An Urban Ghost

           It would be pretty cool to have a second home in the city.  My parents had two homes.  There was our primary residence in town, where we spent most of our time.  Then there was our vacation home on a lake in the country, where we spent weekends and holidays.  The two-home thing isn't a bad system.  It echoes the lifestyle of the landed gentry of Edwardian England, except that the lords of old tended to have their main residence in the countryside and their secondary home in the city...which is how I would have to do it, too.

           I'm always telling my wife that we need a place in the city.  That way, if a benefit dinner, a play, or a concert kept us in town after dark, we could simply crash at our townhouse.  It wouldn't be our main residence, since Pittsburgh city schools are pretty rough.  But it would be our place in town...to be used on--perhaps--ten or twelve occasions per year...  I know it's not practical, but sometimes I just want to rescue a crumbling old townhouse, built at the turn of the century.

          You'd have to be crazy to take on maintenance responsibilities for a second home.  But you could get a pretty cool old house in Pittsburgh for less than $20,000.  This is 312 North Sheridan, in the East Liberty neighborhood.  It's an old townhouse that stands isolated on a once-crowded block, like the one surviving tooth in an empty mouth.  This part of town was genteel enough in its day, and many people who owned homes here could have also kept larger places in the surrounding counties.  I like the gangly, distorted feel of these old city houses; like skyscrapers, they strive to gain space by pushing upward from as small a patch of earth as possible.  Unlike my farmhouse, which could be described as "rambling," these places are lofty and narrow.  They stare vacantly at the street like gaunt widows, tall as Swedes.  I've been visiting a website that promotes the preservation of historic architecture like this.