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Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Before...: The Curci family home on Terra Bella Avenue.
Remember When
Monster Houses: A community curse or neighborhood blessing?
By Cookie Curci-Wright
It's becoming all too familiar a sight in our Willow Glen neighborhoods, those ubiquitous "For Sale" signs that keep popping up like unwanted crab grass on our neighbors' front lawns.
It's not long after one of these signs disappears from a neighbor's bungalow home that the quaint little house and the yard in which it stood also disappear. In its place appears a construction company, complete with bulldozers, dumpsters and wrecking crew. The prewar home is soon only a memory and every inch of its tiny lot engulfed by a huge new structure. The monster house has arrived!
There's an advantage and a disadvantage to this new trend in tear-down/build-up home construction. The advantage being that new homes raise property values. Remarkable improvements and transformations have taken place in these old neighborhoods after a "monster house" has been built. Often, old and dismal-looking neighborhoods are reborn after several rebuilds take place. The spiffy new home acts as a catalyst that encourages other homeowners to add on and remodel. New landscapes, new paint jobs, fences and gingerbread soon follow. The result: a rise in property values and a unique, eclectic mix of ticky-tacky and lavish homes and social standing.
The disadvantage? These huge reconstructions often look out of place, overshadowing smaller homes as they squeeze into older neighborhoods. However, Willow Glen has long been a community of economic blending, where modern and traditional sometimes abruptly collide. Eventually, the monster home and the tiny bungalow will most likely find a way to attractively co-exist.
Living next door to one of these monster houses could be another disadvantage. Waking up one morning to discover one of these three-story, monolithic giants towering over you, complete with bay windows, sky domes and balconies overlooking your once-private backyard, would certainly be unsettling.
Strangely enough, privacy is what motivates the owners of these monstrous houses to build them in the first place--a desire to give their children plenty of private space, a room and a bathroom of their own, a computer room, etc.
I wonder if, in their zeal to bestow so much privacy on their family, they aren't depriving them of something very basic and special, something we all knew as kids--family bonding. It was a bonding that came from years of sharing a one-bathroom house with a six-member family; from sharing the same bedroom with a kid sister; the same closet; same dresser drawers and years of fighting over who was in charge of the night light.
Sharing rooms with our siblings and parents also meant we shared their most intimate dreams and aspirations. Sure, we had disputes over territory and belongings, but it was during those years that we learned something about the word "compromise."
I grew up in one of these small prewar homes. Dad purchased the two-bedroom, one-bath charmer in 1939, and to him it was a palace. I guess it was, when you compare it to the one-room tank house he shared with his six brothers when he was a kid growing up on a prune ranch in Old Almaden.
Privacy in our old neighborhood, or the lack of it, was a neighborhood equalizer. Each family had an ample view of the other's backyard, washline and garbage cans. On laundry day, we could count the socks and underwear on each other's clothesline. On weekends, the smoke from a neighbor's barbecue was an invitation to reach over the fence for a taste of smoky ribs. We knew all our neighbors and all their children. It was a neighborhood bond and blend that could only come from years of sharing a common purpose and lifestyle.
Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
... and After: After the two-bedroom, one-bath home was demolished, the new owner built a huge new house in its place, which has been bought and sold several times since.
I'd really be shocked--no, stunned would be a better word--if I saw an old one-story knocked down and another one-story built in its place. What's wrong with a one-story, anyway? These little houses were good enough to produce our parents' generation, a generation that fought world oppression in World War II and that many feel was the greatest generation of the century. (Excuse me while I get off my soapbox now.)
Like a lot of people, I wonder when this modern need for bigger houses first began. I surmise it started in the 1950s and '60s when the "do it for the kids" generation took hold. It was about that time that the song "Little Boxes," written by Malvina Reynolds and made famous by folk artist Pete Seeger, hit the top of the folk charts. The song was a put-down of America's "ticky-tacky" little suburban houses. It was soon afterward, as if in spite of the song, that the sprawling one-level ranch style gained in popularity; the split-level soon followed. Land was at a premium and families were loath to give up indoor space. Developers had to figure a way to cram more houses onto less lot in order to make a profit and please the customer. There was no place to go but up: split levels and three-story houses began to emerge, and the rest is history in the world of home construction.
Today, with the exception of Hawaii, California leads the nation in highest-priced homes. According to the National Association of Realtors, the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California's Santa Ana area are the most pricey. Even longtime neighbors, who I thought would never sell their beloved homes, have cashed in on this skyrocketing market.
Perhaps this quip from Benjamin Franklin expresses it best: During his stay in London, a friend took him to admire a huge new house the friend had recently had built for himself. The house was oddly shaped and conspicuously laid out on a small plot of land. Because of the narrow area it had been squeezed into, there was no yard, patio or verandah on which to sit and admire the home. "All you need now in order to enjoy your house," Franklin observed, "is to rent a spacious apartment across the street."
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
