What Agnes Built

Cold travels through me before it ever reaches a shoe. That summer the trade crossing me changed entirely — men in white overalls, a boy hauling a bucket of nails, a plasterer whose boots left pale prints going out that had not been there coming in. I learned the taste of lime and wet sawdust. For weeks the door stood open in all weathers and the house breathed dust instead of dinner.

Title, in Her Own Name

On April 3, 1899, the property passed to Agnes M. Spencer. The party releasing it was set down as the executors and trustees under the will of Howard Spencer — her husband's father. Three days later the city copied the address into its registry: a lot number, a plan book, a ward and a division. Twenty-two feet of Pine Street frontage, ninety feet running south to Waverly, and a woman's name at the top of the column.

She came into the house through two winters of black crape. Her father-in-law bought it at auction in 1893 and was dead by the summer of 1896; her husband Graham followed that November, and the funeral left through the front door on a Tuesday morning. What she inherited was a four-story house full of recent absences.

The money under it was white. Graham had developed the kaolin mines his father opened, and her country house sat in the clay country of Chester County, a few miles from the Delaware pits. The porcelain on the mantel and the fortune that bought the mantel came out of the same seam of earth.

The Firm on Chestnut Street

By high summer she had architects. In mid-July the papers reported that Duhring, Okie & Ziegler had finished plans for alterations and additions to Mrs. Graham Spencer's residence at 1822 Pine street, and that the drawings would be turned over to contractors for estimates. The firm kept offices at 1420 Chestnut Street — the kind of practice a widow with clay money hired when she meant to be seen having hired someone.

The estimates came back fast. On August 2 the builders' sheet printed the award: the contract went to J. S. Rodgers, of Stanwick, New Jersey. Then three words that change the elevation — a new story. A few days later a city paper added the figure, about $6,000. The row had gone up in the 1850s as four-story, two-bay brick, and the auctioneer had still called it four stories in 1893. The atlases show the lot already built back nearly to Waverly, with the same narrow slot of light down the western party line. There was no room left to grow sideways and none to grow backward. On twenty-two feet of Philadelphia, the only unclaimed direction is up.

A new story. Three words in a trade paper on August 2, 1899 — and a floor that had never existed before, laid over the roofline like a held breath.

For a season I was the loading dock. Brick came over me in barrows, and lath, and long boards that scraped my western edge until it shone. Then the barrows stopped, and what crossed me instead was paint — a smell so sharp it sat on top of the old coal smell for months without ever covering it.

A Second Summer of Ladders

One campaign was not enough. In September 1900 the trade columns noted alterations again at this address for Mrs. Graham Spencer, and named the contractor and the price a week later: Jacob Myres & Son, alterations to dwelling, cost $1,200. Two summers of ladders against the front, and the house came out of them taller, freshly plastered, and fit for a century that was six months old.

Then the season closed over it again. In January 1901 a city paper noted that Mrs. Graham Spencer had shut her country house in Chester County and returned to 1822 Pine street for the winter. That was the rhythm of the block — the country in the green months, Pine Street from October to April, the shutters opening on a hall that smelled of cold marble and new paint.

One Hundred and Thirty Dollars

The last stroke of the remaking is the smallest and the easiest to picture: in August 1905, among the day's building permits, a fireplace at this address, cost $130. August, when the family was out of town and the mess could be made in peace. The notice names no room. What is left of that hundred and thirty dollars is a firebox somewhere in this house, cut in, pointed and swept — and a hearth that has been drawing well ever since.

The cold months came back and I felt the difference through my whole length. Warm brick above me now, coal smoke rolling into the street at four o'clock, and high up, past where the roofline used to stop, a window I had never known lit yellow and staying lit. It is still the last light on the block to go out.