Lou’s View 9/30

 

By Lou Bernard

I’ve been writing for the Record for over ten years now. I’ve covered a huge variety of topics, mostly historic, and done one column a week for a long time. I have twenty-three scrapbooks filled with all of my old columns. Having done all this, I admit that sometimes the topics start to feel a little stale.

Hey, YOU try writing about county history for a decade. So sometimes when things get slow, I play these little games with myself, come up with challenges that nobody else cares about. I try to write columns that challenge me a bit, make me work for it.

So, this week, I’m writing about the plainest house I can find.

Often when I write about buildings, it’s a building with distinguishing architectural features or a fascinating history. Those are easy. I’m going to go a different route this time—I’m going to find the plainest, least distinguishing place I can, and get six hundred words or so out of that.

Right down the street from me, there’s a house that fits the bill. This place has so few distinguishing architectural features that it blends in with the landscape. I literally have walked past it for years without noticing it; at one point when I was walking my son to school, I glanced at it and thought,”Has that house always been there?”

Obviously it has, but I hadn’t noticed it before in eighteen years of living on this block. The house is 340 South Fairview Street, and describing it would be pointless. Someone has stuck light green siding on it at some point, which seems to be its only standout feature. So let’s see if I can dredge a column out of this.

The house was built pre-1925, at a guess, probably around 1915 or so. The oldest house on this street was built in 1869, and that’s the Wait House across and down the street. That’s about when South Fairview was first settled; the local business owners built their homes on the uphill side of the street because it had the better view. Then their servants and employees built theirs on the downhill side, effectively blocking the view out.

340 South Fairview (the plain house) appears on the 1925 Sanborn Map. (I’m also trying to do this with just the resources around the house, which is another layer of challenge for me.) According to the 1926 city directory, it was an apartment-style rental early on. The earliest tenants were Richard Lannen, Joseph Reeder, and Earnest Jones, all of whom are listed as “laborer.” This suggests that the place was owned by one of the local companies, and used for employee rental housing.

In the 1930s, the house had been purchased by Irvin E. Kling and his wife Eleanor. Kling was a local metalworker. The two had gotten married in 1936, and that was the home they’d purchased to live in with their child. It was a sort of starter home; they’re listed as living there in 1948, but moved out by 1965. (Kling died in 1975, and is buried in Linnwood Cemetery in McElhattan.)

In 1965, the home was owned by Evelyn Weaver, a sewing machine operator at Bobbie Brooks, a garment manufacturing company on Third Avenue, at the top of the hill. She stayed a while; she’s also listed as living there with her husband in 1967 and 1970.

At no point, evidently, did any of these people consider adding any immensely decorative features to the house to make it stand out.

If you get a chance, take a look sometime. Go drive down South Fairview Street and see if you can spot this house. Then go around the block and drive down South Fairview again, because I guarantee you’ll miss it the first time around.