Reflections on My Neighbor’s Home

Expositions Magazine

Issue 7 | Spring 2024

When I first toured my college apartment, I was less interested in the four-story brick building that I now call home than I was in the Victorian-style house beside it. My initial impression of the Victorian—beyond an appreciation for its distinctive light blue color and vague resemblance to the house from the Pixar movie Up—was how out of place it felt, tucked awkwardly between two apartment buildings. Standing in front of the Victorian, it almost feels like somebody misplaced their home, dropping it into a crevice between two otherwise corresponding structures, and that it may be fished out and returned to its rightful location at any point. The atmosphere of incongruity conjured by the home’s odd placement is coupled with an equally disconcerting sense of claustrophobia. Windows that I imagine once bathed rooms in light now face brick walls, weeds fight for survival on the narrow stretch of yard that receives consistent sunlight, and a steep gabled roof shoots toward the sky in a valiant attempt at grandeur, only to be dwarfed by buildings on either side. The house feels like a faded relic of a bygone era during which it may have fit coherently on its street. Adorned with peeling paint and flower beds whose stunted seedlings reach for a sun that is permanently eclipsed by brick, it almost feels as though the house itself is painfully aware of that fact.

Once I moved into my apartment and began living near the blue house, I decided to try to understand it. My search for answers led me to historical accounts of housing booms in Hyde Park and the discovery that, while the Victorian’s placement is visually jarring, its origins are far from unique. In the wake of multiple stylistically and functionally distinct housing booms over the past couple of centuries, Hyde Park is home to myriad housing types. They coexist in varying degrees of harmony, often making for a visually compelling urban fabric scattered with juxtaposed townhouses, apartment buildings, and single-family homes from different historical periods. Like many of the neighborhood’s more ornate homes, the blue Victorian was built during an 1890 boom—the same year that the University of Chicago was founded, one year after Hyde Park was annexed into Chicago, and three years before the 1893 World’s Fair in nearby Jackson Park. Workmen’s cottages and large estates alike sprouted throughout the neighborhood during this time. In the 1920s, Hyde Park experienced another housing boom, this time in response to the community’s rapidly growing and diversifying population. Development was marked by a mixed-use pattern of four-to-six-story walk-up apartment buildings and larger residential and commercial structures. This housing surge raised my apartment building and a similar multi-family four-story dwelling on either side of the Victorian, bookending the 1890 home between two poster children of the 1920s boom.

As I settled into my apartment and the blue Victorian became a landmark on my daily commute, I started appreciating its more subtle features. On sunny mornings, a stream of light summits surrounding buildings and illuminates its upper floors and roof. The closed blinds on the home’s side-facing windows are unflinching, but brief glimpses into the street-facing upper windows reveal packed bookshelves and eccentric artwork. At some point in the home’s past, it seems a great deal of attention went into the selection of various shades of blue paint. The wood siding facade of the home is a light powder blue color; the railings and columns on the front porch and second-story balcony, trim around the windows, and ornamental elements below the gabled roof are a slightly darker cerulean; and the roof is composed of steel blue shingles. The house was evidently crafted with a great deal of care to be an appealing place to live, but few signs of life emerged from within. I had never seen anybody open the doors or blinds, sit on the front porch, or turn on a single light.

My early interactions with the house were limited to what I could see from the sidewalk. Passing glances let me in on the enigmatic nature of the home and gave way to questions that I had no expectation of answering. Then I received a frantic email from a former professor of mine expressing “an urgent need for book packers” at the home of a late professor who had donated her collection to the University of Chicago’s Slavic department. According to the email, her husband had “sold the house and [needed] to vacate it urgently,” as he was moving into a retirement home. Notably, the email closed with the line “we have no time to organize any formal procedure so whoever is willing to help will be paid cash.” I responded within minutes and promptly received the time that I was expected to arrive, instruction to bring a friend, and the address to a certain blue house on my street.

The next morning, with a good friend in tow, I walked up the stairs to the Victorian’s cerulean blue porch. The steps seemed to bend under my weight. I knocked on the door, which creaked open to reveal the late professor’s husband, now the sole occupant of the home. He wore a beige cardigan, a pair of spectacles, and an utterly overwhelmed expression on his face. He appeared to be in his eighties. Behind him stood multiple stacks of cardboard boxes filled with books.

An attempt to introduce myself quickly revealed that he spoke only a few words of English. Instead, he greeted us in Russian—which, by sheer happenstance and to my great relief, my friend spoke. The two engaged in a brief conversation as I admired the home’s interior. Even under visible layers of dust, the house was undeniably grand.

The Victorian’s foyer opened into a magnificent wooden staircase adorned with intricately crafted balustrades and spindles, its walls were lined with ornate woodwork, and its ceilings were ornamented with stately trim. The foyer hosted an eclectic mix of paintings, prints, and photographs. An oil painting of two dancing crocodiles, a landscape that appeared to depict somewhere in New England on a snowy day, and a portrait of a mousy-haired young boy encircled the fireplace. I wondered what these pieces meant to the man who now lived alone in the house, and what they may have meant to the late professor who once lived there, too. Did the painting of the young boy depict somebody familiar to them? Did they have ties to New England, or did they just appreciate a good landscape? I interjected in the Russian conversation to ask my friend to compliment the dancing crocodile painting, to which the owner of the home responded that everything was for sale. I scanned the vast and meticulously curated assortment of pottery, maps, books, paintings, and textiles that filled the home. They looked like they had been collected over multiple well-traveled lifetimes. Troubled by the knowledge that this man had likely acquired these possessions with his late wife, I could not imagine how he would even begin to assign monetary value to them.

Finally, he pointed us to the late professor’s bookcase in her upstairs office. I disturbed a fine layer of dust as I ran my hand along the staircase’s smooth wooden handrail on my way to the home’s second floor. Walking through the doorway into her study, I could not help but feel as though I was stepping into somebody’s soul. Her desk was covered in papers, the mantle of her fireplace was crowded with cards and picture frames, and her desk chair was askew. The state of the late professor’s belongings suggested that she could walk into the office at any second and get back to work on the papers scattered across her desk. Just below the trim on the wall opposite her bookshelf, painted in a horizontal line, were the last names of famous Russian authors: Tsvetaeva, Vlada, Jakobson, Akhmatova, Derzhavin. Every inch of the room was colored by her legacy.

My friend and I took a moment to digest the intimate view that we held into the late professor’s life. Her floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was so tightly packed that I almost feared it had become a load-bearing feature of the home—that pulling books out would result in the Victorian collapsing around us. Nonetheless, we began packing her books into cardboard boxes and carrying them to a rental van parked in front of the house. The job was tedious but not difficult, and as I went through the rhythmic motions—remove books from shelf, place books in box, fold box…what will happen to my books when I die?…open new cardboard box, place books in box— my mind was entirely preoccupied.

I have spent a great deal of time memorializing my life with belongings by acquiring cherished keepsakes from various places I have visited, people I have cared for, and stages of my life. Years of personal journals, my grandfather’s typewriter, an old friend’s Zippo lighter, the discarded painting I found on the sidewalk the summer that I lived abroad. Surrounded by belongings that outlived the person they once belonged to, I finally reflected on the inescapable reality that one day they would no longer be mine.

As I began seriously planning the logistics surrounding the management of my belongings upon my own death, I realized that the bookshelf was empty and carried the last of the boxes to the rental van. My friend and I said goodbye to the late professor’s husband, who was sitting on the front porch steps as we left. He hadn’t stood up since we began hauling his wife’s books out of his home.

I haven’t stepped foot in my neighbor’s home since, but I don’t think that the blue Victorian ever left me. Once I returned home from book packing, I sat on my bed as I tried and failed to shake racing thoughts about the house next door and the professor who once lived there. I revisited the email requesting book packing volunteers, which had listed the late professor’s name.An internet search revealed her to be a force of nature, authoring an overwhelming number of journal articles and books, appearing in countless seminars and interviews, supervising almost twenty dissertations, and earning a hefty heaping of accolades for her expertise in Russian literature. A few years after her death, three of her former students published a book of essays dedicated to her.One of her many obituaries asserts that her publications provide only an inkling into her vast wisdom and sparkling wit. The author states that what he misses most about her is her voice. She taught herself Latin in the sixth grade and spoke a total of eight, maybe nine, languages throughout her life, but nobody could quite keep track. She had long blonde hair in her youth and dabbled in acting. She had a no-nonsense demeanor. She battled cancer for decades.

She passed away in her home—over a decade ago.

Judging by the name inscribed on their truck—Demolition San Juan—I have been assuming that the house is being demolished. To date, this has proved partially true, as the home is currently surrounded by a tall chain link fence and no longer has a front porch.

Shortly after beginning to write this piece, I met with the professor who had emailed me about the book packing opportunity and asked her if she had any insights into who the home’s new owner was or whether it was being torn down. She told me that she heard a new professor had bought the house, and believed that he was only doing renovations. She paused before telling me that the late professor’s husband—the bespectacled man that I had met a couple of months prior—had passed away only a few days ago. On the walk back from her office, I stumbled upon a memorial bench with the late professor’s name on it. And then I returned home, right beside the blue Victorian.

A search into the home’s deeds revealed that a new professor—this time at UChicago’s medical school— is indeed the blue Victorian’s new owner. His image in the faculty registry depicts him wearing a lab coat over a button-down shirt, flashing strikingly white teeth in a broad, kind smile. How will his presence change the home? In the future, will his body, and then his belongings, be carried out of the house by strangers, like the woman who lived there before him? There is something so unsettling about briefly encountering someone in death that you have never met in life. All that remains for you to understand them are their vestiges: the memories held by their loved ones, the things they have created, the things they have left behind.

The late professor’s legacy is clear; she lives on in her many publications, the students she inspired, and the breakthroughs she made in her field.

The late professor’s legacy is clear; she lives on in her many publications, the students she inspired, and the breakthroughs she made in her field.

As for the house, there is no telling how much longer it will stand still while its occupants live and die, while their belongings are hauled in and out, while the surrounding world keeps moving and growing around it.

When I walk past what is left of the Victorian today, I no longer think about its awkward placement, or its gabled roof, or even its particular shades of blue. I think about an old Russian man and a professor with a piercing gaze. I think about where the painting of the dancing crocodiles has found itself, and whether its new owners know that it once hung above a fireplace in a greatly respected professor’s home. I think about walking up the home’s grand wooden staircase, my feet feeling the smooth grooves in the middle of each step, where the wood had been worn by over 130 years of occupants. I think about my own mortality, about what vestiges of myself I will leave behind when I pass, and whether anybody will take the time to unpack them to try to understand me once I’m gone.