Castles in the Sky

December 2, 2020 6:27 AM

While renovating a house in San Francisco, a couple discovered a diary, hidden away for more than a century. It held a love story—and a mystery. [SL Atavist]
posted by ellieBOA (26 comments total)

Thank you for posting this lovely account. Strip off the neoliberal-aesthetic minimalist decor in many old houses and I wonder what you might find.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 6:40 AM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

Didn’t care for it, personally. It reads like a cake with too much sugar, if not an ad for Ancestry.com & for that reason I find myself disinclined to believe all the beautifully smoothed-over details. I hope others enjoy it though.
posted by aesop at 7:00 AM on December 2, 2020 [13 favorites]

What a fun story from the 2020 couples' perspective, but wow what a brutal experience for poor Hans and Anna. And there's a really troublesome part of their story missing, there around 1906-1910. It occurs to me that our various technologies invented over the past century allow us now to live several lifetimes' worth of events and experiences: journeying to San Francisco was Hans' great life adventure, it took him years to even get there, and that's where the rest of his life played out. But the author of this essay was able to fly back to his home village in Denmark, drive all around and meet lots of people, and come back home to California, all within a week or so....while Anna in 1906 wrote about the impossible dream of being able to walk the lanes in their home village even one more time before she died, while knowing that she never would.

It's an unexpected takeaway from this story for me, a realization that our lives now are comparatively completely overstuffed with people and activity and travel and events and information and relationships and we seem to have just exponentially more going on day-to-day now than human beings ever really did previously, because the access and speed and ability to travel is so much more now. (Excepting global pandemic times, of course.)
posted by LooseFilter at 7:56 AM on December 2, 2020 [21 favorites]

Strip off the neoliberal-aesthetic minimalist decor in many old houses and I wonder what you might find.

In my experience, loose change, newspaper or scrap cloth wadded up to stop drafts, bus/train/movie tickets or stubs, the very occasional photo or greeting card propped up on a mantel that fell down behind it, old beer cans and liquor bottles left by builders, small animal skeletons and nests, and plenty of dust.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:29 AM on December 2, 2020 [15 favorites]

I have occasionally tossed and turned at night haunted by thoughts of all the unique mementos and treasures hidden in the walls and floor of homes that are never discovered, because the house burned or was demolished by the unobservant.
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:57 AM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

My building was built in 1890 and there's a sealed and painted over window into the hallway across from my bed. It has 4 panes that are covered in newspaper and 100 years of white paint. When 'all this' started, it occurred to me that the likeliest date on those papers is 1918. I have been wanting to razor one pane off to confirm, but I can't decide which one.
posted by sexyrobot at 8:57 AM on December 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

In my experience, loose change, newspaper or scrap cloth ...

My friend was examining his chimney once when I was over and we found 3 pairs of button-up(!) underwear, child size, hidden inside. The stains in them gave us a pretty good idea of why they were hidden.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:03 AM on December 2, 2020 [10 favorites]

Who can afford a house in San Francisco, let alone renovate it?
posted by touchstone033 at 9:04 AM on December 2, 2020 [11 favorites]

I have an extensive diary and address book, written by a woman who lived in San Francisco in the 20’s. My grandfather found it in the city dump in Martinez in the late 50’s. One narrative is about her boyfriend who may or may not have been running liquor or drugs up and down the coast. A found object family heirloom...
posted by njohnson23 at 9:17 AM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

Hidden items I found over the course of several years while slowly renovating a house built in 1958, that I used to live in, include:

- Many 1960s era razor blades (in the bathroom wall, behind the medicine cabinet)
- A wooden pencil
- A bent silver-plated spoon (this was buried in the yard; I like to imagine it was stolen from the kitchen by a child to dig, or make mud pies with, or to bury as pretend treasure)
- A screwdriver that appeared, by context, to have been lost by one of the original builders of the house during construction
- A very rusted jeweler's anvil

I've spent a lot of time making up stories in my head about these objects, and who used them. I WISH I had found a diary! That would really have been something.
posted by BlueJae at 9:18 AM on December 2, 2020

BlueJae, the razor blades in renovated walls is really common:
“Old medicine cabinets were installed directly inside the interior walls,” Richard D’Angelo, Project Manager at JWE Remodeling and Roofing told Reader’s Digest. “These old units had a slot in the back that was used to discard used blades, which would allow them to fall into the wall cavity between framing studs, and collect on top of the bottom-plate stud.”
posted by ellieBOA at 9:22 AM on December 2, 2020 [14 favorites]

I know, ellieBOA. I actually grew up in a house that still had an old style cabinet with the razor slot! What surprised me was that someone had replaced the cabinet with a more modern one before I ever moved in, but never removed the blades from the wall. I guess they didn't see the point in taking them out.
posted by BlueJae at 9:28 AM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Great story but the language was over the top.

I bought a flat in San Francisco and sold it about five years later during the recession when I was struggling to make the mortgage payments. It was a gorgeous Edwardian. I wish I still owned it.
posted by shoesietart at 9:32 AM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Who can afford a house in San Francisco, let alone renovate it?

People in tech? They can usually afford to travel overseas, refurbish old Jeeps, and fly drones on a whim.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:38 AM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

I found myself quite interested in the romance and the timing of what went wrong. The problem is that we just don’t know and so it winds up being all speculation. And without a telephone, things were difficult to resolve. It’s easy to misunderstand. Did they date and it went wrong, or did one of them misunderstand and they both wound up marrying out of spite?

Another confusing thing about this all is that they alternatively list Anna as both having had children, and having no descendants.
posted by corb at 11:32 AM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

People in tech? They can usually afford to travel overseas, refurbish old Jeeps, and fly drones on a whim.

LOL. Unless you are talking about the top paid .1% in tech. Spending 3k travelling is not the same as spending 30k restoring a Jeep is not the same as spending 3M in a leaky old house is not the same as spending 30M in one of the homes close to the Presidio.

Most real estate in SF is not owned by tech employees. A big chunk of commercial property is owned by the tech companies themselves, but for housing the majority is owned by mysterious LLCs, real estate investment trusts, and international investors. Even Stanford holds billions in single family and multi family residential real estate, apart from their billions in commercial real estate.

The last house I lived in San Francisco was built in the 1880's. During a renovation in the 1960's the owners found a few diaries, newspapers and other document. During some work in the 1990's they found a late 1800's model handgun hidden in a coal chute. In my time there in the 2010's I replaced a mirror and found a piece of a San Francisco Japanese newspaper from the 30s (I think it was called Nichibei) with handwritten notes and some drawings left by a Japanese artist that lived there in the early 2000's.
posted by Dr. Curare at 11:36 AM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

We found a framed indulgence signed by Pope Pius in our house when we bought it. Apparently Grandpa Gerlach wasn't quite up-to-date on his confessions when he died so the family paid for the Pope to give him that extra kick into heaven.
posted by octothorpe at 12:29 PM on December 2, 2020 [6 favorites]

When renovating our house in Montana ca. 1982-3, my dad came across a wooden trunk hidden in the attic, under the insulation.

It was full of old comic books from the '50s and '60s, and a very large amount of marbles. Some kid's life treasures. No romantic love story, but some kid loved these things enough to hide them.

My brothers and I were ecstatic. It was like pirate booty!

I still have a few of the comics, but the marbles are long gone.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:49 PM on December 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

Wow - I just loved this.

I love San Francisco history and building history - I have a woefully neglected website about San Francisco buildings (link in my profile), and I have spent many, many happy hours looking through old documents, tracing the history of a building or a builder or a family. It's fascinating to see the waves of immigrants, the mutual benefit societies, the multiple family members in the same business - the want ads, the old society pages (10 year olds' birthday parties!), so many details, and yet so very, very much missing as well.

I tried doing a bit of research on some other cool cities for my site (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago), and I quickly realized that San Francisco has huge advantages for research, largely thanks to collaboration between the San Francisco Public Library and the Internet Archive, resulting in the online availability of the Daily Pacific Builder (zoom in for Building Contracts) and San Francisco Block Books and just OODLES of San Francisco City Directories and the California Architect and Building News ... and especially the Spring Valley Water Tap Records, which has entries for all the water hookups, showing when the water was first turned on and who the owner was at the time (replete with street name changes and house renumberings). It's a truly amazing trove of information, still fully available despite stay at home orders - fully available to anyone, anywhere, without a trip to the San Francisco Public Library.

(When I started working on my website, I actually tried photographing several pages of those massive water company tomes. I have no idea how many pages I managed, on my not-many-megapixels handheld camera, but MAN am I delighted to have the entire multi-volume set, professionally scanned, sitting on my hard drive. The Internet Archive is a wonderful thing. As is the San Francisco Public Library.)

... Speaking of spending many happy hours on something, I was especially struck by all those hours she put into stripping the paint off the wood. I find it hard to imagine a life where I could dedicate quite that much time to something I loved. I'm glad she was able to.

Anyway - sorry for the wall of text, but I just thought this was fabulous, and I loved reading about what she found and what she couldn't find and what it all meant to her.

Thank you so much for posting this, EllieBOA. It is the best thing I've read this week, and I'm sure I wouldn't have seen it without you.
posted by kristi at 3:26 PM on December 2, 2020 [9 favorites]

I never found any particularly interesting things in my old house (despite the usual), however, my neighbour once found an old wallet with a bit of cash (a few dollar bills) and some love letters in the insulation of his attic. The love letters were notable as they were written by a flamboyant [he was partial to capes] late former mayor of our town when he was a teenager to the young woman who had lived in my neighbours' house. They were about what you'd expect from a teenage boy to teenage girl just the 1940s version, charming if overheated. Another house on the street was the boyhood home of David Morrell, of First Blood fame, but they never found anything interesting in that house.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:36 PM on December 2, 2020

I bought a house in Salt Lake City, which was built in 1912. When I moved in a Bill Wale, a 98 year old lived next door. He and I became friends, and he told me the story of the neighborhood. The Inglewood Subdivision was the second subdivision in Salt Lake City after the Avenues District. The Inglewood was people by railroad workers. My house was built later on what had been the vacant lot that the neighborhood played horseshoes on. I realized there was a horseshoe of tulips around the back of the property, to encircle the horseshoe pits. I found the stakes, but not the shoes. I found plenty of agate marbles, a porcelain dolls arm, a glass bulldog, and other little oddities. I crawled under the back porch one day to see what was behind a wall that left a space, and found an excellent green flower pot, which I still have out on my back porch, as I type this. There were a number of original owners living in the neighborhood, when I moved in in 1984. I heard many stories from them, and enjoyed their company. The lots were 1/3 acre, and many had fruit trees. It was a great place to spend 22 years.
posted by Oyéah at 6:49 PM on December 2, 2020

Aw man, this is just so sad. If one believes in the whole soul mates/twin flames uh, thing, these poor people.

I also want to be all "why did they marry other people and it went so poorly," except I'm sure the social pressure to marry literally anyone was extreme.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:35 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Back in the 90s my brother and I helped renovate an old house our sister had purchased. As we gutted our way from the kitchen into the dining room there was nothing interesting behind the lathe and plaster. So we stuck a half dozen empty beer bottles in various places between the studs and sheetrocked them in: Voila, time capsule instantanée! (In English that translates roughly to "who was the lazy bum who didn't want to take his empties to the back hall?") 80 years from now someone will hit the jackpot and we can read about it here.
posted by Cris E at 10:00 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Great story, enjoyable, poignant, thought provoking, even if it is a little self consciously so.

This is the San Francisco sky castle I think of.
posted by blue shadows at 10:33 PM on December 2, 2020

I had the idea of making a fake "satanic witch jar" kind of thing and hiding it within the walls of our last home during renovation. The idea was to take a glass bottle, put a rusty nail inside with a bundled cutting of my own hair, fingernail clippings, maybe a creepy looking doll made out of pipe cleaners, then fill it with urine and stopper it. Paint a pentagram on the outside and an upside down cross. Maybe something written in Latin as a finisher.

A fake time capsule thing that might freak the ever-living hell out of someone in the future. But I never did it.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:09 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Our 1911 Toronto home had a small patch of old linoleum and under that some newspaper underlay. It was most of a 1913 issue of the Globe and Empire. There was a regular Q&A column about raising chickens. There was also a piece about the dangers of having so many poorly supervised young women working in the city - I think it was literally “young women + meager disposable income + Sunday afternoons free + icecream shops open + unsupervised young men = ?!! ”. An accompanying story that stuck in my mind was of a 16 year old Montreal “Jewess” currently on trial for posing as a boy while employed in a Toronto shop.
posted by bonobothegreat at 4:44 AM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]