When we were looking for a house, our realtor asked us what kind of houses we grew up in. She said that the vast majority of the time, people look for houses like the ones they were raised in.
That was in fact true for both of us -- I grew up in midwestern houses built in the 20's or so, with wood built-ins (something I really wanted.) My husband grew up in a passel of not particularly interesting houses (moved around a lot) but "home" for him is highly correllated with his grandma's house -- a midwestern house built in the 20's or so.
(We got a midwestern house built in the 20's or so.)
But I think the same goes for the kind of area you grew up in. I grew up in Minneapolis, near the city center but still residential (we mowed our lawns), very urban flavor but with a nice community feel to the immediate neighborhood. E.G. grew up in a series of more suburban areas, real urban areas (graffiti, bars on windows) give him the heebie-jeebies. However, he also really dislikes the burbs and homogeneity. We compromised a bit there, more towards urban than suburban, but worked out pretty well I think. (Knock on wood.) (Thanks once again to ehBeth, Setanta and others on A2K who helped... it just keeps coming up that people who live here are amazed that we figured out where to live just from research. A lot of people we've talked to lived somewhere else in the vicinity fist, then figured out they wanted to move here.)
My neighborhood ...
The red pin is my place, the left and right borders are about 18 to 20 miles to either side, the top and bottom borders are about 12 to 15 miles above and below. The lighter areas are mostly fields either planted with light-colored crops or just bare earth, most of the rest is forrest land, the area is liberaly sprinkled with great little fishin' lakes and ponds frequented almost exclusively by locals, cut by a couple rivers and many smaller streams, and there is not a town shown in that satellite picture, though there is a town of about 1500 just a little below the narrow, longish lake just left of the bottom center of the photo. Portions of 4 counties are pictured.
I love the countryside, love to camp, love to hike. I couldn't live there, though. I really need to have social interaction, to have a really great coffeeshop nearby to go and just watch people, be part of the energy and hustle and bustle. Plus the cultural aspects, museums, movies, political activism, (I've been asked to volunteer at the Edwards rally right after the VP debate! Woo-hoo!), theater, dance, everything.
timberlandko wrote:My neighborhood ...
The red pin is my place, the left and right borders are about 18 to 20 miles to either side, the top and bottom borders are about 12 to 15 miles above and below. The lighter areas are mostly fields either planted with light-colored crops or just bare earth, most of the rest is forrest land, the area is liberaly sprinkled with great little fishin' lakes and ponds frequented almost exclusively by locals, cut by a couple rivers and many smaller streams, and there is not a town shown in that satellite picture, though there is a town of about 1500 just a little below the narrow, longish lake just left of the bottom center of the photo. Portions of 4 counties are pictured.
thanks timber I've sold your location to several direct sales companies....
No problem, BPB ... The Puppies really enjoy salesfolk. If they're smart enough to call before stoppin' by, I tell 'em to tell the really noisy Rottweiler they have an appointment, and he'll clear them through the other one and the Shephards and the Huskie ... and just to ignore the retreivers, spaniels, and the schnauser; they're not security staff, no matter what they say
so it's a win win situation.....
A good time is had by most, for sure :wink:
My story is a composite of several of yours. I grew up in a city of a half-million, first near the city center in a late 1920s brick house, then later in a new house in the suburbs. I hated the suburbs. Then I went to college in one of Thomas's midsized university towns (50,000) and fell in love with it. Lived there several years after college...it was hard to leave. Then moved around to various cities & towns. Now I live in a city of 750,000 near the city center in a late 1920s brick house (you're right, soz!) We're within walking distance of the largest city parks, the municipal rose garden, the art museum, the bike trails, and several upscale shopping areas.
I didn't care for life in huge cities (Dallas & Cleveland) because I spent far too much time & energy just getting from Point A to Point B. And the lack of a cohesive "community" feel. But I also didn't like most small towns because of the lack of good shopping & things to do. The city I chose is large enough to have all the major retailers and plenty of festivals and local attractions, but it is still small enough that you can get anywhere in 30 minutes. Besides, it's a very pretty place...clean, lots of trees & rivers & lakes & hills. And it's centrally located, so it's not prohibitively expensive to fly anywhere when I travel.
I still think about moving back to the midsize university town when we retire, though. It's a progressive community, and it will always have excellent facilities, restaurants & shopping because of the school. Plus it's only an hour away from two major cities if I need them. People are so open-minded there.
i mean theres nothing like letting your dogs out and worrying that they are gonna get hit by some jerk flying down the road and not watching where he/she is going...
Sorry, can't pinpoint my house, as whole communties are fuzzed out here:
Humboldt Bay
I have this varied background re where my family, and then I, have lived.
And I agree that one is attracted to the good parts of where one was, the
place of it, for a long time later, even though I think sometimes some people have an equal antipathy, if the circumstances were emotionally hard. Plus, people don't always follow some imprinting, and can get to be more comfortable in a type of place they were happy in later of their choice as they developed into adulthood.
But I bet there are certain corners, nooks, walks, skies, that always recall early days in a good way, if they only recall a moment's comfort in the hard early times. I don't know if any studies have been done on this kind of thing.
And, by the way, before I even start to list where I've been and like, I live in a California bungalow with a newspaper in the attic dating 1923.
By good parts, I don't mean the best architecture, but the best comfort.
I dont know... i heard that in some cities the smog makes for great sunsets :-D
This is clearly too much information, inappropriately so, but it interests me to work this out. I may edit from time to time, to see connections myself to what I like now that makes sense with back then..
so warning, this will be a self indulgent memory trip.
- Just before I was born, my parents built a house in Toluca Lake, an area of Los Angeles. My dad had some involvement in the design, and knew carpentry, but I doubt he was the builder. They built it around 1938.
The house they bought in 1958 in a different part of the city looks, at least in front on photos, very similar. So, that was my first house as a squalling baby in late 1941. BIG CITY, but not downtown.
- shortly thereafter, we all moved to Dayton, Ohio, where my dad was involved in the phototech division of the US army air force. At some point he became c.o. of that divison at Wright Field, as it was then known. We lived in a wee brick house nearby. I would guess from what I know now that it might have been max 600 sq. ft. and probably less, 400 or 500. There was a field next door, which I can remember my mother mentioning that I could see a dog far away in, and a sandbox my father built for me right next to the small front porch. He was hardly ever home and had a rough sort of uniform on, in my memories. I think I remember gabardine.
I also remember my playpen, a dark burgundy rug, the footstool that I loved, the kitchen, sort of, and having a turkey sandwich. Oh, and pabulum (presumably earlier than the turkey sandwich), and certain crackers. MEDIUM CITY .. of the city itself, I remember walking across the street at a signal with my mother and her telling me a child walking towards us was about eight.
- my aunt's house in west Los Angeles. Spanish revival cottage. My mom and I lived with my aunt and grandparents, who she was taking care of... and my mother could then help, while my dad was away on a project with the AAF.
I remember the house well, but it is hard to isolate memories from then and later. I think the key thing then was I got the measles (the short one, I think) and stayed in my aunt's big bedroom during that time. Big flowery wallpaper. Plus, a giant deer walked down the street one day. It turned out to be a great dane. A lot of the houses in the neighborhood were tiny spanish revival cottages, which I can remember being not interested in sometime later, tooo boring. Let's say I've changed my mind. BIG CITY, SMALL PART OF IT.
- Fairfax, Virginia - a housing project, I'm sure in memory that the whole thing was newish. Two story. I have this memory from possibly then and definitely later that my dad was happy about the idea of these good housing projects as places to live. (hmm, I am credentialed as a site designer/planner now, decades later... views of how projects work has been tempered over the times since. Radburn as a planned community has lived on as a model, and Pruitt Igo was blown up. I slightly remember seeing Bedford Styvacent housing just after it opened, but am not sure I'm right on that.) We only lived there perhaps four months, while my father had meetings at the Pentagon. This would have been 1947. Then back to West LA, my aunt's, and first grade. SUBURB AT THE TIME.
- New York City. We lived there one year, when I was eight. Great time I picked, I have to tell you! Basically, 1950. For an eight year old girl, at a time when my parents were beginning to do fine financially, it was a privileged situation. I didn't know that. I was an only child and had had until then few friends. Did make one in that apartment building, and did keep up with her for about a decade later. It was when I first began to play with other friends (yeh, weird, but I don't entirely regret m'strange little past). And quite big city, in that we often went downtown.. my mother and I shopping, and uptown, to visit my father's office at RKO. We went for rides along where the big ships lined up, like the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, and rides along the countrified Merritt Parkway. I saw Rockefeller Center and St. Pat's Cathedral and Macy's basement, and we bought coats at Klein's. As luxe as this sounds to me now, I didn't have many things. I just looked at a lot, and I have memories of entering the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. (huh?)
- rental house in Evanston, Illinois. Two story white clapboard, with full lot yard next door. Wonderful house, a half block from the grade school, and I immediately was thrust into a neighborhood of lively children, most of them girls, except for one family with eleven children of mixed genders. Still, the one our age was a girl. We became The Secret Pine Club. Those next five years were my introduction to what I think of as normal life, sort of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver time. I started to talk more and play more. I remember that whole time as fun, although it was up and down. My dad had a wonderful job at an advertising agency and lost it. It was again, early days, we didn't know then it would be common in advertising. Just before he lost it, they bought a house. NEAR CITY SUBURB
- went back to Dayton one summer, when I was twelve. My father was researching the history of flight - he wrote thirteen episodes for the Age of Flight, a tv series he proposed, then and after we got back to our Chicago home. We were lowi on money as this was on spec, and lived in a basement one bedroom apartment near the Miami River. I liked it, and liked Dayton. My parents were anxious, but that level of anxious became quite familiar later, and (yikes, very familiar to me now, I have coasted-in-wait/finacial dismay for big segments of my adult life, and I probably tolerate this because I was primed to it in some way. I'd rather not be bored... well, that is another whole subject) Re city, I liked Dayton that summer. I revisited with my mother Rike's department store, which I remembered as having some sort of fan/bell from when we lived there when I was 1 - 4, and I had a sweet little twelve year old summer, getting books from the library and reading six at a time, and going out to the Carillions, and visiting Hagy and Ba' Isobel, older people who must have taken care of me once in a while when I was a toddler. And the Rossi's. Making me remember Annie Rooney Rossi, my first actual friend, from the early days. Ah, sentimental at twelve. BASEMENT APARTMENT (re the series, he had gotten department of defence ok, and had funding, but, as I remember, CBS came in and got the plum. I think there was no series, but not sure. Anyway, kaput. No income.
INTERJECTION - two apartments in my life so far, one nice, one okay, and some train rides in compartments, which I for some reason loved - I now get a kick out of tidy small spaces, given that one chooses them.
- a two story house a block away from the rental house. It was brick on the bottom and white clapboard on the top. Key memory is driving to some furniture place in downtown Chicago to get a formica table and chairs. (somehow drives to Chicago are still in my dreams). I still sort of like formica. It also had a knotty pine panelled den, with a tv set into a nook. I was by then thirteen. There was a lot of financial and thus emotional sturm and drang in that house, and soon enough my parents sold it and moved back to west LA, to my aunt's house. NEAR CITY SUBURB to BIG SPRAWLING CITY.
- aunt's house. We lived there from when I was thirteen to fifteen. My father had a good job, vp of RKO, named as that in Variety and Reporter (I think) mere seconds before the studio was sold. He got some editing jobs, but editing has had an episodic history, and he was getting older. People started not answering calls. But he cut (edited) Night Court for a while, and parents then bought a house another bunch of blocks away, the one that looked like the first one. In the meantime, we had, as a family, spent a lot of Sundays househunting. I remember the house they didn't buy, 1/2 block south of Sunset, a spanish two story, for $19,000.
The time in Chicago area house hunting and West LA area house hunting brought me from a scribbling child to a teen with opinions on houses.
Aunt's house now torn down. BIG SPRAWLING CITY.
- We got a house and shortly thereafter the work dried up for my dad. Off and on. We fixed it up ourselves. I spent what might have been my sixteenth summer scraping paint over wallpaper over paint over wallpaper over paint, etc. off of what was to be my bedroom. (I cannot tell you how much that house is worth now, with some sardonic grinning.) The ensueing decade was fairly horrible, as they and I fought to make the payments and have me go to college by bus. They grew more estranged than ever, my dad died mentally ill and my mother of alzheimer's. I sold that house to pay for my mother's nursing home care, as she had wild alzheimer's, wandered, when I was at work as far as the airport, seemingly on the way to my aunt's. Alzheimer's wasn't a word then, that any of us knew.
Turned out I didn't have to sell it, as I was joint tenant.
AGAIN, SPRAWLING CITY.
- my first apartment, when I did lab training at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, rented a tiny cottage (250 sq ft) behind a big house across from La Jolla Cove. Very charming, except that was when they started building the multistory complex a few doors down. Woken every day around six by giant clangs. Cute place. Did my laundry in the shower or walked it across town in pillowcase to laundromat. But cute.
LOW INCOME IN LUXURIOUS SUBURB.
Lived at home again, sturm and drang. SPRAWLING SUBURB
- Got a job and apartment, a tack-on in back of a duplex on Beverly Glen in LA. Cockroaches. But cute. I made curtains. Painted the walls, Purchased things like toaster oven, etc. My sense of decor was white walls, navy blue furniture (director's chairs, etc.) and navy and pink and white curtains. The playboy bunny of the year lived in the duplex in front, and I could hear she and her boyfriend's screaming fights through the adjoining door. By then this was 1966 and I had life of my own, rather late compared to everybody else, but I didn't know that.
BIG CITY, but I spent my time mostly in one area.
- Got an apartment, a whole second floor atop a Spanish Revival House in Westwood, sort of near UCLA. Paid relatively small rent, $115./month as I remember it, which became better and better as they never raised it over six years because I was a good tenant. (!!!!!) Even though I once invited 124 people to a party and they all showed up. My sense of decor at its height then was to purchase two rya rugs. I soooo loved them. I did strip down and repaint the kitchen cabinets, and put new tiles down on the floor. The landlords loved me.
BIG CITY, though by then I was beginning to explore more of the whole LA area. (that house now torn down) <father died early days when I was in that apartment.>
- old hotel refurbished from flophouse (etc) by arty types, The St. Charles Hotel - long story, but I had a loft there (my cousin's husband built the loft for me). Not long after, I now understand more fully how much to my cousin and husband's dismay, I joined with a pal from there in renting a 3400 sq. ft. old Eagles' Lodge in Venice. We took possession when it had seven broken windows and... well, never mind. We fixed it up, to some extent, mostly with my pay from UCLA, which was limited. Had art studio, and art gallery. Rented it part time to a theater group from USC; my to-be husband was part of that group.
OLD STUCCO HOTEL room in beach city of some past repute
OLD EAGLES' LODGE, SAME BEACH CITY.
- Temporarily moved with studio gallery partner from there to rental bungalow, same beach city. That didn't last. Myself and boyfriend (To-Be) and she and her's were all sick of the sight of each other.
CALIFORNIA BUNGALOW, SAME BEACH CITY
- bought 1912 California Bungalow with to be husband. It was in a red-lined area, and we went to many places to try to get a loan. Not only was it redlined, we weren't married. Not good in 1976. Got loan eventually.
CALIFORNIA BUNGALOW, SAME BEACH CITY.
- Lived there 23 years, loved it. Loved each other, mostly. Remodelled it twice. Both became very involved in the community. Knew most people for the immediate block and many many in the neighborhood.
Personally walked miles and miles around, felt very attached.
SAME.
- Divorce. We both moved. Sold it to pay off bills and move.
Now live by self about a thousand miles north, still in a
CALIFORNIA BUNGALOW, my third place on moving here, and the one I bought. For, of course, the cabinetry, the murphy bed, the coffered ceilings.
But this CALIFORNIA BUNGALOW is in a town of 25,000 or so.
Not a big city, and it is a few hundred miles from a big and beautiful one.
I am here because I found someone I can work with and keep a business going, such as it is. I like the weather. The people are a little monochromatic for me, and the food is dreckville, generally. Even the coffeeshops are awful, never mind the supposed primo places. (OK, there are one or two, at most, good ones.) I don't have friends for miles around, though I have made some. My friends in real life and on the internet are pretty far-and-widely located, but I do feel ballasted by friends.
SMALLISH CITY
When I go to the big California cities or New York, I am pretty happy. A lot of people up here have traffic fear. I have it myself on California's highway 5 in some places. But when I go back to LA, at least in west LA, it isn't all that bad. On the other hand, I don't drive around so much at going to work and coming back time when I am visiting.
I'll try to edit this blast from the past shortly, but I'd like to post it before it dissolves.
Addendum. I am not so much a country girl - I know it, my business partner is and I see the difference re personal comfort surviving on the land. At the same time, part of why I love it where I am now is where I am now... see photo.
I did grow up to study landscape architecture/site design, and am very interested in the lacework of cities, in particular the plaza/piazza spaces of european cities.
I would like to see our suburbs and industrial parks rearranged a bit to make pedestrian and bike byways a rational way to get about, not just by some concocted park, and have places that function as plazas do, not all contrived like malls, as meeting places, so that people get out of their home-car-work-home lives.
Ah, well, I could go on about this. In fact I keep meaning to write a book...
Wow Osso...real interesting
That is the longest post i've ever seen so far....holy shite osso!!
LOVED it, osso. Don't edit.
Oh, I already edited about six times....
I am hard to shut up once I get going.
Well, don't ever shut up. That was a really neat bit of reminiscence. Thanks for writing it.
Okay, now I've edited ten times and there are still typos. Enough. Just consider what I left out, we'd be here all day.
I see this as a separate thread but am a little lazy now, after all that editing. Will ask it again in a separate topic manana.
But for now, to start a thought...
Edgarblythe and I have had waaaaay different paths, and we agree on a lot of matters. There are, as we all perceive, a lot of ramparts built on the use of land, space, power, and so on. I am more interested in where we can agree across various divides. Edgar and I or timber and I, or dys and I, or any number of us. Is there anything on land use we agree on? Never mind government entities.
ossobuco wrote:I see this as a separate thread but am a little lazy now, after all that editing. Will ask it again in a separate topic manana.
But for now, to start a thought...
Edgarblythe and I have had waaaaay different paths, and we agree on a lot of matters. There are, as we all perceive, a lot of ramparts built on the use of land, space, power, and so on. I am more interested in where we can agree across various divides. Edgar and I or timber and I, or dys and I, or any number of us. Is there anything on land use we agree on? Never mind government entities.
leave it was it is I think... I think its right nice here in this thread.... as far as land use? I say we use it to grow one big ol field of weed and just have a blast.... oh yea gotta add slip and slides?
