This Old House

(Originally published 7/30/17)

This old house is no more. It stood in the same location in the Bronx for nearly a century and, it’s fair to say, witnessed innumerable and seismic changes all around it. If this old house could only have spoken before it was demolished, it would have had a story to tell. The home’s original owner built the structure with his own two hands, which wasn’t unheard of in the Bronx of yesteryear. People who had the privilege of entering its interior reported that the rooms were tiny and the ceilings, low. It was a dwelling for a different time and place. Pat Mitchell, an iconic local grocer for decades, rented a furnished room in the house’s attic in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While an average-sized adult couldn’t stand up straight there, rooms were really hard to come by then.

I am old enough to remember the builder’s then-elderly daughter living in the house with her grown son, known as “Buddy.” Buddy, who bore a striking resemblance to actor Jason Robards, had a faithful German shepherd often at his side. He was not what you would call a conversationalist. Outside of walking his dog or silently lounging around in his windowed front porch with a can of beer in his hand, the man was rather nondescript. The neighborhood’s nastier wagging tongues considered Buddy something of a slacker. He never appeared to be duly employed and was never sans beer money—a deadly one-two punch as far as they were concerned. And, too, the family had a summer place in the Catskills, where Buddy and his mother vacationed and eventually moved to after selling this old house.

Interestingly, the house's foundation was laid atop the recently covered-over Tibbetts Brook, which meandered through this area of the Bronx until the fledgling years of the twentieth century. When it was first ready for occupancy, there were still vestiges of the stream at the surface. Initially, the home's owner had a swimming hole in the backyard—water in which he actually swam, or at least wallowed in. The basement was quite often flooded.

When my grandparents moved to Kingsbridge in 1946, the old man's wife was still among the living. There were many empty lots in the neighborhood at that time and locals planted what they called “victory gardens” in some of them, even after the war and victory. My grandfather tilled a plot in close proximity of this old house. Approximately ten years later, he and fellow gardeners were asked to vacate the premises in the name of progress. The original developer of the property—directly behind this old house—went bankrupt after running into unforeseen and considerable water issues courtesy of the underground, but ever-tenacious Tibbetts Brook seeking daylight. Two tall buildings were subsequently erected, which were dubbed Tibbett Towers. And this old house now had a parking lot alongside it.

Happily, my grandfather and a few friends found a new site in which to indulge their penchant for gardening. It was not too far from their old garden space—walking distance in fact—and just to the north of this old house. A makeshift fence promptly enclosed the new space, and a well was dug that tapped into Tibbetts Brooks, which supplied the flowers and crops with a regular and generous source of water. It was this garden that I came to know during my youth, before it, too, was plowed under. I recently learned that the old man who built this old house planted the Sycamore tree in the backyard, which has long towered over the property. As of this writing, it’s still there and probably over eighty years old. No surprise though: the developer is going to cut it down—in the name of progress, naturally.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)