The Dollhouse

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The Dollhouse

During the week of the 1998 Gay Pride Parade we tendered an offer on a property in Corona Heights, overlooking the Castro.

sketch
This sketch appeared on the property sales sheet.

Hunting for a house - nay, a home - in San Francisco is a strange and twisted experience. Prices are high, offerings are by and large unimpressive boxy rabbit cages, and speculators are buying what little is left of San Francisco's history and tearing it down to slap up more condominiums, none of which show even a bit of soul.

There are many choices in fringe neighborhoods, but I want something safe, where my wife can stoll about without fear about her safety, where we won't feel under siege, isolated in our home. Something very near a hip neighborhood, where we can indulge in the city sensibilities we so love. The Castro has been good to us.

The property - an earthquake cottage from the turn of the century - was completely unlike the architecturally depressing boxy condominiums and pre-fab houses at which we'd looked.

We looked in Berkeley, where the same money would buy us more square footage, but nowhere in Berkeley felt like home. I guess we're just city folk. Tom Wolfe, in his forthcoming novel "A Man in Full", said it well:

One those magical summer evenings in San Francisco when the fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean and people emerge from the hotels on Nob Hill and go for brave walks down the staggeringly steep slopes of Powell Street and shiver deliciously in the chilly air and listen to the happy clapper clamor of the cable cars and the mournful foghorns of the freights heading out to sea, and all at once life is a lovely little operetta from the year 1910 - at that moment, likely as not, barely five miles to the east, a brutal sun has been roasting Costra Costa county for 13 or 14 hours.

We picked a property that slipped under the radar of others looking to buy. The masses are looking for a three bedroom, two bath, two car garage house. They're willing to live in all sorts of neighborhoods to meet this profile. Our place is tiny, but in a good location, and it has possibilites, and front and rear gardens. We were lucky.

We tendered an offer, dealt with a competing bid that slipped in just under the wire (by convincing the owner that we wouldn't trash the place; the other party wanted to plop a garage on what's now a beautiful front garden), had our mortgage broker drive from home back to the office late one Friday afternoon to re-fax our bone fides, and less than twenty-four hours later (but what an emotional roller coaster!) we found out our counter-offer had been accepted. That was just a few hours before Pink Saturday - the evening before the Pride Parade - started. (We celebrated both days.)

This is the second year running that the has seen us celebrating. A year ago we'd just picked the setting for Rose's engagement ring and then we walked to Market Street and joined the parade. This year it was colder and overcast, but our celebrations wasn't the least dampened.

Have you found errors nontrivial or marginal, factual, analytical and illogical, arithmetical, temporal, or even typographical? Please let me know; drop me email. Thanks!
 

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