599 DIVISION ST - SOLD
The Essentials
A solid, detached bungalow just a couple of blocks north of Regiopolis High School. Two bedrooms on the main floor (with potential for a third), and a high-ceilinged semi-finished basement with a separate side entrance, as well as a rec room, bedroom, and laundry. The high-efficiency gas furnace was replaced, along with the AC, in 2014, and the roof was reshingled in 2019. There is a large deck off the rear of the house. It would make for a good family home convenient to the downtown core, or a very smart investment property. Plenty of mid-century character remains intact, along with oak floors in the living and dining rooms, and it is priced so that you can spend enough on it to make the whole place shine again, sort of like a disco ball, if a disco ball was rectangular and studded with windows that opened to the inside.
The Bigger Picture
There is an arc to the performance of most things, a moment (often an extended moment) when things are working at their peak. Looking back over an author’s career, or a band’s, or a restaurant’s, it us often possible to pick out novels and albums and years that represent the very best that those artists and creators were capable of. Take U2, for instance. They haven’t released an album worth writing home about since Pop, way back in 1997,if you ask me, and even that wasn’t as good a set of songs as those on Zooropa, which wasn’t as good as Achtung Baby, their high-water mark from 1991. A parabolic curve is the most appropriate way to graph their career.
Other things age more and less well. A car is probably never as good again as the day you drive it off the lot. Whereas a good scotch, bottled at the right moment and stored properly, will quite likely improve beyond our lifetimes (if only you could bring yourself to leave it alone).
It’s harder to know with people. They’re more complicated. Physically it’s unwise to argue too strenuously that peak elasticity exists in anyone past thirty. But intellectually and morally, some who walk among us seem capable of improvement to the very end. Mental agility slows at different rates too, depending how many crosswords one has filled in.
The performance of houses varies too. They’re certainly not like cars. They take time to settle into themselves. Trees grow around them, neighbourhoods mature, drainage issues are solved, the flow through a house is often improved by renovation and sometimes the removal of walls. Basements can be finished, window openings enlarged. It is eminently possible, I think, for a well-built house to age more like a good wine than like, say, U2.
That said, I find it hard to imagine extremely long lifespans for much of the new-build inventory out there. Modern building codes keep us safer, of course, but they also calculate how little timber it is possible to use in framing a townhouse. Building code is about economy as much as it is about safety. New homes are not disposable, that’s not where we’re at, but building them legally is often about expending as little time and as few resources as possible.
It wasn’t always that way.
599 Division dates to 1953. Mid-century homes like this one are popular in Kingston. Calvin Park and Poison Park subdivisions are home to many striking examples. Same with Montreal and Division Street as you move out from the city centre. Some, it must be admitted, have been allowed to move past their peak. But they have provided solid shelter for going on seventy years now, and the occasional slightly world-weary expression is understandable (I wear one myself at least four days each week). It doesn’t mean that their race is run. It simply means that a second act, a middle age is upon them. Some - I can picture in my head as I write this, houses on Watts Crescent and Byron Cresent, as well as a magnificent side split on the other side of Division, and another on Johnson near Portsmouth - have been restored in ways that show off and preserve an architectural aesthetic that far outshines the boxy and garage-centric streetscapes we’ve become used to in our 21st century suburbs. 599 Division would reward a similar investment of imagination and paint, I am convinced of it.
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There is an old tangle of Christmas lights around the big feathery tree on the front lawn. You squint the right way and it looks a bit like like a skirt. Lit up mid-winter it would still make a landmark of the house, I’m sure, as if a party was just getting started. But there is undeniably the sense now, with the bulbs dimmed and knotted, of a slightly tired morning-after. For that reason I think the tree might be where I’d start the renovations. I’d cut away those lights with some new shears, I’d get all Edward Scissorhands with it, and restore the natural shape to the trunk and show off the way the tree throws its arms joyfully into the air. From there I’d move to the front steps, and then the front hall. I’d pause in the kitchen long enough to pour some lemonade and get some music going. I’d roll up my sleeves and get started. I might even sing along.
