We went to a birthday party at Lee Harvey's last night and ran into a couple whom we hadn't seen in a couple years.

In trading the "haven't seen ya in a while" pleasantries, I asked where they lived now.

"Do you know where TABC is?"

Know it? I used to practically take my mail there, back in the days when it was still struggling while it waited for the neighborhood to catch up with it. There was a long driveway that ran beside my house, now the back alley for some townhomes, that ended at TABC.

From late 1995 to early 1998, I lived in a 700 square-foot shotgun shack on Worthington Street. There were four of them in a row and we who lived in them referred to them as "the Monopoly Houses." They were yellow, blue, pink and gray. I lived in the gray house and paid a whopping starting rent of $525/month. Houston, who became my best pal, lived in the pink house. George, a cab driver was in the blue house. The first resident of the yellow house was a genuine kook who also worked for me. He sawed a hole in the floor of his rent house to put in a tub. It was a disaster and he moved away to be replaced by a more sensible fellow named Trevor.

We all had porch swings that had an unobstructed view of downtown across a gigantic lawn where we used to drink beer and play croquet. We would come home from long nights on the town and sing and play guitar on the porch in what would come to be known as "The Pink House sessions."

It was a great place to live, and we had many adventures. We would drink Heineken on Saturdays with the last remaining original residents of the neighborhood on our way to kill hangovers at Texadelphia. (To be fair, we originally drank 40's, but then, "Boss" told us that his doctor said he needed to drink a better grade of beer in respect for his ulcer.) We hired The Sutcliffes to play a huge block party, then thought better of it. But the kook failed to cancel them and we had to convince TABC to let them play. We had to go into George's house to take care of his terrifying pit bull, Rup, when George called us four days after going into the hospital for a heart attack. I forgot to pay my gas bill, and we all banded together to figure out how to turn it back on when there was to be a week delay in getting service. There were countless parties that it is probably best that we don't all remember. And, of course, there was the Chez Pompadour heist.

Even then, the neighborhood was changing and we didn't like it one bit. The croquet lawn became a construction zone. The empty lot next to me meant that I didn't worry much about privacy until the day I walked by my window before dressing and found a construction crew invading the Eastern perimeter. I gave them the finger and refused to pull down my blinds.

Eventually, the rent went up enough and the view deteriorated enough that it wasn't worth it anymore. One by one, we moved out.

Even then, we marveled that the houses existed at all. They had been fixed up, but were still not very "Uptown." And they were so tiny that they couldn't really be gentrified. We'd always heard that the matriarch of the Kasnetz family refused to let them be torn down, and that they would only last as long as she did.

So, I don't know why I was so shocked last night when our friends told us that the Monopoly houses had been torn down in the last couple of months. We took a detour home to confirm it and I emailed Houston the sad news from my BlackBerry.

I'm in a funk over those damned cheap houses. Maybe it's because they were the first place I ever lived that wasn't pre-fab and sanitized. Maybe it's the memories. Maybe it's because they mean to me that the transformation of Uptown is finally complete. In any event, even though I know that they had to go, I'll miss them dearly. And I'll come up with a really nice curse for whatever yuppie flat replaces them.

Comments

Michael Davis Verified

Great story Mike. I feel your pain my friend. The apt where I moved when I first lived in Knox-Henderson....gone for future condos.

I lived in a different building in Knox-H when I first got married. It too has met the bulldozer, this time in favor of cookie-cutter townhomes. The latter had a roach problem that was so bad that a friend shipped some industrial chemicals from out of state just to make it livable and a balcony that was falling off the building little by little. Still, I loved it.

Memories...

1 year, 2 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )