Dream House

Have you ever set foot in your dream house?

I have. It was twenty years ago, Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a narrow east-west street in the high 90s that pleaded for urban renewal. Book-ended by crumbling apartment buildings, the once-uniform rows of brownstones now looked like a Leon Spinks smile: vacant lot gaps, a few white brick façades sticking out like gold-capped teeth, the steel window bars and house front fire escapes looking from a distance like orthodontic braces.

Once grand residences, the remaining brownstones had long since been sliced and diced into starter studios, stoops removed to squeeze in one more, cable lines snaking from the windows to the roof, protruding air conditioners buzzing and dripping in that sticky August afternoon I first walked down the street hunting for my friend’s father’s place.

It looked like the others, at first, then you noticed it still had its stoop, it wasn’t covered with a fire escape and so far it had resisted the white brick face lift. But its dirt-covered windows were barred like a prison, decades of acid rain were etched in black on its brownstone façade, along with spots of graffiti, and battered trash cans and litter were strewn about its basement landing. Like the rest of the street, this place reeked of decay.

I hesitated at the top of the stoop, unsure what to do. Instead of a glass door opening into a shabby little foyer with an intercom, a tenant list, mailboxes and a floor carpeted with old Chinese take-out menus, there was just a door and a doorbell.

Which unit?, I wondered, stepping back to search for a directory or other doorbells. Not seeing any, I rang the bell and waited.

My friend’s voice crackled out of an unseen speaker, the door buzzed and I pushed it open into a smallish vestibule, bench on one side, shoes underneath, rain coats and umbrellas hanging on hooks above, and heard the door clunk solidly shut behind me, then the whir of the unlocked lock engaging again.

A figure loomed larger through the frosted glass panel in the inner door, then a bolt turned and my friend threw open the door and arms spread wide welcomed me with a flourish into his father’s humble abode.

And what an abode it was! My eyes processed it in pieces: Gleaming surfaces, brightly-lit, cool air silently circulating through a huge open space, pictures on the walls, furniture casually but carefully arranged, so much bigger than I expected, everything quiet, no hint of the world I just left behind.

I must’ve looked surprised, for he laughed and offered me the tour, each room a new revelation, most done in different styles and each having its own feel, from the open brightness of the sunlit kitchen to the closed-off darkness of the book-lined library, from the cool clean lines of the main parlor to the warm and cluttered study. We ended up sitting in the backyard under the shade of a vine-covered trellis, listening to the burbling fountain while sipping cold ones and contemplating the splash of colors and the enticing scents surrounding us in this secret garden.

I can’t remember ever feeling this comfortable this quickly in a stranger’s house, I said, it’s as if I’ve lived here my entire life. Everything just feels right. This is one incredible house.

That’s just the beer talking, he said, but then he explained that his parents divorced when he was very young, his father leaving the family in the suburbs and returning to the city. It was a hard time for the city, bankruptcy looming, crime booming and let’s not forget the power outage, but my father believed in the city, he said, and was determined to put down new roots there. A decade in the suburbs had left him with a need for more space than an apartment could provide, but the divorce left him without the cash to buy it, or at least anything in a half-way decent neighborhood, so after looking around for a while he found this place, a broken-down tenement carved up into tiny apartments, mostly empty, so crappy he could afford to buy the building and to buy out the few remaining rent-controlled tenants.

He’d always been handy around the house and, in the divorce, he got the tools, so with little money but nothing else to do with himself, he set about undoing all that had been done to his once-grand residence, working nights and weekends and vacations, one project at a time, slowly turning back the clock and erasing the post-war decades. Whenever he ran into something he didn’t understand, he’d haunt the local hardware stores until someone could explain it to him. This week I earned my plumbing merit badge, he’d say, joking but proud.

He got us every other weekend and holidays, and for a month each summer, my friend recalled, and he made us his hired hands, except we didn’t get paid. Though he worked us like galley slaves, I remember those years fondly. He infected us with his enthusiasm, and something about working together bonded us more closely than you’d expect from a weekend relationship.

It is amazing how well this house turned out, he said, my father knowing just enough to clean it up, not enough to adorn it, designing it only for what he needed, not for what others would expect. It isn’t opulent, but it’s very comfortable, functional and practical, and in its open and unadorned way I suppose it’s also artful. What else do you really need?

Maybe clean up the façade?, I suggested with a smile. But that’s the key, he said, not smiling. In the beginning, my father left it that way for security. If you think this area is marginal now, it was pretty much a slum back then, so he figured it was best to blend in, not to advertise himself.

But over time he grew attached to the grubby exterior. It wasn’t showy, drawing attention to itself, trying to rise above its neighbors. Instead it blended in with the rest of the grubby street. And it was genuine – an 80-year old building should look its age, he’d say, those are just age spots. My father likes to surprise people, to watch their jaws drop as they walk through the door, and he surely sees that the contrast between the grime on the outside and the gleaming inside only heightens their appreciation of his hard work.

So I can understand why my father never touched the exterior, he said, but I can’t say I’m entirely happy with it. It isolates him; his house skulks in the shadows of its own street. He’s never met any of his neighbors, or even made eye contact with them, hiding behind his carefully obstructed windows. My brother calls this place The Bunker. It’s selfish, if you think about it, how he devotes all his energy to the inside of his house, for his own benefit, neglecting to share any of it with his neighbors. Who knows, maybe if he spruced the front up, others would too and the street would look nicer. But I think he likes it this way, his house repelling the neighbors, his street repelling the city.

Where is your father?, I asked. With his girlfriend, he said, looking annoyed. She lives on the East Side, a condo high up in one of those new pencil buildings. She’s afraid of this neighborhood, doesn’t feel safe walking on this street alone, so they spend most of their time at her place. She hates the shabby exterior and it really bugs her to enter through a mud room, she says she can’t have anyone over so she’s always trying to get him to fix it up. But he won’t. So he’s basically moved out of here. Just to be with her. The things we do for love, he said, shaking his head.

Soon after my visit to the house, I moved to Los Angeles and lost touch with my friend. So I never visited the house again, and I never found out whether his father returned to the house.

But though it’s been 20 years, I’ve never forgotten that house. I’ve seen many nicer houses since then, houses that would rank higher on any number of objective and subjective criteria, but for some reason that’s the one house that’s permanently filed away in my mind as the Ideal House.

It’s got to be the façade. That’s what’s unique about the house. When I suggested to my friend that they clean the façade, I was kidding, for even before my friend explained the façade, I knew. I didn’t understand, but I knew.

Only now, 20 years later, do I understand.