Out past the edge of the subdivisions, where the farmland used to run uninterrupted, there’s a red brick house standing in grass up to its porch rail.
It’s a two-storey colonial-style home with white columns and a full-width balcony stacked over the front entrance. The paint on the columns is peeling in long curls. Two enormous maples flank the house like bookends, and the lawn has gone fully to meadow: chicory, Queen Anne’s lace and tall seed grass, all in bloom against the brick.
The front door stood open, so I started in the foyer. A curved oak staircase with panelled wainscoting sweeps up from the entry, under brass fixtures that still looked like they were waiting for someone to flip the switch. The arched transom over the door throws a fan of light across the hardwood. The floors are scattered with wire hangers and broken glass, and a maroon snow shovel lies in the middle of the foyer as if someone dropped it mid-sentence.
Through French doors, the living room has a gas fireplace with a carved oak mantel and a beveled mirror, one wall of dark green wallpaper, and a ceiling fan with a cluster of amber lights. Across the hall is the dining room, which is the part nobody told the house to give up on: a carved rosewood-style table with eight chairs, still wearing their gold silk cushions, flanked by two glass-front cabinets, under a pleated valance and tied-back curtains. The textured ceilings, brass hardware and floral swag drapes feel very much like a 1990s build, and the stained floors show the water finding its way in.
Outside, a covered side porch runs the length of the brick, its bare joists gone silver with weather, a coach lantern still on the wall.
What makes this one hard to leave is what’s coming. The land around it has been rezoned in spirit for years, and the planning paperwork for its future is already filed: a cluster of high-rise towers, thousands of apartments, and retail at street level. The house isn’t in the plans. In a few years the meadow and the maples will be a different kind of skyline, and this porch will be a memory in a few hundred photos.
I’m glad I got there while the grass was still high.
