This Old House

The home I grew up in was recently razed, and although I knew the day was coming, that hasn’t made it any easier to accept

The cottage at 918 Stewart Drive turns 100 this year. It’s hard to believe we’ve been in the place for almost a decade. We love where we’re living, but as is always the case with things new and especially old, something always seems to need fixing. So last Thursday afternoon, Leigh and I sat down with a landscape architect and reviewed her exhaustive plan to overhaul the back half of the backyard: the removal of a hedge, stripping and replacing the soil and regrading the terrain so as to enhance growth and improve the drainage, the addition of an array of colorful plants that will thrive in the shade, and maybe even the installation of artificial turf in hard-to-grow-grass areas.

Razing is too strong a word, but we are essentially starting over.

We were 30 minutes into our meeting when my phone started pinging with a flurry of texts. I didn’t think much of it and would discover only later that one alert was a group text discussing the college football playoff. But then I came across a text and pictures from Peter Livingston, a dear friend going back to childhood. “Just now in my eyes for the first time,” Peter wrote to my sister, Deborah, and me. “On my jog.”

Peter and his wife, Mary, recently moved back into the Richardson neighborhood where he and I grew up. Estates North, it was called when my family settled there back in 1964. It would become more familiarly known as the Reservation, as all of the streets are named after Indian tribes.

I hastily swiped through the five images Peter had snapped during his afternoon run.

“Oh, no!!!” I replied.

The house at 1202 Cheyenne Place, the house where so many memories were made over the years, was gone, only the chimney still standing amid the rubble. The news came basically 61 years to the day we moved in. I sat in stunned silence before sending a text to a handful of friends. My two best friends from high school and before were the first to respond.

“Sad to see,” Bryan Jeanes wrote. “Many good memories from that house. Unfortunately, it seems to be the way of the world in that part of Richardson today.”

Then Scott Nixon weighed in: “I moved a good bit when I was growing up. You and your family grew up in that house. Damn, Bro. I feel your pain.”

My parents broke ground on the house in the summer of 1963. The L-shaped lot was a little more than a half-acre, tucked in the corner of a quiet cul-de-sac, a couple of creeks converging at the bottom of the property. Peter’s house was just around the corner, on Osage Drive. You could see forever from our backyard. If you didn’t know the area, it would have been hard to fathom we were only a dozen or so miles from downtown Dallas.

As I tried to process the news, I decided the best way to find closure was to return to the property for one last look. So on Saturday morning, I jumped in the car and made the drive from Kessler Park. Knocking down old homes and building McMansions has been going on for decades in the Park Cities, and as Bryan noted, the novelty has spread to Richardson. From the time I turned off of Belt Line Road onto Waterview Drive until I pulled into the cul-de-sac (a little more than a one-mile jaunt), I counted 14 rebuilds.

But let me be candid: I’d be naive to suggest I didn’t see this day coming for the property at 1202. The house next door was razed last year, and construction on a castle was well underway. Plus, I had driven through the neighborhood several times since we returned home in 2015, and our house looked nothing like how I remembered it. The cozy courtyard, fronted by a short brick wall on each side of the walkway, was gone. The front yard, once so meticulously maintained by my father, was the victim of neglect. The live oak trees needed a serious pruning. The magnolias were gone. At one point, I entertained the thought of dropping a note to the owner asking if I could stop by and check out the old digs. I was eager to share the history of the house, how it had become the foundation for my family. But the property appeared to have changed so dramatically that I decided a tour would only break my heart. The letter was never written.

I pulled into the cul-de-sac to the sight of a handful of pickup trucks and construction vans. The chimney had been toppled. A mountain of bricks was piled near the front of the lot. Workers were toiling away on the rebuild at the old Lightner property, and a guy was taking a small piece of heavy machinery to the foundation of our place. The foundation was most definitely winning. I chuckled.

See, the house was constructed on old farmland, and before custom builder Jim Pittman broke ground, he insisted on dumping thousands of gallons of water in the area where the foundation would be laid. We lost count of the number of times a tanker would pull up to the property and do its thing. Not yet, Pittman would say. Only after he decided the ground had sufficiently settled did his crew put a shovel in the ground.

I walked up the driveway, whose concrete had buckled, compromised by the roots of the five massive live oaks that were still standing, still in disbelief about what I was seeing. A carport had been added to the end of the driveway—Mom would not have approved!—and strewn on the ground were an oven and a refrigerator, among other masses of metal. I wondered if those were the appliances Mom had installed when she redesigned the kitchen in the mid-1990s. She was a gourmet chef, and nobody ever said no to her dinner party invitations.

The house was only 2,700 square feet, a one-story ranch with four bedrooms and 2½ baths. There was no wasted space. The long hallway, which connected the bedrooms to the living areas, featured floor-to-ceiling wood-stained bookshelves. The living room, dining room and breakfast area overlooked the backyard. The walk-in pantry was the size of a spacious closet. We spent a lot of time in the den, talking about life, shooting the breeze, watching sports and getting the occasional lecture as the fireplace roared. It was in that very den where Leigh and I told Mom and Dad we had just gotten engaged. A bottle of champagne was popped.

And it was in that very house that Mom and Dad threw an engagement party for us in the fall of 1985 and hosted a barbecue dinner for family and out-of-town guests two nights before our wedding, 40 or more attending each celebration. Oh, the memories.

The backyard was every bit the house’s equal, its cornerstone a sprawling elm tree that had to be a century old. Mom and Dad surprised Deb and me when they announced in the late ’60s that they were making plans for a pool. Dad called the folks at Crawford Pools, and Jim Crawford, the owner himself and a casual acquaintance, paid a visit. Upon surveying the landscape, Jim said, “I’ll build you a pool, Steve, but the elm tree will have to come down. The leaves will be a nightmare in the fall.”

Without hesitation, Dad replied, “Well, Jim, I guess I’m going to have to find somebody else to build me my pool.”

The elm tree stayed. Jim built the pool.

The tree was a godsend because of the canopy of shade it provided, but it was impossible to grow grass under it. I can’t tell you how many times Dad and I planted St. Augustine and Bermuda and rye and every other strain of grass imaginable, only to watch it wilt for lack of sun. So a deck was built. A massive deck that extended across the back of the house to the elm tree and to the pool’s edge. Dad was away when construction started, and I still recall Mom calling in somewhat of a panic, the house reverberating as workers jackhammered the pilings of the deck. “I’m afraid the house is going to fall down,” she said half-jokingly. Wasn’t going to happen, Mom! Jim Pittman had made sure of that.

The backyard and pool were an oasis, and they became a hub for celebrations: birthday parties, youth baseball parties, graduation parties, retirement parties, plain old parties, you name it. And, of course, parties Mom and Dad never knew about, first with high school friends and later with fraternity brothers who made the trek from Missouri. Friends were treated like family.

I next made my way along the driveway toward the back of the property, where I came upon a large enclosed basketball court, its backboard and rim still intact, a nylon net hanging pristinely. I had initially spotted the backboard last fall while sneaking around the side of the vacant Lightner lot, at which time I surmised the pool had probably been filled in. My Saturday visit confirmed as much, but in no way did that ease the pain.

The elm tree was gone, too, although that didn’t come as a surprise. The tree had been showing its age for years, to the point Dad brought in arborists to stabilize sagging branches with wire cables. I wondered how long the deck survived, and as I retraced my steps I stumbled upon a patch of artificial grass in an area where the deck once was. Another chuckle.

You might be wondering why I haven’t included any pictures of the house and backyard in all their glory to accompany this elegy. That’s because I haven’t turned up any. The images that are engrained in my mind will have to suffice. If you never set foot on the property, you’ll have to take my word when I tell you what a special place it was. And quite frankly, I have no interest in seeing the structure that will rise from the ashes. I know this much. However grandiose and state-of-the-art that house might be, it won’t have anywhere near the charm of the humble abode I knew at 1202.

I walked back across the cul-de-sac to the sound of heavy machinery meeting concrete. The foundation was most definitely still winning. Before opening my car door, I took one last glance back. That’s when I decided I couldn’t leave without taking home a memento. Something! Anything! I walked back to the lot and snatched a cream-colored brick from the pile of rubble.