In Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady, author Vikki Warner 鈥�98 recounts her purchase of a tenement house in Providence and her dream of establishing an urban utopia鈥攁t least within the bounds of her chain-link-fenced yard.
The neighborhood: 鈥淢y Providence brethren have simply learned to live with the patterns of waste and grift in the city, mostly by devising artful new ways to complain and joke about it in our hardass Yankee way. But we stay here because we really love this place. We even love that it is often openly terrible. New Englanders love punishment.鈥�
Tenants she鈥檚 known: 鈥淚鈥檝e filled [the house] with an outlandish array of people (80 percent male) and animals (60 percent feline): punk farmers, herbalists, body piercers, musicians who play metal, punk, country-rock, psych, and folk (or some combination thereof), chefs, bike mechanics, angry straight couples, boisterous gay couples, couch-crashers, geeks, losers, insomniacs, hippies, alcoholics, artists, pit bulls, Dachshunds, Chihuahuas, ferrets, and a bona fide cat parade.鈥�
Potential perils of planting a garden: 鈥淲e joked about dead bodies; secretly I was slightly anxious that we might encounter one. In the heart of a formerly mob-controlled neighborhood, digging down is a dicey prospect.鈥�
The myth of the nasty landlady: 鈥淭he women I know who rent apartments to tenants are fairly young, dangerous with a spreadsheet, and firmly in charge of their homes and lives, so we might want to update the accepted shorthand 鈥榞eneric landlady鈥� image of an angry, broom-wielding old lady.鈥�
No regrets: 鈥淏uying the house and selecting a long line of opinionated outsiders to live in it with me has added to a series of proclamations: I鈥檓 tough and capable, and nobody can tell me how to live; I want to be with my weirdo brethren; we spit on your plywood mansion out in the suburbs. Even when none of the above is particularly true鈥攚hen the experience of owning the house is terrible and I鈥檝e stopped wholly believing in it鈥攅ven then, I鈥檓 happy it鈥檚 not ordinary.鈥�
鈥�Marybeth Reilly-McGreen