Maureen F. McHugh
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When I lived in Brooklyn, I lived in a brownstone turned rooming house, in a room on the third floor, for $75 a week. The brownstone was one hundred years old, and the room was extraordinary. The wooden floors glistened like butter on a hot day. The plaster moldings were intact around the high ceilings. The walls were eight to ten inches thick, and the windows were tall and narrow and set deep in the walls. They had shutters inside. It was the first time I had ever seen such a thing. Most extraordinary of all was the cool white marble fireplace, purely ornamental now.
Now I live in a two year old four bedroom center stairwell colonial without architectual interest. It's in a subdivision of mostly very similar, very new homes. I wonder if, one hundred years from now, someone will view its rather routine amenities in the same way I saw the materials used in that Brooklyn brownstone. One hundred years from now, what will someone make of sheetrock? Of wooden trim around the windows? Will someone someday look at my two car driveway and find it aesthetically overwhelming?
I wish I could whisper down one hundred years and tell them that when we lived here,
when you looked out the bay window in the big room, you looked at the back of the dairy farm,
and sometimes black and white cows with obscenely pink tongues lolled their heads over the fence.
I hope that they would be as delighted as I was when I learned that the house at the end of my
Brooklyn block was the only one with a garage because when it had been built, the woman who
lived in it was Teddy Roosevelt's mistress, and he had gotten her special dispensation from
the city for a carriage house.
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