So my childhood home just collapsed in on itself ...

Poor kids, though. To lose your mother in such a fashion? The house fell on her.
They must feel like the universe is against them. Very sad.

 

Yeah, my sadness obviously pales in comparison to theirs, to say the least. And I know I'm hardly the first person ever to lose their current or former home in an instant. And that it hadn't been "home" for almost half my life now. But it still hurts a little to realize that it's completely gone and never will be again.

The house that collapsed was the third of three that we lived in while I was growing up. The first was an idyllic three-bedroom suburban house, big yard, nice school a few miles down the road. We knew our neighbors and a ton of others in the neighborhood. I got along well with my elementary school classmates and, as near as I could tell, was kind of popular.
It was paradise.
We lost that house when I was 10 and moved into another one a couple of blocks from and very similar to No. 3. A three-story row home duplex. It was utter misery. Decent neighborhood, but our family started splintering. One of my sisters became a black sheep and had a kid when she was in high school, Dad drank, Mom tuned out, and I went through a juvenile delinquent phase where I ran with the bad kids (to be fair, they were the only ones there that were my age) and our crew was pretty much responsible for most of the neighborhood's problems. Once my two sisters moved out, I moved into the attic because it had hookups for cable and a phone. It also had no heat.

I broke off from that group of friends my freshman year of high school and we moved to the collapsed house about a year later. December 1992, I think. It was only four blocks away, but it felt like a different planet. Our family still had the same issues but the house was nicer. Other than around school, I never saw the bad influence friends again. It was pretty much on an island, with a business on one side, a main road out front and an empty corner lot on the other side. We really had no neighbors even though we were smack dab in the middle of the city. After the misery of the previous few years it felt good to get away.
My room was the same way. It was on the third floor -- it took up the entire third floor -- and was roughly the size of a small studio apartment. You had to go up a steep staircase to get up there so my parents rarely if ever came up. There were small crawl-in closets in three corners, a crawlspace in the fourth, and three cubbyhole lofts for storage or screwing around in about 6 feet above the floor. One loft was over the stairs and I never went near it, since it was about a 15-foot drop down the steep staircase if you slipped climbing up. That part that fell onto the sidewalk, the window with the AC unit, was a small cutout that was akin to a bay window but square. I had a desk and a bookshelf over there. It was 5 or 6 feet deep. I'll never forget during the 1993 Superstorm seeing a small bird land on the outside ledge in front of it, just to take a break from flying in the driving snow. It hung out for a couple of minutes and then flew off again.
I was in that room when I got the call to come interview at a paper 1,200 miles away in June 1998. I was in that room the first time I made out with a girl. I spent God only knows how many hours up there with my best friend, forging a lifelong friendship over Mortal Kombat 3 on the SNES and other video games.
Even though we lived in three houses all for about the same amount of time, and my parents moved out not long after I did, this one really was where I grew up. It wasn't even our house. It was a rental. But I think this one will always be home.

 

Must have felt like their whole world fell in on them.

 

House that collapsed was built in 1920, according to Zillow, and last sold in June 2001.

I was surprised to see that it was all brick. Makes me wonder even more as to how it collapsed.

 

Terrible for the family, to lose both their mom and their house.

The place that my parents rented from my birth to age 5 was in a group of apartments on a campus of a school for troubled kids, where my Dad worked as a maintenance guy for a while. The group was attached to a stone house, which was more apartments.

My parents bought the house where I grew up from age 5-college, we moved, and our apartment turned into some offices for a few years. My Mom even said she stopped in there once to check it out.

Then one day, maybe about 10 years or so after we moved, our former apartment building caught fire and was destroyed. It was bizarre seeing my childhood home all burned out and in the front page of my local paper.

The place was never rebuilt. The stone house that was the main office became a residence. I looked on Zillow a while back, but there were hedges blocking the view.

 

Try aerial photos from Google maps. That will defeat the nefarious shrubbery.

 

Batman, just wanted to say thanks for sharing this personal story. Really enjoyed reading it. Well done!

VB

 

I had no idea it was that old.
Talking to my mom last night, she said she and my dad had a chance to buy it when they were getting ready to move out but passed. I think my dad was sick (he died in 2000) and their finances probably weren't in order. Looks like that was probably for the best on a lot of fronts.
We rented from a couple that lived in Allentown. They were going through a divorce toward the end of our time there and obviously sold it to somebody. No clue if it was a rental company, a slumlord or what they might have done to it from then on. Maybe the roof went bad and gave way, or they renovated it and took out something they shouldn't have.
One thing about that house was that it was way bigger vertically than horizontally. Horizontally, it was basically one room wide but if you laid it on its side it would have had a decent footprint for a one-story house. There were bedrooms at the front and rear, and a bathroom on the second floor between them that was the size of a small bedroom. So almost anything you took out to open up the floor plan would probably have been a load bearing thing of some sort.

 

It looks like a tall, skinny house from the front, but the side view shows that it stretches a long way to the back, so it's much bigger than it looks from out front. It's basically a stacked shotgun shack, right?

 

Pretty much. First floor had a living room up front, kitchen in the back, and a small connector room in the middle. There was a big wood burning stove in the connector room when we lived there. I remember Dad burning that thing when it was 85 degrees one day in May just because he wanted to have a fire or something (sorry for the personal memories; they just come flooding back when talking about this).
Second floor had the master bedroom in the back and an office/bedroom up front, with the big bathroom in between.
Third floor was as I described above. I think the couple we rented from had turned it into a playroom for their young daughters before they moved. The walls were pink. It would have been such a pain in the ass to paint it because of the angles and tall ceilings that I never cared about the color. After House No. 2 I was just happy to have full carpet and heat in my room.
So it was three floors and basically 6 1/2 rooms total -- plus a rough basement that was just laundry and storage for us -- with most of those being decent-sized. It made good use of the layout instead of carving it up into teeny tiny rooms.

 

Good stuff, Batman. Sorry about the house. Loved the tales you told here, though.

 

The verdict seems in on the collapse: Water damage that basically caused the foundation to disintegrate.
Of course, that just raises the question of were there any warning signs and should whoever owned the house have known about them?

A century of rainstorms collapsed Hamilton house in an instant, killing mother of two