don't know much about history...

when i first moved here, i lived in a neighborhood called the avenues, which i like to call the san francisco of salt lake. it is a charming part of the city, close to downtown, filled with hills and trees and cafes and art galleries and old chapels and historic houses. the house i lived in was, in fact, built by my great-grandparents and is currently owned by my uncle bob. he LOVES giving tours of the house, pointing out original lighting and other historically significant features. (not in the category of historically significant, but certainly in the category of interesting, every single room in that house has a door to the outside. my great-grandmother didn't want anyone tracking mud through the house and thought entering a door directly into whatever room was your ultimate destination would solve the problem. i never heard any compelling evidence that it worked, but having that many doors certainly added to the problem of my living in constant fear of a break-in.)

i often wondered what kinds of stories lived inside the other houses i passed every day in the aves and, thanks to my totally awesome and in-the-know cousin, keri, i got to find out. keri is an architect and preservationist and, for the second year in row, took me along on the utah heritage foundation's historic homes tour a few weekends ago. this year's tour was of houses in... you guessed it... the avenues! some of them were stunning, and some of them you couldn't have paid me a million dollars to live in, but it was really fun to poke around inside and imagine what life is like there now, and what life was like there then. some things we (and i really mean i) learned:

1. the best way to kill your wife is to build her a new house. several of the houses on the tour had been built by husbands for wives who died before the homes were completed. suspicious.
2. sleeping porches were all the rage in the early 1900s. (is that the 20th century? i always get confused.) it was a commonly held belief that sleeping in the outside air would prevent and/or cure tuberculosis. these days, former sleeping porches make lovely, sunny, windowed family rooms.
3. old school bathtubs (made out of either steel or iron. again, my memory fails...) are too heavy to haul out of old houses, so most of the places we toured still had the originals. no explanation of how they got in the house to begin with.
4. little benches in the corners around a fireplace are called ingelbrooks.
5. some of the houses in the avenues have underground tunnels, some leading out to the middle of the yard, some leading to as yet undiscovered destinations. our guess as to their purpose? an escape route and/or hiding place for polygamist wives.











once we were done with the houses on the tour, keri, her mom, kathryn, and i drove past some historic houses in the avenues owned by our own extended family at one point or another. we drove past aunt elizabeth's old house on D street, where both kathryn and my mom had their wedding receptions, and past the old B street house, where my enterprising great-grandfather built four garages, used one and rented out the other three. (why did i not inherit this kind of genius?)

and, in perhaps the most stunning historical preservation of the day, we saw a fellow tour-goer wearing turquoise overalls. let me repeat that. turquoise overalls. when was the last time you saw those? i thought so.