25. Jeffersonian Door

I have a Jeffersonian window. I don't know how it got its name. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson liked them. Maybe they were at Monticello. I don't know. A quick google search is futile. The only sites I can find are other St. Louis architecture blogs. Perhaps it's a colloquialism.

What is a Jeffersonian window? When closed, it looks like any other window in the room. It has a top pane and bottom, a lock in the center where they meet, and a handle that looks as if it would raise the lower pane up. Just like any double-hung window. But when you pull the handle up, you realize the window raises from the floor. The paneling below the window isn't attached the wall, but in the track with the lower pane of glass.

So you raise this up into the ceiling--the bottom of the window goes up at least to the level of the lock where the two window panes meet. It may be (mine is old, obviously, and I don't push and pry) that at that point both parts can continue up further into the wall, but my upper pane doesn't budge. So you have to duck a bit to walk through the doorway it makes, but you can walk through.

Mine opens onto a sleeping porch off my bedroom. We don't use it often because the cats can jump from the porch to the neighbor's kitchen window (we live next to a 2-family flat with an apartment on the second floor). Since I've played that game once with Hickory already, I'm not about to let them sun on the porch until I get it screened in. Which I will do--it's just a matter of priorities.

But that door is the reason we will never do a two-story addition to the back of our house. We might one day expand the kitchen and dining room. We might one day then expand the sleeping porch onto the addition's roof and make a deck. But I won't part with the door. My house has few intricacies of this sort. It is the Plain Jane on a block of Fancy Nancies. I won't take her Jeffersonian window away.

24. Authentic Rehab

This past week at coffee, Ann mentioned that she and her husband were talking that morning about authenticity. What makes something authentic? They were talking about vacation spots and natural wonders and so forth--her husband is an architect whose focus is on such destinations. So we talked a bit about it for a moment, giving examples of what is and is not authentic. In the end, we couldn't define authentic, "but I know it when I see it."

"This coffee house," she pointed around us. "This is authentic."

As opposed to, say, a Starbucks, she went on, which is prefabricated. I knew what she meant.

I've been looking at houses with my sister Bevin lately, and some of them are authentic and some are not. Sometime we'll walk into a house and have the strange feeling that something isn't right. I don't mean some sort of sixth sense about the house or its former inhabitants (although I admit sometimes that happens, too). I'm talking about rehab projects.

There seem to be three types of rehabbers in south St. Louis (and perhaps nationwide or worldwide in cities of every age and type). First, those who strip the house of all its authenticity--in St. Louis, that means the woodwork, the plaster walls, mantels, doors, plumbing fixtures, kitchen cabinets, and so forth--and replace it with something out of a display home in the county. Baseboards shrink from 10 inches to 2. The bathrooms lose the clawfoot tub and gain a walk in shower. The floors are carpeted in berber or worse. Peel and stick vinyl in the kitchen with plain light wood cabinetry. Sometimes they go over the top with granite counters and gorgeous stone floors, but it still feels wrong. Bevin and I walk in, sometimes ooh and ah over bits of it (like the California closets, I mean, I could go with some inauthentic details in my closets), but always walk out with a shrug. Not the same thing at all.

Then there are the remuddlers. We've seen some doozies. Indoor-outdoor carpeting in the kitchen. Or bathroom. Refrigerators in the pantry. Faux fireplaces with 1970s-era looking faux-brick surrounds. Plastic tile on the walls. Closets of all sorts built in the wrong places. Windows you can see from outside but not from the inside--they've been covered up with drywall. Beams half-supported on jacks. Cheap vinyl windows. Gas lines that cut through ductwork. Two family conversions to single family homes that are simply a hole knocked in the wall--the old kitchen upstairs is a bedroom. With a kitchen sink and cabinets above a bed. Toilets in glass-brick walled bathrooms in the basement. I could go on. They are maybe authentic, in that they are authentic crap, but they are still crap.

Sometimes, though, we find a house that has been lovingly restored to its original magnificence (or better in some cases). Built in cabinetry around an arts and crafts mantel. Original wood floors in the kitchen. Clawfoot tubs with re-finished feet. Woodwork in dark colors, ceiling beams in the dining room, windows that are wood at least on the inside.

This last group, of course, is always outside Bevin's price range.

You pay for what you get.

Luckily, we have seen some relatively untouched places, maybe with a few mistakes, but not too much to undo or wish wasn't gone. The kitchen might be a Home Depot special, but the woodwork in the living room is intact. The floors are wide pine, like mine, in bad shape but with that authentic patina of a hundred years of feet walking across them. These are my goal when I look at houses with her. Find one with a new electric service, copper pipes, and an HVAC system younger than the Reagan administration. And then pounce on the dang thing before somebody ruins it.

That's how I feel about my house. Every time I lift off one more layer of Mary Chapman, I feel the house breathe a sigh of relief. Better now.

18. Sleeping Porch

When I was very young, we lived on South Grand. We lived in a four-family flat building, with four little shotgun style apartments and a center staircase in the front and one in the back. It was a two-bedroom apartment, with a closed in porch off the back bedroom (my bedroom at the time).

When my college roommate moved to Magnolia St., to a two-family flat, they also had a closed in porch off the small back bedroom. And when Mike signed the lease on his first (and later my first) apartment, it was a tiny 1 bedroom, three room shotgun in a four-family building, but it also had that closed in porch.

And I remember thinking, "what, is this some sort of weird 1910 excuse for a three-season room? Some sort of bonus space?" Why on earth would you build a porch off the back bedroom and then close it in with the same windows the rest of the apartment had? It wasn't added on later, and it wasn't closed in later. Windows all around, 8 total--well, 9, really, because the back bedroom it sat against had a window out onto the porch, too.

My great-aunt Sarah explained it to me, finally, the year I lived with her. St. Louis has had miserable summers as long as she can remember (and even though she'd be scandalized to read this in print, she is 92 years old). Those unheated, uninsulated rooms on the backs of the brick houses were sleeping porches. In the heat of the summer, they were the first defense against the sleepless humid nights in the city.

Of course, when the porches themselves got too hot, folks slept in the park. In the park.

I thought about this phenomenon when our air conditioning went out this week. We were in the middle of a strong summer heat wave and the temperature inside of our house started really creeping up. We have a second story porch, but it isn't blocked in or even screened. It has a regular railing and a teensy bit of a slope towards the outside edge. I don't think I'd sleep there at this point.

We made it through the two days without a problem, using a spare room AC unit we usually have up in the attic. But it reminded me that I want that porch in working order sometime soon. It's been three years of talking about it. Right about on schedule, Wissinger-wise.

6. Red Brick

Throughout the south side, everything is red brick masonry construction, which I have heard means that when the big one hits New Madrid, all our houses will liquify. They were built with brick, as opposed to frame, because we had a fire. Not famous like the one Mrs. O'Leary's cow started up in Chicago, but it was still quite a fire. Afterward, very little was built with frame construction.

Many houses have a different brick or stone facades--our block is filled with houses that appear to be white stone or brown brick. But down the sides and across the back, it's all red. The brick is native to the area, coming from quite nearby, actually. The south side is filled with old clay and coal mines.

My house is red brick all around, but the front is a tighter stacking of bricks--like a higher thread count. The mortar is red on the front, too, while it's a lighter pink down the sides and in back. But that's as fancy as the builder got with my house (definitely the plain jane sister to many of the houses here). Still, it's quite an imposing building, this foursquare done in brick instead of frame--it doesn't have the friendly look of the platonic ideal of a foursquare, a big happy farmhouse kind of building. It looks urban, set so close to its neighbors, tall and looming. I like it.

Our alley was red brick, too, until 3 years ago when it was paved over with asphalt. I suspect our street was red brick, since there are still some blocks scattered through South St. Louis with perfect brick--not cobblestone--streets.

Brick houses are easy to care for--we've done nothing but paint some window trim and lament the state of our terrible front porch (added on in the 80s, like a back deck on the front of the house) in the 11 years we've lived here. But they do require care. The four-family block of flats behind us had some drainage issues and we watched as the walls grew moss and mold, and then the mortar started to crumble. It's fascinating to see a brick wall tumble around a doorway, but not so great when it's the house behind you.

4. Alley

I like alleys. All of our "services" happen back there--power lines, phone, cable, sewer, trash pickup. Many of us park back there, either in tight garages or parking pads. Every May, we gather as a block (the two halves of the block that share the alley--my side of Halliday and the adjoining side of Magnolia--and clean it. Due to this alley cleaning day, I met my neighbors behind me long before my neighbors across the street.

Our alley used to be brick paved, but our alderman had asphalt put down a few years back. We didn't want it, for various reasons (for some, because brick slows you down, for others, because we like the still-usable to be used). But traffic doesn't seem to go much faster on the asphalt--those threatening dumpster hooks are a good speed-bump--and it sure is easier to keep clean.

City alleys, with their dumpsters instead of private trash cans, are often victims of dumping crime--folks who don't know how or can't be bothered to haul away an old mattress, concrete chunks, construction detritus, or auto parts, like to dump them in the anonymous dumpsters. But my alley is patrolled by several neighbors who keep developers from cheating and have the direct phone line to the "dumpster investigator." But that's not all we do in the alleys.

Kids learn to ride bikes. We trade gardening secrets and produce. We sit on the bump that used to be an ash pit across the way and plot against the developer at the end of the street. We gossip about city politics. We clean up graffiti and watch each other's (literal) backs. We admit pregnancies and steal blackberries. Kids sneak from yard to yard.

My uncle Glennon took down a nasty weed tree that was on the border of our alley and our property this past fall. Now I have a view of everything that happens back there--people trolling for bulk trash that's set out once a month, the neighbors going to work. My kitchen window looks out into the alley and I find I spend a great number of tiny moments at that kitchen window.

People who live without alleys don't seem to get what the big deal is. My brother, down in suburban Houston, thinks it's a waste of space that could be more yard (hmm, and more to mow?). But I wouldn't trade it for more yard or a garage on the front of my house with a driveway. I don't want to drag a green waste cart to the curb and watch trash trucks drive down my street. And I don't want power lines in the front of my house, endangering the street trees. Put all that in back.

2a. Stoop Photos

2. Stoop

In my "About Me" section below, I mention sitting on my south city stoop drinking coffee and chatting with neighbors. This is the view from the stoops on my block, down towards Grand Ave. You can see the double set of steps--the "stoop" in my definition is that first set that goes from the sidewalk to the level of the front yard. The second set goes up to the porch.

The first set of steps is the line between public and private space. Businesses leave fliers in the handrail of the first set of steps, but rarely come up onto the porch to deliver them. The mail, of course, is delivered at the front door (which is becoming more and more rare in America these days), but most interaction happens at the first set of steps.

We sit and watch kids play from there--the 5 or 6 moms who either live on my side of the block or know that's where the action is. And yes, I often have a coffee mug in my hand. The kids picnic on the steps, or right above or below them, smoothing out a blanket and producing picnic food from each house--peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, leftovers from the night before, hummus and tortilla, fruit in season.

The stoops on my block are over 100 years old--the western half of the block was built in 1903 and 1904, and my house was the first one in 1905 on this side. The concrete is not in good shape. Mary's is crumbling dangerously, and mine is starting to eat out from underneath. Weeds grow in the cracks, and Trisha comes out with hot vinegar water to kill them (I pluck them from their homes and toss them into the street to be swept away on street cleaning day).

There are intermittent steps, too, that don't lead to the front doors of our houses, but to the gangways between them. This produces a cascade of stairs, I suppose you could call it, heading slowing down the hill towards Grand. The houses are so close, we can spread out between two or three sets of steps and still manage a conversation easily between kid noises and dramas.

It was on Mary's stoop that I sat when the gang walked up our street and attacked Joe and my husband. It was on Trisha's stoop that we ate take out ice cream on the hot 2006 power outage days. Standing on George's stoop, he told us about his wife's cancer diagnosis. We met Elizabeth's new baby from Korea after she brought her down to the stoop (again, the outside world meeting the inside).

Mine has the best shade of the houses on our side where we tend to congregate--that black oak and sweetgum keep the front of my house pretty cool, while Mary has lost a maple and Trisha an ash in the past three years. But it also is prone to mosquitoes due to the ivy growing right next to it. Since they don't bother me, that's where I usually start out on any given warm afternoon. I migrate, though, because conversation is more important than shade.

1. Threshold

My front door is wide. So wide, the screen/storm door in front of Hickory the cat there? Cost more than four months of Maeve's preschool tuition. I use that statistic a lot when the girls let it bang shut on each other. Wide enough that all three cats, if they choose to cooperate, can sit and view the outdoors. Dara the geriatric rottweiler mix usually hovers behind them, waiting for the UPS man to bring her a biscuit. Or just to bark at every other living creature that comes within earshot.

Out my door, I see Jim's house. Our front doors look straight out at each other, although our houses aren't exactly mirror images. I've lived here long enough, it was Mary's house first. And then that weird couple from New York moved in. Now it's Jim's, with his wife and his kids and his hawaiian shirts and dog and sandbox in the back of the truck. Next door to him, the white stone house? That's Doug's place. Independently wealthy man of mystery Doug. Not much to view there. Jim's house has more going on.

Hickory and Dara may watch for juncos and dogwalkers, but I've looked out this door at many things: the badges of FBI and Secret Service agents; homeless men with stolen goods to sell me; neighbors bearing meals after babies are born. I watch the sweetgum tree turn yellow and the black oak turn brown. Kids run up and down the sidewalk while folks east of us walk past on their way to the park.

I like the view.