It so happens that today was the New Albany Historic Home Tour, which appears to have debuted in 2006. My opinion about this event and others like it has shifted over the years; let it suffice to say that for me, the home tour now serves as a reminder of the many opportunities in New Albany that have been fumbled during the 2000s.
We could have been a contender, and gotten more things right, but whenever the redevelopment path has split, invariably we’ve rejected the way marked “transformational.” We just can’t seem to scrape that floodplain mud right off our shoes.
But I’ll readily concede that much good came from the home tour of September 10, 2007, when our house was included. The inclusion itself always struck me as odd. Our house was built in 1910, suggesting an age that merits the word “historic” even if there is little of distinction in terms of bells and whistles.
On that Staurday in 2007, promptly at 10:05 a.m., the first historic home tourists were queued outside on the front steps. They comprised a baker’s dozen descendants of the Schwartzels, who bought the house in 1913 and lived there until just after World War II.
Among them was the youngest (and last surviving) Schwartzel daughter, Susie, aged 77, who left the house at 17 in 1947 and had not been back inside for 60 years. Spry and sharp, she led the clan’s tour (with one very attentive homeowner) room by room through the house, dispensing anecdotes and details about its original configuration, which was later altered a bit on the ground floor prior to our tenure.
Susie showed us where her father hid the hootch during Prohibition, and explained that the dormitory-scale floorplan of the house was a crucial factor in its purchase by a couple intent on having a large family (9 children in all). She referred to the house’s physical location as an “island” during the 1937 flood, with only one pathway above water level leading out of the neighborhood to a grocery store down the street.
If the walls could talk, it would indeed be wonderful, but living history was better and I’m grateful. If not for the home tour, we probably would not have had the opportunity to hear these tales.
The timing was propitious for another reason. Eight months later a family member called to tell me that Susie had died after suffering a stroke in route to her annual post-Kentucky Derby dinner. We were crestfallen; it seemed as if I knew her better than those few hours during the home tour might have suggested.
On Halloween in 2024, Diana and I will celebrate 21 years together in the former home of the Schwartzels (Susie’s father and his brother were founders and co-owners of the New Albany Box & Basket factory through the 1940s). I’ve lived my entire life in Floyd County, but never longer at any single address than here.
