comings and goings of construction vehicles. However, as the display unit was completed and the driveway graded and the rest of the building made shipshape for buyers, the fence has come down and a new phase of events has begun.
A series of strange, fussy and seemingly grudging repairs has taken place over the last few weeks: new soil poured onto the workboot-besmirched Designated Tree Area, but unevenly, clumping two feet high around the base of the DT and spilling over the granite bounding stones in a careless line across the walkway. One panel of the fence between the condo and the neighboring house has been replaced, two others left damaged and dangling. The cracks in one of the concrete sidewalk squares out front are filled in, but carelessly, with gaps and holes still remaining. You can almost feel the contest of wills between sale-hungry investors ("We've gotta make this place look Classy!") and those managing the actual work ("I'm trying to build a damn house here!").
Yesterday was the best so far. One of the established, old-money trees that grows on the sidewalk in front of the condo got a big hunk of its bark gouged out, in an incident probably related to some pipe work they were doing there last week. The bark broke off in one clean piece, maybe one foot wide by two feet long, and was lying on the ground next to the tree, until yesterday. I walked past the scene of the incident on my way to the store, and saw that the hunk of bark had been fitted neatly into place on the open wound of the tree, and fixed securely with a piece of bright pink string, tied in a bow. An attempt at grafting, to clean up the neighborhood, I guess. I wonder if it will take?
Posted by hilatron at July 19, 2004 10:38 AM | TrackBack