Gut and rebuild
In Baltimore, new people are moving in, are paying top dollar to remove the Formstone. Men, almost always men, come in with crowbars, pry the fake rock off the façade, tuck and repoint the newly exposed brick, repair tumbledown walls. Often the brick was already turning to dust when the first workers set up scaffolding, draped the famous white marble steps that the fastidious Polish ladies of Baltimore kept bright and clean. Entire blocks were caged in chicken wire and lathe as the men slathered cement mix on chockablock rowhouses, transforming old world brick into new world faux.
In San Francisco, they are propping houses up on jacks, underpinning foundations, retrofitting in case of earthquake. What do they find beneath the slatted wood? The houses rest on broad oak beams or heavy hips of steel propped up on concrete columns, strong, but not enough to take the shaking that is inevitable. The workers come with their heavy equipment and digging machines, extend legs deep in the ground. They marry house and foundation, bolt them together to ensure that the two don’t separate in a moment of crisis.
I dream that I am in a house, that I am the house, a faded Victorian, gingerbread rotting on the porch. My foundation is sunk and the slightest shaking will slump me into the street, or have me crying drunkenly into a neighbor’s garden, letting shards of my window glass dangle in the koi pond.
I am my mother’s house, an alley rowhouse no more than 12 feet wide and 27 feet deep, huddled with my compatriots on Finch’s Way, a one-block dead-end Baltimore street. The brick underneath my Formstone is solid and plumb. I am bright with open windows that let in Mexican music and the sounds of the crazy woman across the street cursing the traffic and the illegally parked cars. I am tolerance smelling of English tea roses and home cooking. But be careful climbing the winding staircase at my core, where the stairs narrow at the inside edge and you must climb in darkness.
One misstep will send you tumbling.
(Image: Looking at Kevin's old house on West Street, the one on the left.)