Friday August 7, 2009
Home is where the history is
by Rabbi Dr. Abraham Unger, Community Blogger
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “home” as “a place where one lives.” The values most meaningful to us are reflected in the ways we view, and use, our homes. Are our homes places to collapse after a long day at work? Or, do they represent something deeper - a place where we have control over the kind of lives we dream of leading? This is a true story of how one couple’s search for a house that could fulfill their vision of raising a family was realized.
Shelley and Neil Harwayne discovered Tottenville on Sunday ramblings in the late 70s when they’d visit the antique stores lining Amboy Road. When they moved to their “Colonial Revival” house on Hopping Avenue in 1980, Shelley and Neil were told they had moved to “The Park Avenue of Tottenville.”
The house they discovered, built in 1905, contained colonial-style symmetry, such as “equal numbers of windows on either side of the central doorway,” according to Tottenville Historical Society Director Linda Hauck, along with a classical elegance. This was the home the young couple knew they’d have to have as soon as they entered, no matter what it took to scrimp and save to make a go of it.
Already, back in the 80s, Shelley and Neil understood technology was coming fast and furious, families and neighbors were growing apart, and the idea of home, both physically and spiritually, was fragmenting too. The Harwayne’s own journey home had taken them from a Stuyvesant Town apartment in Manhattan when they first married, to the Village Greens planned community in Arden Heights in the early 1970s when they had their children, and finally, to Hopping Avenue. This third stop was the permanent one. Here is where the kind of life they wanted for their young family met up with its structural embodiment.
They saw a place that was, as Shelley remembers, “a container for an interest in history” of early Tottenville. Why was local history so important? Because knowing where we live, really knowing where we live, matters. As Neil says, “We’re not a part of this history, but the house is.” Shelley and Neil thought this would be a “perfect house for reading and writing.”
Shelley and Neil went about learning all they could of the house’s history to “preserve its integrity.” They learned the house was built by a salesman named Baxter, whose family extensions through blood and marriage still run deep in town. At the same time, it became the family “big occasions house.” Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s were celebrated at home. And finally, Shelley and Neil became part of a street where people knew each other. To this day, every July, Shelley and Neil have all the neighbors over on a Sunday and they talk from afternoon to midnight.
Shelley recalls how “the kids would run to the window to see the boats” as they passed on the waterfront, or how excited they’d get “when the doorbell rang.” But this was not an isolated life. It was a richer one than many can imagine inside the box of how we often limit our lives today.
Shelley and Neil’s children went to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and, as “boat kids” all the way from Tottenville to the city, they made great friends and got a lot of homework done. The kids are grown up now, but they still return on weekends with their spouses and the grandchildren to Hopping Avenue because, after all, home is where the history is.
Rabbi Unger’s column examines history of a Tottenville home
August 25, 2009
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