The Fall of the House of Garfield
There’s a special sort of people that triggers curiosity in others for their peculiar character and a story they might have. It can be anyone, even a rough sleeper hiding from the elements in an improvised shelter. Or the man selling veggies and fruits in my neighborhood with a chessboard, challenging me to give it a try. His pomegranates and apples are on the sweet side, but his habit to floor me each time we play has a rather sour taste to it. In the end, it’s not really that important.
Chess is like a metaphysical conversation, a silent battlefield where no hostages are ever left behind. What makes this game so beautiful is the lack of tacky triumphalism that revels in the humiliation of the defeated player. You might say the same of houses. Sometimes they have the aura of a rough sleeper themselves and there’s a special one I pass by almost on a daily basis. As time goes by, beauty slowly peels away to reveal its secrets.
If you’ve got a taste for the thrilling imagination of Edgar Allan Poe, your own will certainly run wild when you see the house in question. There’s no triumphalism in its imposing appearance: rather an impression of a shabby tower tossed away from my friend’s chess board. Yet it has weathered everything that’s been tossed here so far, and that’s a lot.
Originally built in 1905 by the Spahić family, for a while it used to be the only house in the neighborhood, sticking out among the green landscape. People dubbed it the Firefighter house due to its looks in spite of the fact it never served as that. Allegedly, there’s a pretty private library inside and a drug dealer living there, so its shelves might be filled with something other than books. Unfortunately the lush garden was turned into the Garfield Bar. That wiped out the palm tree, one of many in the neighborhood. For whatever reason those were all the rage here in early 20th century.
Mike Flanagan’s Netflix sensation, The Fall of the House of Usher, is named after a horror story by the aforementioned author and each episode is inspired by others. Garfield House would be a fitting setting for his bloody saga where we follow the surreal demise of the powerful Usher family that falls victim to its own demons. Each episode is an exercise in gore where death may be a given, but the things that lead to it are bizarre to say the least. We don’t feel sorry for most of the victims because it’s the consequence of their hubris, violence and greed.
I’m sure you won’t find any undead creatures in this house, quite boring in comparison to the Ushers. Still, the eerie vibe you feel here on a rainy night is equally strange. Instead or ravens there are crows, but as long as the color fits I’m fine with it. In mythology, they represent destiny, so let’s hope there’s at least new coat of paint and a few flowerbeds in the foreseeable future. Judging by the current situation, this place could use a little help from Verna too.
The personal history of the original owner of Garfield House is full of curiosities as well. Born in 1855, he belonged to a group of Islamic Serbs which is something unheard of today, due to the specific ethnoconfessional amalgam on which the historical identity of each local community is based. After the Habsburg annexation of the country, he refused to play by the rules of the new government and its political agenda according to which Islam was supposed to be exclusively linked to ethnic Bosniaks.
This got him into trouble since he advocated for a much more inclusive concept. After a three-day long prison sentence, he was released on condition of abandoning his cause. It was a losing battle since their divisive practice created an gap between Serbs and Muslims almost impossible to bridge. The bloody boiling point was the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the aftermath which turned the region into a chaotic bloody mess.
Spahić died in 1958, leaving this house as a monument to an extraordinary life and an idea of a different world pushed deep underneath the rug. I’m not sure if the owners are aware of his life but I’ll never look at it the same way again. In complete contrast to the statement he was forced into by the authorities, his verses speak of what is now fashionably called his truth: “do not mention the past to me/ it stands clearly before me”.
Were he to rise from the grave like Madeline Usher, there would be quite a few candidates for the body count among those of us who still feast on the carcass of a disaster the remains of which haunt us like ghosts of centuries past. But signs of life are still there: lights in the windows, laundry drying on the line and a car in the parking lot. I’ve never been inside so it will remain a mystery. That might be a good idea: an intrusion would dismantle its veneer. You would probably see a perfectly average person instead of a rebel against an empire, a basement meth lab or Wednesday Addams.
Afterwards, others added their own posh houses to display their social status, like the villa Peško, built by a family od wealthy merchants that owned valuable real estate all over town. They weren’t exactly known for risky political activism but trade with food, incense, jewelry, wine etc. Their name is still etched above their former shop though the last family members left in the 1990s as their large estate crumbled to ever smaller pieces with each shift in politics in the 20th century.
This house was also a rough sleeper until it was restored to its original splendor by a foreign bank. There are more of them scattered around, but none as attractive as Garfield House. I can imagine Poe sitting on the top floor of the tower on a stormy November night, feeding the crows through the window that blows his papers covered with words written in black ink out into the streets outside. Each flies away with a nevermore tucked unerneath its black wings.
I’m sure the dark bard would suggest to keep it this way, with the rusty needle on top of the roof as thin and sharp as the tip of his quill pen. There is no need for Verna here, we deal with our own dead in ways not even Mike Flanagan would dare to come up with. Maybe it’s an embodiment of our collective conscience? Or whatever is left of it in the meantime. Architecture is like a book, each of us reads our own narrative into space and gives it a shape that mirrors your values and ambitions.
The very idea of a house is a sign of ambition: a marker and a landmark, simultaneously. Sometimes you don’t recall the exact name of the street, but the image of the marker always stays the same. Just like in 1905, when Garfield’s tower still ruled over the green horizon of a vacant landscape. You may not know where it is, but you know what it is. And you never forget, even with your eyes closed, you see it as if you were standing right there. In the dead of the night and middle of the street, waiting for the quill to drop its last spill.
