Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
‘The Archaeology of Home’ Explores History of Lower Manhattan Row House
Applying the word “archaeology” to a currently occupied dwelling is a new concept to me, but Katherine Grieder manages to make it work in her book “The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set in 1000 Square Feet of the Lower East Side” (PublicAffairs, 352 pages, maps and b&w photos in text throughout the book, $26.99).
One of my dictionaries defines archaeology as “systematic recovery and examination of material evidence, as graves, buildings, tools and pottery, remaining from past human life and culture.” That definition from my treasured “Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary” is a good summation of Greider’s woes with her cooperative apartment on the top floor of row house at 239 E. 7th Street in what she calls the Lower East Side, but I would call Alphabet City — because of its letter avenues, Avenue A, B, C and D. It’s also been called the East Village, but purists would dispute that designation since this area had little in common with Greenwich Village.
The story begins in 2002 when Greider and her writer and editor husband David Andrews received a phone call from the architect her family and the other two owners of units in the 1845-vintage building had hired to diagnose certain worrying developments, including cracks in the building’s facade and sinking of the basement floor. After examining structural beams under the building, the architect and his engineer colleagues, decided the building was not only dilapidated but was unsound. He urged all the residents to vacate the building immediately.
Greider and the rest of the residents of 239 moved out and the event resulted in a period of travail for her family, including a stay with her folks in Virginia, renting a nearby apartment and finally, when they sold their co-op apartment on the top floor of 239, to another co-op about a mile south on Grand Street in what I would call the real “Lower East Side.”
When Greider was told to leave her house or risk it falling down on top of her and her family, she used her journalism skills and began an investigation, the New York City equivalent of an archaeological dig, beginning with contractors’ diagnoses and lawsuits, swerving into archaeology and urban history, before settling into the saltwater grasses of the marsh that fatefully once sat beneath the site of Number 239 East 7th Street. If to a hammer everything is a nail, to a journalist everything is a story — or even a book!
By coincidence, this book’s publication comes in the month of the 200th anniversary of Manhattan’s grid system, the numeric street-naming grid in Manhattan, officially called the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. The grid system officially begins immediately north of Houston Street with 1st Street at Avenue A, although the grid does not fully come into effect until 13th Street. The grid established streets running east and west and avenues running north and south.
The daughter of author and reporter William Greider, one of my favorites (“Secrets of the Temple”, 1987 and other books on capitalism and finance), Katharine Greider waxes philosophic as she examines how people balance the need for permanence with the urge to migrate, and how the home is the resting place for ancestral ghosts. The land on which Number 239 was built has a history as long as America’s own, and served the original Indian inhabitants of Manhattan, too. It provisioned the earliest European settlers who needed fodder for their cattle; it became a spoil of war handed from the king’s servant to the revolutionary victor; it was at the heart of nineteenth-century Kleinedeutschland and of the revolutionary Jewish Lower East Side. America’s immigrant waves have all passed through 7th Street between Avenues C and D. In one small house is written the history of a young country and the much longer story of humankind and the places they came to call home.
I hope Greider isn’t offended, but much of her family’s sturm und drang reminded me of “Joe’s Apartment,” a 1996 cult movie from MTV Films, directed by John Payson and starring Jerry O’Connell, Megan Ward and Robert Vaughn, and a cast of thousands of singing, dancing cockroaches. The fictional apartment occupied by Joe and the roaches is in the 300 block of E. 8th Street. For the curious, the movie – 80 minutes expanded from a 15-minute short — is worth seeing if only because of its wonderful score by Carter Burwell, composer of most of the scores of the Coen Brothers, including their new “True Grit.”
What about 239 after everybody moved out? The new owner rebuilt the row house from the inside out, adding another story and a steel rather than a wooden infrastructure.
Katharine Greider and David Andrews and their two children discovered that the permanence of a home is a myth enshrined in history, Presidential urgings for everybody to be a homeowner and the preaching of a secular church called First Church of God, Realtor (I’m making part that up, but not by much, from my experience of 40 years covering real estate). I thoroughly enjoyed Greider’s exploration of the concept of homeownership and how it’s enshrined in the nation’s history.
About the Author
Katharine Greider is a writer living in New York City. She got her start in journalism at an alternative newsweekly and then a small-town daily newspaper. As a freelancer she has written on health and medicine, culture, and other topics for local and national newspapers, magazines, and non-profit organizations, from the AARP Bulletin to the New York Times. Her first book was The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers, PublicAffairs, 2003.
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