Providence House
I have a recurring dream where I move back to Providence and need to find a place to live. I move into my old apartment, it’s falling apart, but there are also fantastic huge spaces I never knew about.
I lived in a tiny studio my junior year of college on the lower left side and the next year in a nice 2-room apartment flanking that porch on the 2nd floor right (which the singer Lisa Loeb moved into after I left). I had the requisite old chair on the roof and would hang out up there. But the whole thing is abandoned now, with peeling paint, boarded doors and in the left walkway, the ceiling is fallen in allowing pidgeon roosts and inches of guano.
on May 29th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
The historic buildings would be one of the great things about the cities on the eastern seaboard. Do you know if they lost many old buildings during the late 50’s/early 60’s “urban makeover” like we did here in Mpls/St Paul?
The custodian at my work used to live alone in an old mansion in Minneapolis, hired by its owners to be its caretaker in exchange for living there. Being single and in his twenties at the time, he spent most of his time kicking a playground ball across the mansion’s ballroom, perfecting the skill of landing it in the grand piano. I forgot the name of the place; I’ll ask him tomorrow the name of the place. It’s down by Dunwoody somewhere.
on May 29th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
Yeah, it’s amazing to me that this place is abandoned like this. It’s been chopped up in crazy ways, but it is right on campus. There are other houses like this around Providence that have been similarly chopped to pieces. My sister and I speculated that there was some sort of legal thing going on with it, which is why it was abandoned but not resold or condemned. In Minneapolis, Kenwood used to be like this - many of those huge grand mansions were boarding houses back in the 40’s and 50’s.
on May 30th, 2006 at 1:45 am
Yes! My Mom and Dad moved straight from their hometown in Iowa in 1962 to boarding rooms in Kenwood and the Wedge area. Before they were married, my Mom stayed in a house right around the corner from the Leaning Tower of Pizza that she has always referred to as a “girls club” which, by her description, sounds like a euphemism for a code-violating, overpacked rental house for women only.
I suppose many of these places do hang in limbo while multiple owners fail to agree and nobody has the means or desire to buy and restore them (often to the exacting specs of a preservation group), but there may be no pressing public need to condemn it either, so they just linger.
Here’s a link to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which just added several buildings at Fort Snelling to their list. http://www.nationaltrust.org/11Most/
As I searched, I saw that there are quite a few of these preservation trusts and alliances. Here’s one tracking several Minnesota sites: http://www.mnpreservation.org
on June 1st, 2006 at 9:24 am
The house in which my friend lived alone as caretaker is known as the Lyon House on Oak Grove Ave (the address is now Clifton Place, he says) about a block north of the Hennepin Ave Methodist Church. It always sounded like a fun gig!