It frequently seems to happen that old, large houses that were once occupied by single families 100 years ago get subdivided into apartments. The current thread (now in MPSIMS, but suspect will soon be in IMHO) asking what’s the oldest thing people have in their homes made me wonder: does it ever happen that if you live in a subdivided house, you might get into the attic and actually find things that the original family left behind? Needless to say I wouldn’t expect them to be valuable antiques or anything like that, but has anyone in that situation ever found even traces of the original occupants?
I was wondering about this because in L.A. we have a 10th Street Elementary School. AS it happens, the school fronts Olympic Blvd, which was renamed from 10th street in 1932, in honor of the Xth Olympic Games that year. The school was founded 44 years before that, and they evidently never bothered to change the school’s name. The neighborhood has a lot of old, large houses that once must have been inhabited by comfortably well-off families, but now are all subdivided into apartments and are the homes of the working poor, mostly immigrants.
I don’t know why but it intrigues me to think that the former occupants might have left any traces of their lives in those houses.
So if any of you have any anecdotes which relate to this sort of thing, and you’d care to share, please let’s have them.
My story doesn’t deal with an old house, but rather an updated condiminium building. My mom moved in a few years back, and while going through a storage nook in the spare bedroom a few months back, I found a missed box of family pictures and knick-knacks. Nothing of any real value, but they were pretty thankful when we called them to let them know that they’d been found
When I moved into my apartment last month, we discovered that the tenants before us had left everything from the clothes in their closet, to their silverware drawer. They were in a bit of a hurry to get out.
The apartment I’m currently living in used to be huge, old house. I’m not exactly sure when they turned it into apartments, but I would guess around 2-5 years ago. Our living room used to be the old dining room, and it still has the original call box and outdated phone lines that were added into the wall. The people who used to live here must not have searched the attic very carefully, because I’ve found many things that are obviously from the original inhabitants (The house was passed down through the generations to my current landlord). Some things are junk, including a hideous greenish lamp shaped like a child, and then there are the things that were left in the yard, which are very cool.
The yard must’ve been awesome before my landlord’s dad died, because you can tell that the antiques and such that were left in the yard have been neglected for only a couple of years. Some of them are still in great condition, but most are overgrown with weeds and weathered. There’s a beautiful fountain/birdbath thing that seems to have done ok, and a sculpture on a pedestal that looks pretty good also. But then there’s the mining cart, complete with original tracks that were placed into the ground so the cart could run. It’s started to sink into the ground and has grass growing in it, and the tracks are overrun with roots. The car from 1914 that still has the original (?) sign hanging from the back has been left uncovered, and now the wood’s all rotted, and the metal’s rusting.
The landlord told me all the good antiques from the house are stored in some sheds on the property, and I’d love to go look at them, but I doubt I’ll get the chance to. The cool thing is that he told us that anything that was left behind is ours, so I’m still searching for stuff!
I already found an old word precessor and KILLER working telescope that I plan on keeping, so I figure I’ve already lucked out, but I still have the rest of the attic storage to search.
[sup]My area must be good for this kind of thing, because when I was searching for an apartment/house, I looked at this one place that still had the original wallpaper, children’s clothes from the late 1800’s stored in the attic’s closet, and a really weird doll that was left in the dumbwaiter. The house didn’t even have electricity upstairs!! It was way too creepy and old, so I passed.[/sup]
When I was a custom framer, a guy came in with something he wanted framed…apparently he’d just had his kitchen re-done, and in the process the contractors found a piece of brown paper behind the walls, signed by the original builder/architect for the house…who just happened to be the founder of a very successful, locally famous business. All of eighty years ago.
He wanted it conservationally framed, and said he was going to leave it hanging in the kitchen regardless of whether or not he ever sold the house.
It wasn’t particularly valuable, but I thought it was very cool.
Having said that, the only thing I’ve found in my current Old House Turned Into Funky Apartment is some peeling wallpaper and closets that smell like mothballs. The neighbors got the cool antiques that were left in THEIR apartment. bitter sigh
Totally Off Topic…
Audrey, you threw me off, I thought I was back at the Grumble! I’m Ruth over there. It feels like running into a customer at another store and they’re all out of context.
My cousins tore down the old farmhouse they grew up in and discovered there were old tin signs in the walls that were used to patch things. Old Coke signs and the like… They have cleaned them and displayed them and it is really cool
Either my mom or my aunt was working on her century + house, and was lamenting her need for a chisel. She tore off some of the wall, and right there, walled up, was a barely used, 100 year old chisel sitting on the framing in the wall!
I lived in an old manse that’d been converted to an apartment building, but the roof had been taken off to add an additional story, and the owners used the basement regularly, so I doubt any relics remained. Very cool house with 10’ ceilings though.
The house I live in now is about 100 years old. It’s been turned into a duplex, and Mr. Athena and I use the upstairs apartment as our offices.
We bought the house from my Dad, who bought it in the mid-80s. He did an extensive renovation and found some neat things. Probably the neatest is a 50 pound sack of sugar that was from WWII days. Apparantly someone had stored it in the rafters during the days that sugar was rationed, and forgot about it. One of my aunts owns a cake decorating business. She called the company who made the sugar and asked them if it was still safe to eat. They said as long as it was clean and not buggy to go ahead and use it. She did.
My Dad also found stacks of old newspapers, all in Finnish (there’s a big Finnish population here.) Parts of our house have Finnish newspapers used as insulation - you can see them in the basement entryway where the siding has become a bit separated from the ceiling and floor.
We did the opposite - when we built our old acadian style home 16+ years ago- we deliberately put things into the walls for folks to discover later.
Things included are:
Farmers almanac
The original house plans drawn by hubbie, which were on the back of a brown paper sack.
A small loose board in the dining area that we kept up to date with the names of every foster child who ever called our place home. (the names are written on the side facing the wall, and you have to know which board it is in order to find them)
A picture history of the original 2BR 1B house, that grew over the years into a 5BR 3B home. We also took pictures as we built the 1200 sq ft workshop, boat/camper port, and 5 bay parking/farm implement garage
One of the kids (I forget which one) kept poking baby teeth that had fallen out through a knot hole in the wall.
Love notes that hubbie and I wrote each other as we were finishing the house were placed into the walls before the sheetrock went up.
We sold the house 3.5 years ago - the new owners haven’t remodeled, so they haven’t discovered anything - but they know all of the stuff is there like buried treasure
Years ago, I rented a room in what served as the inspiration for the boarding house in the Bloom County comic strip; a kit house ordered from Sears, Roebuck, & Co. and built around 1893 or so. The room next to mine (separated by a pair of pocket doors long ago nailed shut and painted over) had sat empty for quite some time (someone had backed out on the lease), so I got permission from the landlord to rent both rooms and open the doors up to have a suite.
One evening, rather bored, I was trying to get the latch on the pocket doors to work. I’d chipped all the paint off the hardware, but couldn’t get the latch to flip out like it should. I finally took the whole mechanism out of the door and found that it rattled quite significantly when shaken. I unscrewed one side panel from the latch mechanism, and dumped out the following:
An inch-long piece of green crayon that was flat on one side (my grandparents had some of these, the flat side was to keep them from rolling down the sloped school desks).
An old brass thumbtack with a sort of 3D daisy pattern on the cap.
A buttonhook for buttoning the old-fashioned shoes with all the buttons up the front. It was cheap, just stamped out of some metal (aluminum, maybe) with a flower pattern on the handle; but I figure that it was stuck into the latchbox by some young child back when there were buttonhooks laying around people’s houses to play with. I figure it had been there quite a number of decades. I still have it.
In Atlanta, there is a neat older section of town called Buckhead. There are many large old houses and mansions that have been conveted to many things including apartments and we found a vacancy in one.
There were 3 apartments that we knew of including our ‘Penthouse’ (attic), the ‘Servants Quarters’ (toolshed) and the ‘Back Door’ (rear of the house). We moved into the ‘Penthouse’ which was perched on top of the house itself so all of our great windows looked out on roofing shingles. We had to go up outside stairs and cross an iron catwalk over a peak in the roof to get to our place.
The heat was natural gas and delivered by a floor unit that was very ornate and art deco but had to be lit every time you needed it.
The best part was that it had ghosts. Hubby and I never talked about it while we lived there because he didn’t believe in such things but still didn’t want to freak me out and I couldn’t believe what I thought I saw. Turns out the dog used to ‘stalk’ one of the floor units and one corner of the living room. We had both seen it at different times and the hair on necks tingled when we saw it.
One night I got up to go to the restroom. The route was circuitous and in the hall I was brought to full wakefulness by a voice in my head screaming “DON’T LOOK! DON"T LOOK! DON’T LOOK!!!” as I passed by a door to the living room. Scared the hell out of me.
And no, I didn’t look.
Yes. Yes, I am a wenis and I ran from the UFO as well. I may be a wenis but I don’t have nightmares and I am still on this planet.
The building I live in is about 200 years old, but since it is a rental appartment, I am unlikely to be tearing down walls
I would imagine the place has been well and truley picked clean however as it is an only military building, and was more or less gutted to the stone when it was made into appartments.
I was removing baseboards to paint, and found an old letter behind one of the boards. It was dated 1912 and was written to the former owner of the home from a cousin of hers that lived in Virginia. It was basically a “hope everything is ok in your neck of the woods” letter, with a little info about how everything was going with her cousin’s family. Not terribily exciting, but still a pretty neat thing to stumble upon. The stamp on the letter truned out to be a pretty nice collectibile as well.
A ex-co-worker (or cow-orker, as some might say) of mine, Nadine, found a manilla envelope in a drawer that had been left by the previous owners/renters of her place. It contained several 8x10 professionally-shot photos of a woman (presumably the one who had lived there before), one of which showed her topless. Nadine thought this was the funniest thing on earth and brought the pictures to work to show everyone. “You’ll never guess what I found!!” Heh…
With us it was a little different. From September 1966 to November 1971 we lived in a two-story house in Hermosa Beach, CA, built around 1910 and temporarily divided into apartments; we found this out because, among other thigns, our local electric bill had the street adress followed by “Lower Left.” In fact, the bedroom I used when we moved in–one of four, all on the second floor–had capped fittings in the closet suggesting it had been a kitchen.
My father and his sister still own the house where they grew up. My grandparents lived on the first floor 'til they died, and for many years, they rented the second and third floors to relatives. The building originally had two apartments, and the third floor apartment was added gradually – at first it was just a single room that served as a bedroom for someone who lived on the first floor. Because it’s an attic apartment, there are several very large, oddly shaped spaces under the eaves. They’re big enough to stand up in (on the interior side).
About seven years ago, my father was helping me move into the attic apartment. He opened one of the large under-eave spaces and emerged a minute later with an antique dining room chair. There was a set of four back there, and they’d belonged to my long-deceased grandmother. I used them for years while I lived in that house.
It feels like running into a customer at another store and they’re all out of context.
