This post is one of a series of remembrances of various aspects of my childhood home – 1521 Ninth Street in the Fairview neighborhood of Altoona. My home, as detailed in RIP - 1521 Ninth Street, was converted into a handful of spaces in a parking lot last year.
My childhood home featured one-and-a-half baths – a full bath on the second floor and a half-bath on the first floor. As you will see, calling the first floor bathroom a “half-bath” is really pushing the truth boundary. Since using the term “one-eighth bath” is sort of clumsy, I’ll instead refer to the first floor bath as the Downstairs Powder Room.
The distinguishing features for the Downstairs Powder Room were its location and its size. From a location perspective, our Downstairs Powder Room was located in the Grand Central Station of 1521. It was basically carved out of a corner of the TV Room – the door to the Downstairs Powder Room couldn’t have been more than 4 feet from where the TV console was positioned. It was bordered on two sides by the TV Room, on one side by the kitchen wall where our “wet bar” was attached, and on the final side by the back porch. Privacy couldn’t have been high on the 1521 architect’s priority list – you were right in the middle of it all there.
![By (c)2006 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man) (Self-photographed) [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AIndian_Corn_Maize_Zea_mays_3008px.jpg "By (c)2006 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man) (Self-photographed) [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], via Wikimedia Commons")