look: explosion!
30 August 2006 | maura dot com | 2 Comments
walking around my hometown today i noticed that some of the houses in my parents’ neighborhood — a square-blocked section (complete with numerically ascendant streets) that, during my childhood, was filled with modest, if nicely trimmed, double-wide-sized ranches and split-levels — had been razed, in pairs, before being replaced with icky, overgrown mcmansions that looked as if they’d been plopped down in the middle of everything sans regard for a) any house nearby (see above neighborhood description), b) the size of the lots they were being situated on (hint: not big enough), c) any sense of design (the silo-like ‘foyer’ areas, which bulged out of each building’s aluminum-sided facade, probably being the biggest offender as far as this category went), and d) any sense of who might actually want to live in these monstrosities (guess how long the ‘for sale’ signs have been attached). this encroachment of america’s worst tendencies — into my old, sensibly organized neighborhood! the nerve! — bummed me out; beginning in high school and up until probably the day the first wal-mart was put in, i always thought of long island as sort of hermetically sealed from the rest of America, thanks to the fortifications provided by the bodies of water and big cities that separated Us and Them. seventh-grade odes to dead-end wiffleball games aside, that haughtiness was probably a bit delusional (hello, miracle mile and roosevelt field?), but it wasn’t completely unfounded; after all, it wasn’t until 1990 that k-mart to hit long island’s shores. anyway, what with reading about the bubble and the oil bubble, i’m thinking that those people in my parents’ humble hamlet-segment who stood pat, and plowed their riches into extra “beware of dog” signs and prettier flowerbeds, are in the right position. after all, their houses (not homes, for the love of god, unless someone’s lived there for years and years) haven’t sat on the market for months and months, waiting for an upwardly mobile striver to move in, with visions of shelling out for their outsized heating bills and plurality unfurnished rooms dancing in their heads.
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It’s a common theme. In some of the nearer-to-Boston suburbs, I’ve seen this aplenty. We’re hunkered down and hoping it doesn’t happen where we live. :(
Grew up in Beverly and know of what you speak. Have been long gone. Have lived in Tucson since 1980, I am so blessed too have grown up in Historical New England. The architecture and the no-nonsense residents. The freedom and being an Anglophile. I was really into that. Now it is the Wild Wild West with it’s own History. I have always felt like the prim Boston Schoolmarm who met the genuine Cowboy. Been hooked up with him for 23 yrs. Enuf said.