Oil City, my birthplace. I wish you could see just how steep this street is. My grandmother used to fret that a car was going to come sliding down this steep street in the winter and come barreling straight into the front window of our house...
There's a lot of abandoned property here--though not as much as you find in the towns of the Monongahela Valley. A lot of houses in Oil City just LOOK abandoned; they've actually got people living in them. And they're big. And they have a lot of nonsensical doors opening onto porch roofs. Upstairs exterior doors to nowhere are pretty much a feature in most of these homes. Our house has a door in the bathroom that opens onto a three-story drop.When we were kids, the round tower on the top of this house served as a kind of landmark. It used to be so lovingly maintained... Now everything looks like an abode of witches, or vampires, or goblins.
The dereliction is such a waste, such a betrayal. But who can maintain a house like this in the local economy? I think this place went from private home to funeral home and now back to a private home--or maybe an apartment building. It'd be weird to live in a house that used to be a funeral home...
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