Even after my mother died in July, nearly six years after my father passed away, their house was still there — a two-story, white-columned Colonial, with a Century House medallion displayed on its front door and a picturesque pond out back.
The Fair Haven, New Jersey, house was the physical embodiment of my parents — Arthur Z. Kamin, a baker’s son who became the hard-driving, white bucks-wearing editor of the now-defunct Daily Register out of Shrewsbury, New Jersey; and Virginia P. Kamin, a tall, stylishly dressed teacher, beloved for her generosity, who towered over her elementary school charges.
So it was deeply unsettling last week when my sister, Brooke, and I sold the house, especially because the buyers plan to tear it down. Its future demolition is like anticipating a third death.
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My feelings of dislocation surely are not unique, given the teardown trend that has altered the face of suburbs around Chicago and the nation, often replacing modest homes with oversized, visually overwrought McMansions. Countless Americans undoubtedly have experienced the same gut-wrenching sensation as they watched, if they could bear to, wrecking crews reduce their childhood homes to splinters or shattered bricks.
Yet it is rare to grow up in a very old house, and rarer still to have parents who plant themselves there for more than half a century and put down deep roots. The U.S. is one of the world’s most geographically mobile countries. IBM, its corporate transfers used to joke, stands for “I’ve Been Moved.”
For me, living hundreds of miles away in suburban Chicago, the house served as an anchor — a bastion of continuity in a tumultuous, ever-shifting world. That reflected the hopes of my mother, who suffered the disruptions of her family’s multiple moves during the Depression and World War II.
She and my father bought the house about the time I was born in 1957. They never left, except for the nearby hospital and retirement community where they died. My mother stayed until the end of April, when severe shortness of breath caused by her lung disease brought an ambulance to the driveway.
I’ve never been able to pinpoint the house’s age or the origin of the black letters and numerals that spell out “A D 1789? above the front door. Perhaps they refer to the year of George Washington’s first inauguration.
But I do know that the house, which sits at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac about 25 miles from Lower Manhattan, once was a cottage on an estate. And that my parents perfectly complemented its historic character in the way they furnished — and did not furnish — the interior.
They lined the walls of our red-walled family room, the Red Room, with framed copies of Colonial newspapers like The Federalist and New-Jersey State Gazette of 1799. Also on display: an oil painting of the steamboat Albertina, which once ferried passengers, vaudevillians among them, from New York to our idyllic Jersey shore town. There was no TV in the Red Room. We read newspapers, talked and gazed out at the serene but always-changing pond and its panoply of waterfowl, including ducks, geese and a graceful pair of swans.
In retrospect, I’m certain that my advocacy for saving historic buildings in Chicago stems from living in a house steeped in history. Yet I also recognize that the house has been significantly changed, especially by an early 1960s addition and renovation that added its tall, thin-columned front porch. It no longer retains the original design characteristics, or “integrity,” that would enable it to become an official landmark.
So I don’t quarrel with the buyers’ decision to tear it down. It’s small by today’s standards (less than 2,000 square feet) and lacks modern features like central air conditioning. Besides, the buyers have indicated they may replace it with something architecturally ambitious. That beats another McMansion. Sometimes, letting go of the past is the right thing to do, provided you trade up architecturally.
As I packed treasures like my mother’s reddish-pink English castle china, the late-afternoon light bounced off the pond and danced on the ceilings of the hauntingly empty rooms. The wind shook the trees that had sheltered the house for so long. Their leaves fell quickly, like tears. Later, as if to offer comfort, the pair of swans materialized on the pond, where my sister and I had scattered our parents’ ashes — my mother’s, just four months before.
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I dread the sound of a wrecking machine clawing into the house’s white clapboard walls — the shattering glass, the piles of dust, the erasure of this constant in my life. But we have the keepsakes and the memories they evoke. While it is no substitute for the physical presence and emotional resonance of architecture, memories ultimately are more durable than stone.
Blair Kamin was the baiduhai’s architecture critic from 1992 to early 2021.
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