The house on 1795 Gerrard Avenue is where I like to think my 3rd act of life in Columbus really ramped up into gear. Or maybe the 4th act. At any rate, as a first time home owner, I was stoked on that level, but also in that it felt like a return to where I belonged, my favorite general region of the city. Before this, it seemed as though I would probably just continue moving farther and farther out, until winding up in the suburbs somewhere, married and living in a quiet subdivision. And possibly worse still – the horror! – I never even thought about it, never considered any other option at all. If I had, I probably would have thought it just what a person did in growing older, and why fight it.
So over time, I had lost contact with countless friends, living in such far flung, exotic locales as Upper Arlington, or out off of Morse Road. We might catch a crappy cover band every now and then, nearby, but I had completely lost the pulse of the music scene otherwise, not to mention what was happening downtown, on campus, or in my favorite neck of the woods, Grandview.
It wasn’t a conscious decision to jump back into the fire, so to speak. Like many major overhauls, in retrospect I can see this was prompted, in a roundabout fashion, by things going south between me and some girl. But on the plus side, not being with her meant getting serious about this concept instead, meant taking on a second job, meant kind of thinking for the first time, once finances stabilized, that, hey, I can actually afford to buy a house if I want. Not to mention looking up many old friends for the first time in who knows how long. Next thing you knew I was actually looking at houses, and though driving around and checking out something like 20 in the space of a single day, with a realtor chosen only on the recommendation of a friend, I kept coming back to the first house we had walked through that morning…1795 Gerrard Avenue.
The idea was that I could rent out 2 of the 3 bedrooms if I wanted, and the basement as well, and break even or perhaps show a slight profit on the monthly payment. This would prove a hit or miss proposition, though I’m fortunate that in the extensive scroll of bill-paying roommates at that house (Damon, Matt, Brandon, Clif, Steve, Megan, Clif again), the good ones far outnumbered the duds. Living here would help me reconnect with the city, and reinvigorate my social life in a major way.
As expected, it also turned into party central. And as an unseen, never considered bonus, for some reason the basement in this place had insanely good acoustics for recording live music, in particular the drums. Vocals were a different animal at times, but you could put one crappy mic in the middle of the room and pick up all the instruments in remarkable balance, sounding crisp. And as I’ve said, the drums especially stood out in this setting, sounding much better than anywhere else I have experienced. As a result, this place did become somewhat of a hotbed for musical activity. Impromptu jams with an audience happened frequently, or, sometimes on a nightly basis for a week straight, we’d come home from the bar at 3am or whatever, hit RECORD and goof around to see what might happen. Here are some tracks which were recorded as live improvs in this spirit, entirely in that basement:
The basic rule of thumb with these is that whatever sounds like the hardest instrument to play, that was probably Matt. Whatever sounds like the easiest, that was definitely me. Other random people would fall in and out of the mix on a continual basis. We have a boatload of similar evidence in the can, and while the songs themselves are debatable, I do find the audio quality amazing at times, considering no work was done to them whatsoever.
When I move in, there’s this light grey Berber carpet everywhere, which was supposed to be stain resistant – mmm, not so much, at least not in our hands – yet really didn’t look that great from the outset. Then at some random cookout, this Bill character (pictured below), who was a maintenance man of sorts, said he would almost guarantee there were hardwood floors underneath this carpet. We peeled back a section and discovered he was right. Beautiful hardwood floors covered most of the house, but had been obscured by this ghastly carpet – which we began removing that very night.
Random scenes from random cookout:
The house was built in 1942 and clocks in at 1800 square feet. I only met the previous owners once, and even then it was really just one of them. There was some random, rainy afternoon where I was chilling out in the living room and heard a knock on the door, got up to go answer it. Was surprised to encounter a senior age woman on my porch, clutching this bound packet of papers – her husband remains behind the wheel of the car, in the driveway, though he and I exchange waves. She explains that they are the people I bought this home off of. As for these papers, these are the entire history of this place, an insane amount of material going back to even before it was built. While standing here, she even gives me a shorthand verbal rundown, about how this neighborhood was built for factory workers coming home from WWII. And then she walks back to their car, and they are gone.
I think about this encounter quite often, and am so glad I was home that day to accept this handoff of papers. Otherwise, who knows if I would have ever seen them? They might not have left them if I was not around, considering the rain. Whatever the case, it remains a touching encounter, and I’m forever grateful that they took the effort to stop by like this. I’ve flipped through this packet here and there throughout the years, and will at some point get around to uploading the highlights.
