Funny — it’s not mentioned in the real estate listing
Great news — H.P. Lovecraft’s Shunned House (AKA 135 Benefit Street, Providence) is for sale! And for less than a million bucks!
Benefit Street is the oldest residential street in the US of A (Williamsburg is older, but is no longer residential); most of the houses along it are 18th Century. So I was surprised to read — if this article is correct — that the street was widened and a whole row of even earlier houses razed to build the current street.
Ol’ 135 really did have a creepy history from the get go. It was built over the graves of a couple Huguenots who had lived on the earlier site. A subsequent mistress of the house went mad and babbled in French — a language she didn’t know. Pesky dead Huguenots — didn’t these people see Poltergeist?
Benefit Street was a dangerous slum for most of the 20th Century. It was just pulling itself up in the late Seventies, when I moved to Providence to go to the Rhode Island School of Design. My apartment was a block from the Shunned House, up a little blind side street called Bowen Street. It was a row of three or four Depression-era houses, each with three identical flats, one above the other. If you got drunk at a party in one, it was the very devil trying to work out where you were.
The whole street is very done-up and posh now, so I’m sure #135 is very nice. Plus — learn French without studying!
Dead Pool is all set up and ready to autopost tomorrow at 6 sharp, Weasel Blog Time. Be there or…don’t be there, I guess.
Posted: May 5th, 2011 under history, personal.
Comments: 15
Comments
Comment from gebrauchshund
Time: May 5, 2011, 9:09 pm
Time check.
WBT -6 confirmed.
Wait, is that 6pm or 6am? Dammit, now I’m all confuzzled again.
Comment from Mark Matis
Time: May 5, 2011, 9:42 pm
So does WBT correspond to Brutish Summer Time? Or does Weaseldom not observe that fluff and finery?
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: May 5, 2011, 10:13 pm
Well, see, that’s part of the charm of Weasel Blog Time, Mark. It’s just some WordPress setting, and I haven’t the faintest fucking idea what time it is.
All part of the challenge.
Comment from Argentium G. Tiger
Time: May 5, 2011, 10:29 pm
Dang it, here in North America I’m some hours behind you, and will be at work when the floodgates open.
Hrm. I must find a way to be sneaky.
Comment from Oh Hell
Time: May 5, 2011, 11:18 pm
Work happened to me, also, last time – BUT I AM ON VACATION this time!!!! I’ll probably still screw up. Now, on to some research…..
Comment from Uncle Monkey
Time: May 5, 2011, 11:33 pm
That would be 6pm Weasel time, or 10am PST – 8 hours ahead.
I vacillate between left coast and Hyderabad.Which is friggin’ GMT +5.5, which I have NEVER figured out. I used to think time zones went by (whole) hours.
It’s like Porky in Wackyland!
Comment from JeffS
Time: May 5, 2011, 11:53 pm
Dead Pool Day! YAYS!!!!!!!
Comment from Oldcat
Time: May 6, 2011, 12:17 am
There’s some zany timezone that is 15 minutes off the hour. I forget where it is.
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: May 6, 2011, 12:57 am
There is a house in Rhode Island
They say that house is shunned
And it’s been the ruin of a young Weasel
and I think you know which one
Now mothers tell your children
not to do what she has done
and spend your life in sin and misery
and have to move to old England.
Comment from Mark Matis
Time: May 6, 2011, 1:21 am
Got the spambots all set up to do their thing at 6 WBT!
Comment from Nina from GCP
Time: May 6, 2011, 2:52 am
That’s a pretty cool looking house, at least to me here in CA, where a hundred year old house is rare. I live in a neighborhood that 20 years ago was cowfields, so the old things entrance me. I probably would hate the inconveniences, though.
We had an exchange student from Sweden many years ago and she chortled with glee at things we called “old” in CA. She had a point.
🙂
Comment from Mike C.
Time: May 6, 2011, 8:19 am
Not to be picky or anything (much), but isn’t Elfreth’s Alley in Philidelphia the oldest remaining residential street in the US?
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: May 6, 2011, 1:13 pm
What can I say? I always heard that about Benefit Street. On the other hand, they always said the Providence Journal building was used as the Daily Planet building in the old Superman series (not true). On the other hand, they always said the State House had the third largest unsupported dome in the world (true).
Comment from Mark Matis
Time: May 6, 2011, 3:02 pm
So which is the largest unsupported dome in the world? Obama’s head? Harry Reid’s? Or Nancy Pelosi’s? Last week I might have added Osama’s to the list, but now it ain’t no dome no more…
}:-]
Comment from Pablo
Time: May 7, 2011, 12:54 pm
That’s a pretty cool looking house, at least to me here in CA, where a hundred year old house is rare.
Yep, we’re just filthy with old lumber around here. 200 years old isn’t even rare. Of course, we pale in comparison to Old Blighty.
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