Change is Hard (Los Altos Town Crier February 2014)
The house across the street will be torn down by its new owners,, and a new two-story house with a basement will appear in its place.It is a perfectly good house, a 1950’s 3-bedroom 2-bath ranch style with the kitchen in front and a patio in back looking at a deep back yard filled with fruit trees. These are only the third owners.
The first owners were airline pilots: he flew for Pan Am; she had ferried war planes across the country during World War II. The house was built as part of the new San Antonio development after the war .
At some point in the late 50’s the first owners added a second-story addition behind the garage with an additional bathroom, family room and fireplace downstairs, a playroom and additional bedroom upstairs to accommodate their growing family. The owner did a lot of the work himself; the staircase was narrow and lacked a banister. It would never have passed code today.
The children grew up and moved away, and the wife became the dowager overseer of the street. From her strategically placed kitchen window she could see anyone arriving or leaving up or down the street, or coming around the corner. She made no secret of her vigilance. When I was a teenager and my parents were planning to go out of town, our neighbor came over to ask my mother “If I see a strange car parked over night while you’re gone and Allyson is home, do you want me to tell you or not?”
The first owners aged and moved to be closer to one of their children. They kept the house empty for over 30 years. Prop 13 kept their taxes miniscule, so it was cheap storage, and convenient to stay when they visited friends on the Peninsula. Finally the children arrived, cleared out the house, and it was sold.
The second owners were a young family with young children. They loved the vintage ranch style of the house, the avocado and terra-cotta wallpaper in the kitchen, the rice paper on the walls of the living room, even the bead curtain in the kitchen window. They put on a new roof and installed new windows. They built an elaborate playhouse in the back yard for their kids. They hosted a guacamole party for the neighborhood when the avocado tree was in fruit.
But it didn’t last. After only a couple of years the wife found a fixer upper in north Los Altos that was even more of a challenge. The house went up for sale again. It sold to another young couple with young children at roughly 1000 times its original cost.
It was the deep back yard. The new owners came over to show us the plans for a new house on the lot. “We’ll have the family room and kitchen at the back, looking over the swimming pool. The kids will be playing in the back; they won’t bother you. In front there will be just a home office and bedrooms. We want to use as much of the back yard as we can. We’ll plant trees in the front so the house won’t look so big.”
The change makes me sad. Sad to see the old house go. Sad that the new family plans to be invisible in their back yard behind their two-stories plus basement. Sad that there will be no eagle eye on the street, unless it’s mine. My kitchen does face the corner.
Allyson Johnson 