Cathousin'

My Grandpa Hahn built this house from a 1937 Popular Mechanics design ("Build your Daughter This Dream House!"). Kind of ironic, considering it was the midst of the Depression, and a swanky art moderne dollhouse was about as close as they were ever going to get to a dream, but this was the result. Dee is the little girl with her head turned away, and her brother Ron, my father, is the little boy. It was Dee's fifth birthday, and Grandpa had also built a garage for Ron, which you can see next to the house.

When my cousins, Ruth, Alan, and Sheri, were growing up in Daly City, they spent a lot of time being baby sat at Grandma and Grandpa's Sunset District (art moderne/art deco) house, and the dollhouse made it through their childhoods as well, until it sat for a couple of decades with Sheri's stuff piled up around it in Grandma's garage. After Grandma died and I was stumbling around trying to figure out what parts of her packrat life to keep and which to ditch, I found the dollhouse gathering dust down there and my dad and I packed it up for the trip to my apartment in New York.

Where, mind you, I didn't have much space. So it perched on the windowsill for a decade and both my cats, then kittens, spent time in and around it, clearly not interested in re-arranging the minute wooden furniture Grandpa had made for it.

During the decade in which it served as a cat house, my cousin Ruth had two more little girls, for a total of three, so my father and I agreed that we should deacquisition it back to California to Ruth and Mike so their girls could "grow up" with it, as we had. Ruth was a little more ambivalent--musty old things are not her style, and for about five years, it has sat in splinters on their living room, walls asunder, furniture perched on the chimney (youngest child Becca has a wrecking ball sense of home decor). They finally tidied up the house for a Bat Mitzvah and the dollhouse is once again packed up somewhere with Ruth hinting that one of these days somebody is going to spruce it up with a coat of fresh paint (!!!! please God, no!!!). Bailey, the middle child, got a school project out of it ("MY GREAT GRANDFATHER BUILT THIS OLD DOLLHOUSE...") and the poster sits above her desk two years later, so we're still getting some mileage out of the little metaphor. More than just the cats fit in that little place.