4913 Avenue G

In my twenties I attended many a house party in Hyde Park and various neighbor hoods around town. I would always notice the house and sometimes feel sorry for it especially the ones that had empty, imported beer bottles lining the window sills or some hideous "found art" piece scratching up the wood floors or entire rooms painted black, including the wood floors. It's amusing  to see those homes listed with MLS numbers. These properties are all cleaned up and freshly painted. Words like "renovations" or descriptions like, "Open floor plan, great for family" are used to sell it. But I  knew it when it was a junky party house. I like to see the renovations and appreciate an older home was saved and not razed, but can't help but wonder what the new owners would think if they saw what their future home looked like as an Austin rental.

I lived in a home in Hyde Park for a year and a half. It was cute place, built in 1929. The woman across the street had told me it once had a lovely lot of roses growing next to it but the family that owned it was not nice. The lady of the home had become ill in the 50's and called the pharmacy to ask a few questions about her medication. It was winter time and all the gas heaters were running. She had left him on hold to go fetch her prescription bottle and had not returned. This became a problem because it was tying up the pharmacist's line (phone lines not the way they are now) so he sent someone over to see what was up. The clerk arrived to find the place locked tight and smoke slipping under the door. He quickly alerted neighbors and fire trucks were called while he broke a window to find the lady of the house slumped over the gas heater roasting. She was dead. It was not clear whether she had a heart attack and fell over or had tripped and unable to get up had died a tortured death.

That same house became home to one of the biggest pot dealers in town in the 60's. Later in the 70's the backyard had been filled with old cars because a mechanic was living there. The oil from those cars did damage to the soil and when it would rain, the water would not seep through in parts. In the '80s it was home to the owner of some restaurant until the '90s when I moved in with a few others. All this time it had been passed along, informally, without a lease and without much of a rent increase, my share was $80.33. There were boxes in the front room, loads of things in every drawer in the kitchen, records on the floor...I assimed that everything belonged to the guy who was living there. Tired of the junk I asked if there was some way we could clean up. He said only what was in his room belonged to him, the rest came with the house.

Apparently everything in the house was a leftover from previous tenants. The junk had turned into a smorgasborg of treasures: Among the records was a numbered White Album, cool art books, neat vintage kitchen items, a box full of beads and jewelry making supplies... Eventually, the landlord, who had not been there since 1983, came by and was surprised to see that the original tenant had longed moved out and there were six people in a four bedroom home paying only $485 a month. Changes came fast, all the old junk in the shed and backyard was hauled out, holes in walls patched, latches on windows put in and new wiring. When the carpet was lifted in one of the rooms, underneath was an old piece of linoleum and old Weekly Readers from the '30s, an old report card and newspapers from the '40s all smelling of mildew but otherwise somewhat intact. WWII headlines, first run Dick Tracy Sunday comics in color print and the pages of an entire old Sears catalog for the '40s. Was the carpet that old? Horrifying. To this day I get creeped out when I think of the time I picked up a bottle of bleach to do my whites and opened it to find needles swimming in it. I was told it was a leftover and was there when our roommate moved into the house in 1987. Possibly even older than that. There was a bong shaped like a peace sign that was also a leftover our roommate  had procured from a previous tenant along with the house and it's stories and it was supposedly an authentic '60s relic. I discovered the house had a sordid past as a drug party house for years and that explained why out of nowhere someone would show up knocking at the door mumbling code or dropping names.

The house collected stories until recently when it was renovated and sold. I drove past the place a few weeks ago en route and saw pretty little flowers in the front yard, a porch void of old sofas and junk, and through the front picture window I could see, for an instant, that it was a family home, clean,warm, nice paint, kids.It was nice to know it had, hopefully, found a forever owner and would never again be trashed. It even seem to have shed it's icky past completely. It was not one of my favorite places to live in at all. In fact, I hated that rental and I wasn't fond of all the roommates or that entire situation. It is a good thing when a house can finally shut up about it's past and start over.