Dirt Law at Ground Level

January 20-26, 2014

By W. Christopher Barrier

We (especially dirt lawyers and real estate folk) all live in what professionals refer to as “the built environment,” and it is typically not hard to guess which houses in residential and mixed use sections of that environment are replacements (not just McMansions) and which business buildings have gone through repeated changes in use and appearance (frequently existing today as branch banks, at least for now).

But, the architectural individuality of those areas is more often taken for granted or ignored day to day. For example, even long-time habitués of Hillcrest may not realize that at least a dozen surviving houses in their neighborhood arrived there in pieces, thanks to the Sears catalog, which offered several designs.

Piece by piece…

In the early part of the 20^th century, walls, roof joists, floors, window frames and sashes, porches, wooden front steps, floor furnaces and interior detailing arrived by train and were trucked to a lot owned by the customer where a foundation and utilities were underway. In the area before sheet rock, walls and ceilings were plastered. My grandparents’ house on Beech Street was set on brick piers with a frame of wooden lasts all around, which was coated with stucco, probably to give an appearance of greater heft.

Inside you got two bedrooms with a bathroom in between with tub and a ladder to the cramped attic, a dining room, a tiny living room, a kitchen and breakfast room and a back porch suitable for a rainy day clothes line. The existing houses have been dolled up, of course, with porches enclosed and additions out back. My grandparents enclosed their back porch but fortunately did not block in the window into the back bedroom as others did – I loved to climb in and out that window, my imagination in tow, as a pirate, burglar or detective.

President Newton?

Farther west, in Newton’s Addition (bounded roughly by Spruce, Kavanaugh, “V” and University), plans may have been more ambitious but did not always come to pass. At least one intersection has corners that are clipped and set back – to provide more room for motor cars to maneuver around an elaborate fountain in the center that never got installed. Mr. Newton, however, was able to leave his own name among several dozen north-south streets otherwise named for Presidents (surely confusing school children trying to learn our nation’s leaders).

[More about Mr. Newton later.]

Chris Barrier is a real estate lawyer who has lived in the Heights, Cammack Village and Hillcrest virtually his entire life.