Chapter 5 - Wall Street, Part 1.

We moved into 82 Wall Street, Coventry, Connecticut, before the start of school in 1962. I was 13. It was a huge step up from the crappy apartment on South Street.

I have no idea how Mom swung the purchase. Women were not allowed to buy a house without a male co-signer before 1974. Mom is long gone - I suspect that her parents, my grandparents Frank and Edna Clark, helped her. 

The house had (has) around 3,000 square feet. The first floor was made up of the entry with a small coat closet, three roughly square rooms, a large closet, a side entry, and the kitchen/dining room, with a bathroom off the kitchen. There is a nice covered porch on the front and east side. 

This is the front of the house in 1988. The front door is straight ahead. The two windows to the right of the door are where my mom's room was, and the two above them are in my brother's room.

The second floor had five bedrooms and a large bathroom that didn't work. At first, my brother Doug and I shared the front bedroom; Sandy had the rear bedroom. Later on, I took over the room behind the front bedroom. The other two bedrooms were either empty or rented out. None of the upstairs bedroom closets was very large.

1988 view of the rear of the house. It is much the same as when we lived there. The ground floor window to the left was in the "music" room, the window above it was in my bedroom. On the upper floor of the addition, the window to the right of the chimney was into my sister's room. The other two went into the non-working bathroom.

For me, Wall Street was the best house we lived in. Maybe I wasn't the happiest there, but the house itself was pretty good. We each had our own bedroom, and none of the bedrooms were open to traffic.

That's not to say the house was perfect. It was old. It had an old furnace system. There was only one register, and it was on the first floor. The rear part of the house was an addition; there was no basement under that part, only a crawl space. There was no heat in the kitchen except for a kerosene heater/stove. And there was only one working bathroom. I'll explain the bathrooms first.

The upstairs bathroom was in the rear "new" addition (the addition was most likely built in the early 1900s). It had a claw-foot tub, pedestal sink, and toilet. The room was big enough to be a bedroom. The tub, sink, and toilet appeared to be hooked up, but there was no water. My mother never spent the money to figure out why.

The working bathroom was on the groundfloor, at the rear of the house. There was a tub with shower, sink, and room for the washer and dryer (although my mom didn't like to use the dryer - too expensive).

To deal with no heat upstairs, my mom paid some goofball to cut holes in the first-floor ceiling/second-floor floor. He then put registers in the holes; the hope was that the heat would waft upstairs. I never felt a difference, but I did get to hear whatever was going on in the room beneath me. 

One of my chores during the winter was to fill the tank for the kitchen kerosene heater. Oh what fun. Go outside in freezing temperatures to fill a 2.5 gallon tank with kerosene. I'd go to school smelling of kerosene. We were lucky there was never a fire - kerosene heater fires were fairly common. 

There were big, heavy storm windows for all the windows in the house. I almost fell out of one of my bedroom windows trying to install the storm window. It would have been a 3-story fall because the basement was at ground level on that side of the house.

The layout of the house was essentially a square (original part), with a rectangle at the back (the addition). On the first floor there were three rooms, a large closet, two entry foyers, and a small coat closet. 

On the second floor there was five bedrooms, and that dry bathroom. My brother had the front bedroom, I had the one behind it, and my sister had the bedroom at the rear. The two other bedrooms were rented out. 

There was no attic as the roof was basically flat.

This was the driveway in 1988. It was a little neater when we lived there but there were a few cars. Mom usually parked her car nose in toward the basement so she was close to the door. 

There was no garage, just a dirt driveway. Thankfully there was an entry door into the basement (at the driveway level the basement was a walkout). The basement was a mixture of two old stone walls and two cement block walls. Mom had shelves for her caning (tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, and some fruit), and there was a newer oil fired furnace (it was probably from the early '50s).  

I don't know for sure how big the lot was/is, maybe a full acre. The front yard was dominated by two large trees; the side yard was mostly grass with a few flower beds. The rear yard had a smallish area that was grass, with a large tree. The rest of the rear yard was overgrown with saplings and full-grown trees. There was a spring fed cistern (our water source), and a small, semi-seasonal stream that ran all the was down the right side (as you entered) of the driveway, to the street where it went under the street and out into an apple orchard, and flowing into the Mill Brook that runs behind Main Street. 

This used to be the apple orchard across the street from us. Looks like the stream is still there.

That is about it for the physical description of 82 Wall Street. As I said, the house was my favorite of all the houses I lived in while in Connecticut. I can't say the same for that part of my life.

Note: Pictures of the house are from the current owner, Peter DePaola. The picture of the stream in the park is from Google Maps.