The Cinderella Homes

Mom came home one day exclaiming, they're "salt boxes", those homes are nothing but "salt boxes."

Well, I pictured a round dark blue house with a little girl and yellow umbrella plastered on the front door. I didn't know that a salt box was a type of house where you have a first floor in the front and two floors in the back, and it looks like a one-story home from the front. This picture shows a type of home popular in New England in the 1800s. We didn't have the waterfront as in this example, but you get the picture.

The Cinderlla Homes had arrived. It was 1951. They were built in a plot that encompassed Ardmore, Knight, Johnson, and Lindsay Aves -- extending those streets for about 1/2 a mile, so that on each side of those streets, they built, I would say 8-10 homes, maybe 12. My eyes are not seeing how many to count. I do know that they built a "sidewalk" between the houses about 1/2 down the development that ran parallel to the two main streets in two (Clements Bridge and Ephsham Rd) so you could walk between the four streets without going to the main-streets end of the street, then going to the next street by going up the street to where the Cinderellas began, making you have to walk basically a "U" with a flat bottom (down, across, up).

They all were alike. Cookie-cutter homes. Cute, though. After several years, they all changed, and took on their own persona, depending on what the owners did with them. Many were expanded out the back. None were built with garages, so homeowners put garages in their back yard, or put a car port on the side of the home. The lots were quite small, so if they put in a car port, they almost overhung their neighbors yard (air space).

I had several friends who lived in those homes, but the mind is dim, and no names are coming to my mind. The new residents were 99 percent catholic, coming from Philadelphia. And, since they didn't attend my church, which was really my main social-building place, I didn't get close to any of the children who lived there.

Mom may have lifted her nose at those "salt box" homes, but I thought they were cute -- cottages, like the cottage in Random Harvest, a movie I recently saw (again) with Greer Garson and Ronald Colement. It's a two hankie movie. 'Nuf said.