{"id":1878,"date":"2019-07-10T10:01:36","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T14:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2019-07-22T09:49:10","modified_gmt":"2019-07-22T13:49:10","slug":"this-weird-old-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/issues\/summer-2019\/this-weird-old-house\/","title":{"rendered":"This (Weird) Old House"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady<\/em>, author Vikki Warner \u201998 recounts her purchase of a tenement house in Providence and her dream of establishing an urban utopia\u2014at least within the bounds of her chain-link-fenced yard.<\/p>\n

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\"Vikki<\/div>\n

The neighborhood:<\/strong> \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tenants she\u2019s known:<\/strong> \u201cI\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Potential perils of planting a garden:<\/strong> \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The myth of the nasty landlady:<\/strong> \u201cThe 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 \u2018generic landlady\u2019 image of an angry, broom-wielding old lady.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No regrets:<\/strong> \u201cBuying the house and selecting a long line of opinionated outsiders to live in it with me has added to a series of proclamations: I\u2019m 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\u2014when the experience of owning the house is terrible and I\u2019ve stopped wholly believing in it\u2014even then, I\u2019m happy it\u2019s not ordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2014Marybeth Reilly-McGreen<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady, author Vikki Warner \u201998 recounts her purchase of a tenement house in Providence and her dream of establishing an urban utopia\u2014at least within the bounds of her chain-link-fenced yard. The neighborhood: \u201cMy Providence brethren have simply learned to live with the patterns of waste and grift in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[122,81,121,123],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer-2019","tag-alumni-author","tag-marybeth-reilly-mcgreen","tag-tenemental","tag-vikki-warner","architecture-annotations-network","architecture-network"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2372,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/2372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}