The Tenants: An Episode of the '80s

THE TENANTS

AN EPISODE OF THE '80S
MARY S. WATTS
NEW YORK THE McCLURE COMPANY MCMVIII

Copyright, 1908, by The McClure Company
Published, March, 1908
THE TENANTS

They were tearing down the old Gwynne house the other day as we drove past, and it was not without a twinge of sentimental regret that we beheld the spectacle. The old Gwynne house was what our newspapers delight to honour by referring to as an historic landmark. In the huge, expensive, devastating, and reconstructing haste of a growing American town—a town of the middle West at that—any building twenty-five years of age is likely to be so described; but this must have numbered all of four-score. Many valiant notable deeds and people were associated with it; it went through a whole epic of adventures like—as one might whimsically fancy—a stationary Odysseus. At the latter end it fell to be that common drudge and slattern among homes, a boarding-house; reached the last sordid depth as a tenement; and now they are abolishing it utterly, and a new subdivision to be called, I believe, Gwynne Park Place, will presently flourish above the grave. Once upon a time there was a park; it lay upon the utmost border of town, and brick walls bound with a ribbon of stone along the top, kept the house and its outlying lawns in a pompous seclusion. That was all swept away long ago; of late the ground has been reclaimed from slums and shanties and laid out in building-lots, curbed, sewered, gas-mained. But you may see here and there a single elm or buckeye, keeping yet amongst the spruce new flower-beds and within call of factory-whistles, some air of its antique dignity, remote and cool. In my time Doctor Vardaman's cottage, hard by where you used to turn into the Gwynne driveway, was the only other dwelling hereabouts; a great, spraddling, staring apartment-house covers the site of it now.