A life in crime

Abandoned houses have long exerted a peculiar fascination over me. When I was three, we moved from our house in Brooklyn to a quiet suburban neighborhood which had a “haunted house” located diagonally across the street from us. If I stood at our front door, it was one of the first things I saw, and I never contemplated it without a shudder. As a derelict building, it was a classic of its kind – crumbling red brick, broken windows, graffiti, overgrown lawn, an obligatory “For Sale” sign, the works. The place was of course a magnet for every beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, making-out teenager within a 10 block radius. At night you’d see the flickering yellow lights of matches being struck or flashlight beams bouncing dementedly around., a sight that did not inspire confidence in my three year old mind. And sometimes there were…sounds…voices. Who knew what was going on in there?

Gentle reader, you must know where I’m going with this…One day, a couple of my friends organized an expeditionary break-in. Filled with fear and trembling, but in the grips of an irresistible compulsion, I followed them in. Next thing I knew, I was running out screaming my head off like a victim in a horror movie. What transpired in between I have no idea; where that memory should be is a total black-out. Was I transported to the mother ship? Is that when the probe got implanted in my brain?

Could be.

But the experience – whatever it actually was – failed to break me. Five years later, me and my friend Eileen Jones were gleefully breaking into an abandoned carriage house. First we had to grapple our way hand over hand up the twisty ropes of ivy totally obscuring the facade, and then we had to squeeze ourselves in between the long pointy shards of broken glass of an open second story window. It was tough getting in there, let me tell you. Ivy Cottage, we called it. Off-limits, is what my mother called it. Too bad for her, I grew up. Or at least grew more careful.

Because once you get a taste of that B&E frisson, it’s hard to give it up. Just like how for some people, smoking that first joint plunges them directly into the ravages of heroin addiction, or an innocent sip of their Dad’s beer is the irrevocable step #1 leading them straight into the heart of the worst kind of Bowery-bum type alcoholism, some of us should NEVER be allowed to get that first taste. Because it didn’t stop with Ivy Cottage. Next it was Horman’s Castle on Howard Avenue. The Staten Island Monastery, also on Howard Avenue. The old Gramatan Hotel in Bronxville. An abandoned factory in White Plains. The University of Miami’s Experimental Agriculture Lab.

Now I’m a realtor and I can enter abandoned buildings at will, without having to worry about being arrested. Other people actually unlock the doors for me, hand me keys, give me the lockbox codes. Do they understand who they’re dealing with? Evidently not. So lots has changed. But one thing hasn’t. Every unopened door still holds out a promise for me, a mystery that dangles just out of reach. It’s like getting the answer to a question you didn’t even know you had. For a second, opening that door feels like it has the potential to change everything. It’s huge, that moment when your hand is on the knob and you feel the door push open. Because anything could lie on the other side. Anything.

The tower of power

The symbol of Rhode Island par excellance has for me always been the Old Stone Mill. When I was growing up, in New York, for many years my mother - whose father's family came from Newport - had a Newport souvenir letter holder/bucket-y sort of thing on her desk in the bedroom, and decoupaged on its side was a misty, greenish image of the Old Stone Mill. Whenever I would go into her bedroom to fiddle around with the things on her desk, I used to examine it closely, in the curious and accepting way of children, wondering to myself WHAT exactly was being depicted, although I can't recall it ever actually occurring to me to ask about it. The letter holder just sort of sat there, day in, day out, one of the insoluble mysteries of the adult world that would one day stand revealed in all it's glory to me.

That day is now here. Yikes. It's almost like that letter holder foretold my future. For the past 30 years, there probably hasn't been a day in my life that I haven't driven past the real Old Stone Mill, ensconced there in all its legend-shrouded glory behind it's railing in Touro Park.

Like all good symbols, the Old Stone Mill has always succeeded in being all things to all people. Pick your romance. Viking raiding tower. Remains of a Portuguese settlement. New England Stonehenge. Native American meeting place. Colonial windmill. Each successive Newport generation has had its own version of the Old Stone Mill. A thousand years from now they'll probably be interpreting it as a cell phone tower. These days archaeologists and scholars are convinced that the mill was originally a wind-powered grinding mill, built by Governor Benedict Arnold in the 1660's; back then it would have been faced with "parjet", a stucco-like covering, & would have had a large wooden superstructure that connected the wind-driven sails to an enormous grindstone within. Nowadays the only things moving inside are the indefatigable flocks of pigeons that call the place home, but in Arnold's day the area would have been a hub of bustle and activity, supporting a lifestyle most of us can barely imagine (grinding corn? when was the last time you needed to do that?).

But whatever the Old Stone Mill once was, it has the amazing quality of having survived all the intervening centuries, and moreover of connecting us to them and to ourselves and to the stories that are important to us. Behind that black wrought iron railing in Touro Park, link upon link pile up, some meaningless, some not, the past, the present, the real, the imaginary, all jumbled together. The Vikings. Portuguese dreams of exploration and conquest. The flickering flames of a Native American camp. Governor Arnold- progenitor of the notorious & much later Benedict Arnold - cutting his way up through the trees and the brush, from his roughly clapboarded house on Thames St to what is now Bellevue Avenue. The actual truth matters far less than these other, more symbolic realities. I look at the tower and for a second I'm carried back into my own distant past, a little girl again, with a letter holder in my hands. The sails might be gone, but the wheel still turns.