“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
Sometimes, when my 4-year-old friend Andrew and I would part after a day out in Murfreesboro, Tenn., we would recite the little dialog—“See you later, alligator.”
“Afterwhile, Crocodile.”
“See you in the 50s!”
Well, Andrew…. I am in the 50s.
I bought a 1956-constructed home. It has held only the Cherrier family since then. Mr. Cherrier, the one-time Assistant Fire Chief in Dubuque, built, maintained and lived in the house with his family until his death in 1996. And Mrs. Cherrier, employed by the telephone company for more than 25 years, lived in it until she sold it to me August 10. It has all the stability and charm that you might expect from such a responsible, Midwestern family.
It wasn’t love at first sight. There was a spark of warmth, but no ring of fire. I lusted after a Queen Anne right downtown Dubuque—an interior designer’s dreamy interpretation of the mine-rich Victorian Era, when Julian Dubuque staked his claim on the Mississippi River.
Dubuque’s charm lies in the Victorian laced bluffs and I would have loved to invest in the young renaissance of a largely dilapidated population of grand homes. However, while I am a dreamer, an optimist and a Taurus, I, for once, managed to plant my feet a little more firmly on the Cherrier’s front stoop.
Once I came to my senses and opted for the more sensible home, I fell in love with the kitchen first. It reminded me of the one my mother grew up in, in Madisonville, Kentucky. It has the flickering buzz of an exposed circular florescent light. It has an oven that looks like the front grill of a Corsair fastback. And the stainless steel sink is set on the corner, framed by windows that wind out to both the back and side yards.
Once the kitchen charmed me, so too did the warm, maple-ly wood floors that I imagined were underneath the carpet. It took me longer to cozy up to the wood trim, which has always been white in my Southern Living decorated world.
Well, Andrew, it’s wood, it can be painted, right?
I started with my bedroom. I chose the smaller of the two bedrooms, because of the crazy built-in closet. Not that I was going to keep the closet, but I just knew they could become built-in shelves and could be painted white. My dad, who was a college administrator for most of his life, could build them, right? Dads just know how to do that, right?
Turns out, my dad can build shelves, but his daughter can’t paint the maple trim. My friend James Manning, who is the executive director of a historic house and museum, and a general aficionado of historic houses, was horrified that I would even attempt to paint the trim and warned me against its lack of porous surface. After sanding, then painting with kilz, then painting with white paint (and then again and again and again with the white paint), I gave into the retro-cool buttery trim of the rest of the house.
It would seem, Andrew, there is compromise in every relationship.
My raised ranch house is in the middlest of the middle class neighborhood that seemed to sprout 1,200 foot houses with semi-finished basements around 1956. The dark trim, roughed-in closets and shelves are in all the houses within Dubuque’s city limits.
You can follow Dubuque’s success through its homes. The Victorian Era opulence shines from the reflection of the river. Large Brick homes sit atop carved bluffs, some polished and refined, some peering over the edge of the same bluffs, threatening to jump.
It seems fitting that the very year Queen Victoria began her reign is the same year Dubuque became a city—1837. And just as her monarchy was often characterized as peaceful, so too were Julian and the Irish and German lead miners that followed him up the Mississippi as they lived and worked amicably with the Meskquakie Indians, both digging into the bluffs and residing on top of them.
It almost seems all of Dubuque was facing the river and the land that drifted beyond the bluffs to the prairies was largely ignored until the 1950s. When the town filled with meat packing plants and the industries of post World War II, smaller, more middle class housing developed. My house, toward the prairie side of the city is so typical of the rest of Dubuque one wonders if anything was ever built outside the two time periods.
So even though my house is going to show its age a little, it is still going to be retro cool, much like Dubuque itself. Besides, both my house and the houses on the river are what attracted me to Dubuque. It is Americana, family, sustainable living, and a faint memory of childhood. It all feels as if I have been here before.
