basements

In the Philadelphia Inquirer today there was an article about the recent storms causing a lot of basement flooding. Our house here in Philadelphia doesn’t have a basement. We didn’t have a choice about the matter, as the homes that were being built by the Philadelphia Housing Authority did not come with basements. We bought the house without being able to pick the colors of the wall or the stucco on the outside or what kind of hardware the doors came with. For what we paid though we got a great deal, so I am no complaining I just probably would have chosen to have a nice basement that spanned the footprint of our house if I could have.

Growing up I always had a basement. In Astoria , the basement was our playroom. My dad worked in TV and appliance repair at the time and so we had a big screen TV (all of 24 inches diagonally) in the basement that he salvaged from the trash, replaced a few burned out tubes, replaced the cloth that covered the speakers and brought it back to life. It was color and it was great. He always had several Betamax cassette players in various states or repair that we could watch or record videos on and we had an HBO antennae on the roof that got pay TV long before cable. The antennae was two feet long and had a metal circle every half inch so it looked kind of like a ray gun from My Favorite Martian. It pointed at something in the sky, a satellite I suppose, and beamed Premium movies down to our basement in the shadow of the Triborough Bridge. We would invite school friends over and watch Beastmaster, Star Wars and Bill Cosby Himself which always seemed to be on. The floor was covered in multi sized rugs that overlapped and made little seats in the hills and valleys. The basement was the size of the whole first floor except there were no real walls or rooms to make it small. Only the boiler room which no one ever went in except my dad and which always breathed ominously behind a ply board wall that my dad had put up and the laundry room which was near the back and had a door that lead to the back yard. There was a big record player and radio the size of a sofa that we listened to records and eight track tapes on. It doubled as a drink and cake table during all of the birthday parties. That all changed when the basement was rented out as an apartment but we got a basement back when we moved out of Astoria and further into Queens.
In Douglaston, the basement was set up as a party room by the previous owners. The walls were covered in orange plastic wallpaper and wood paneling with an off white drop down ceiling and closets built into the wood paneling under the stairs. There were long benches with white vinyl seat cushions that extended fifteen feet long on two walls, with a permanent plastic flower arrangement where they joined the corner. The benches had built in storage that we could fit in lying down like Dracula coffins. We never did that though out of fear that someone would sit down on the lid and we would be trapped and run out of air or be trapped forever. Every big party and major event of those years was held in that basement. After one or two years my dad built a full bar with a mirrored front in one side of the basement and the following year I helped him build a half bathroom. There was a door that opened onto to the driveway and the backyard so there was never a need to go upstairs during the festivities.
The basement in my parent’s house now does not resemble either one of the previous two. It’s a place to hold stuff they haven’t figured out how to throw out yet. The things they keep putting off looking at. Some of the things don’t even belong to them. They inherited them from the previous owners as I am sure the next owners will inherit items from my parents. In that basement right now there are several commodore 64s, several dining room sets and dozens of boxes of old papers and clothes as well as a beautiful pool table that is loaded down with my sister’s old dolls and a lot of school books. I have inherited their propensity for hoarding meaningless mementos, things that one hopes will be worth a lot of money one day but never will and things that need only a few pieces to be operational. Not having a basement or an attic for that matter has made me more selective about what I keep and although I still have way too much stuff for our small house as Jeannie keeps reminding me, I don’t have something which acts too much like a black hole to be beneficial to a Taurus like me. So the slab may be the way a lot of people find their end but it’s the saving grace for me.