Retro-Decorating for Real

Visiting the Past without a Time Machine

If ever you are looking for transport into the past, here is my recommendation: Find a place you once knew well — for instance, I remember in detail my grandmother’s apartment at 56 Bennet Ave in Washington Heights (NYC) — and search for it on Zillow. There’s the apartment! — or one in the same configuration — that I redecorate in my mind to make it just like it was maybe sixty years ago.

I don’t recall the canopy over the front entranceway, but there again are the tiny buttons with names next to them in the front hall. On family visits we were buzzed in and I ran to the elevator where I got to push the button for the fifth floor. If I was there visiting my aunt and grandmother, they had their own keys to the building. And then there was the tiny, tiny key to the mailboxes, automat-like, glass-fronted cubbies with gold numbers, each box like its own “apartment compartment,” as I once announced.

Whisk away the furniture and brightly colored walls in the Zillow photographs. Although current residents of 56 Bennett Ave. have gotten rid of the iron window grates, on the internet I lucky enough to find a similar item: “Foldable Heavy-Duty Extendable Window Protections Bars with Lock.” Those bars always reminded of danger we in the “country” never considered. The several times this apartment was broken into from the fire escape seemed inexplicable. (After my grandmother died, my aunt moved to a garden apartment in California.)

In the Zillow photo is the bedroom my aunt shared with my grandmother, twin beds with matching chintz bedspreads. The bathroom has been updated, but the lavatory and sink are in the same location. Across from the tub, in the old days, stood another collapsible item, this one made of wood. It sported knee-length, skin-toned, ribbed underpants alongside stockings with black seams.

The living room wall ,which once held their glass-fronted China cabinet, now accommodates a large flat-screen TV. I recall my father and his siblings sitting on small stools in this space, observing the mourning period after my grandmother died. I remember wanting so badly to find conciliatory words. Nothing came then. Nothing comes now.

All the appliances in the small kitchen, where bottles of seltzer were delivered weekly, are new. Gone is the formica table pushed against the wall, where we ate puffy omelets, But the memories are not gone.

Thank you to Zillow for the concrete details and the hour of pleasure their images invite. Not what they had in mind, I’m guessing.