700 East 26th Street (p 101)

(Originally published in 'DOOR=JAR, Issue 37 | Winter 2026)

In the beginning, there was the house. The new colossus. She welcomed us.

Of course, she was never just a house. She was the brick-and-mortar embodiment of the American Dream. A hallowed place, like Ellis Island. We were the immigrants, maybe poor, but not tired. We were raring to go. We all started there: the eight who came first, with four children. Then four marriages among the first arrivals, and 18 children followed. She mothered us all, 30 of us, the ones who followed streets paved with gold to Paterson, and those for whom the dream was birthright.

 She was a charcoal gray with bright white trim, and green casing highlighting her many windows like a demure eyeshadow. Her broad porch, classy and breezy. When the first arrivals looked at her, it was in awe of what they had been able to accomplish in three short years since their immigration: from wood planks nailed together to form one-story walls in the rainy tropics of their birth, they now had solid brick and stucco, three stories high. Their former hard-packed dirt floors transformed to oak boards, shining with varnish. They had a fireplace, French panes, claw foot tubs, crackled porcelain tiles – elegant vestiges of a turn-of-the century American wealth they had just arrived to in the 1960s. She was like a movie star. They’d pose with her, not as the backdrop, but as the reason for the photo. She, the Victorian bombshell. She should have been adorned with a fancy nameplate, like a brooch, that read “Mother of Exiles.”

But storied pomp is only useful in ancient lands. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it is not static. Because everyone needed to fit, they chopped her up into three apartments. The entrance sitting room with the large stone fireplace became a common foyer, where bicycles and raincoats and basketballs and shoes and bookbags and tools waited for usefulness in haphazard piles. They added hollow-core doors in makeshift frames to create bedrooms for the children. So many children, so many new Americans! In the name of improvement, they hammered in shag carpeting to soften the wood floors and went to Sears to buy plastic tub inserts to replace the old, impractical cast iron originals. They enclosed the romantic sleeping porches to maximize living space. They painted her body stark white so she could stand out more, and her main door a deep red, like a lipsticked mouth.  Her once airy front porch became a crowded repository for junk they quickly accumulated in this land of plenty. Then they yanked out the hedges and unfurled chain link around her perimeter, like an apron, to protect her. But it just made her look harried, like a busy mother with the city soot and dirt clinging to her white dress.

She remained a beacon, her welcoming glow undisturbed. The violence they did to her good looks didn’t affect the sounds emanating from her. When her red door swung open, she sang a happy, boisterous song of family. There was laughter, and the clinking of silverware and glasses as they gathered every day for dinner in one or another’s apartment. There were heartfelt greetings and the sounds of makeshift beds being assembled to fit yet another newcomer, not always blood, but made welcome anyway. There was the sound of music – salsa, merengue, disco – on weekends when, after dinner, the furniture would be shoved over to make room for dancing. The thump, thump of the basketball and the hoots of the men sweating it out in the long driveway, clanking the ball through the hoop. And the ropes skipping on the sidewalk and the metal strap-on skates grating against the cement, and the higher-pitched voices of the women on the stoops, taking a break from the cooking and cleaning and mothering. 

Despite the love, we tired of huddling, we yearned to breathe more freely, independently. We tired of proximity. We had outgrown her. And so, family by family, we all left. To West Haven. To Riverdale. To Rockaway. To Miami. To Australia. Thirty of us departing in waves. Barely looking back at her tired façade, her ruined lawn. We traded her in for symbols of success: gleaming modern houses in new neighborhoods, and open-planned split-levels and cool mid-century ramblers in the suburbs, with high school diplomas and later college degrees hanging from the walls. No more small rooms and janky doors. We’d become Americans. We didn't need each other for daily support. The pastures sought were greener than the surrounding city that was deteriorated, like her. She started to go quiet while around her the noise of urban decay increased: the sirens, the yelling, the all-hours cacophony. She was sold. The new owner was just a manager. He bathed her in new pink paint, but it just made her look cheap. He chopped her up some more to collect extra rents. Five apartments, no relatives, only strangers. Antennae like frizzy hair sticking up from her roof.

Her ruin was complete. In less than two decades, her progeny had made it.