I just learned that the house where I lived in 1975, when I was a freshman at the University, burned last Saturday. Someone left a hot-glue gun on, and it overheated. From the Texan’s story, it sounds as though the fire might have started in my old room, on the north side of the third floor. (Ref: The house faces east, so my room was high on the right side in the Texan photo, but not visible.)
In my time, the house was not a co-op but a privately-owned, old-fashioned boarding house for men, named Bellson Dormitory. Residents got breakfast and dinner, five days a week, and there was a sort of common-area kitchenette on the first floor if you felt adventurous enough to try cooking anything using the odds and ends of pans and cutlery that had accumulated. Your washing was your own responsibility, but the owner had a coin-operated washer and dryer in an alcove off the back porch. A tiny kidney-shaped pool took up the section of the back that hadn’t been paved for parking, for those brave enough to try lying out or swimming. (I can’t remember whether anyone ever did.)
All the rooms were double-occupancy but mine; I had an oddly-shaped, cut-off room and a walk-in closet that had been carved out of one corner of the attic. It was strictly from low-rent, but it was low-rent, which was important for my parents’ budget. The one clearest memory I have was of a resident who wasn’t a student—he was a deal older, and a little “slow,” and was apt to rifle through people’s mail and pilfer it. The mailman dropped everyone’s mail at mid-morning on a table right next the front door, so anyone who wanted could nose through anyone else’s mail. We were all pretty honorable about keeping our nosiness in check, except Edward.
The house faced into the side of Old Seton hospital, which had been abandoned earlier in the year when they moved to a new building on 38th Street. Occasionally I’d wander through the grounds and into the heating plant, which was in an outbuilding, but not often ’cos I felt the old, dead boilers and pipes looked menacing. (I’ve always had a minor phobia of derelict big machinery.) The development company that bought the property finally leveled the building and scraped the lot, and now the site’s an ugly, hulking block of student condos—the second set of condos to be built on that site since I left the neighborhood, I might add.
At the end of my freshman year, the owner sold the boarding house to the Navy ROTC, which converted it to their fraternity house (for lack of a better term), the Crow’s Nest. A few years later, the Navy got tired of it and sold it to the Inter-Campus Co-ops, who have owned it ever since. All the residents were turned out, and I moved to a tiny apartment at the corner of 45th Street and Speedway, at the very edge of Old Hyde Park, and about five blocks from where I live today.
The acacias were loud at night. Fnord.
