We are finally over on Leiper Street on a beautiful afternoon after the rains. I was heading down to get another picture elsewhere and almost stopped in my tracks. It wasn’t the house. It was the garden and the plantings around the biggest tree stump you are likely to see. Click on the thumbnail to see it in full size. He turned that ugly remnant of a tree into a work of art.
So I stopped to talk to the owner who was out in his yard watering. He said he has been there about five years and had moved into Frankford for this beautiful house. He’s done a lot of work on the exterior. Had a new paint job done recently. I asked him the story about that pirate flag. He said he put it up there one Halloween and just never took it down. Sounds like something I would do.
Here is a view of the house itself.
I was inside years ago. It’s amazing inside too.
Beautiful house, amazing architecture. Is there any way that besides the photos of some of these grand old relics that you can dig a bit into their history? Who or why would such a distinct house have been built for or be part of the neighborhood? There are several classics like this one scattered about Frankford and each has a story to tell.
i heard eddie munster lives there……?
[…] That’s a mouthful. But apparently it comes down to the time involved it takes to survey historic areas. So the researchers are trying to match up old atlases with current mapping techniques and trying to guess which areas of a neighborhood have a high likelihood of having historic stuff. Sounds kinda vague, but lets take the example of the area near Frankford’s border with Bridesburg, you look on an old map and see the Frankford Creek running up along what’s now Aramingo, you know you don’t have to wonder around Frankford Valley looking for old stuff cause they only filled in the creek recently. You look at the houses that used be where I95 is now, you know you’re probably not going to get anything historic around where the city bulldozed 50 years ago. But it also works for where you might find something. Take Leiper Street around Overington Park. If you compare old maps with the current surveys, you can see that some of the lot sizes for the estates are the same, meaning the houses are probably still there. And go figure, they actually came upon this week’s home of the week! […]
[…] lets play a game, I have a few houses that were named, let’s start with one that is a recent home of the week back in August that was owned by Henry Blum who owned a jacquard mill in Kensington. What name did this dude […]