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.
As your powder rooms go, this one was pretty bare bones: toilet, sink located directly across from the toilet, and cabinet with mirror wall-mounted above the sink. I recall there were two layers of shelving above the toilet. We used these for storage of some board games, an iron, and some other miscellaneous knick-knacks. A single window, bordering the “back porch”, was curtained and included a screen. Light was provided via a single pole switch on the wall and a ceiling fixture. The sink was one of those older wall-bolted jobs – no cabinetry underneath and the trap and supply tubing were exposed. Mom used to keep her cleaning bucket and supplies under the sink. There was a hand towel ring, but I can’t recall if there were any AC receptacles in the room.
The door opened into the TV room – I don’t believe it would have been physically possible to enter the Downstairs Powder Room if its door opened inward. It was that tiny a space. It is dangerous to assert precise measurements about a place you haven’t been in for over twenty years, but it couldn’t have been more than 2.5 by 4.5 feet. While sitting on the toilet, if you stretched your legs, you could almost reach under the sink to the other wall. Quite intimate. I assume that our Downstairs Powder Room met building code, but it had to have been pushing it. (I was a bit curious about the building code for half-baths and came across this article at the useful This Old House website.)
Since the Downstairs Powder Room wasn’t furnished with a dedicated duct run from our natural gas furnace in the cellar and since its single window wasn’t outfitted with any sort of weatherproofing insulation, it could get colder than a witch’s you-know-what in the winter. The back porch provided a bit of a buffer between the Downstairs Powder Room and the direct elements, but on those January mornings your best bet was to wait out Mother Nature until the upstairs bathroom had cleared. (Think about Flick’s tongue sticking to the flagpole in A Christmas Story and replace tongue with cheeks and flag pole with the Downstairs Powder Room throne.)
Since the window could be opened and screened in during the warm weather months, comfort wasn’t an issue in the summer - but privacy sure was.
Back in those days in our ‘hood, when you wanted one of your friends to come out and play, you would just amble up to their screen door (front or back porch) and call them out with this sort of rhythmic cadence of “Hey” followed by your target friend’s name. For example, “Heeeeeeey Joooooooooooe”. I am not sure why we didn’t just use the phone when coordinating that interlock or, hell, just simply knocking on the door, but that call and cadence was universally used. (This was before the days of helicopter parents setting up play dates for their precious little overachievers.)
The Downstairs Powder Room wasn’t more than four or five feet from the back porch door, so it was always an awkward moment when one of your friends would come-a-calling while you were doing your bidness in the Downstairs Powder Room during the summer. Think about it - separated from them only by a curtain and the screen and a couple of feet. For obvious reasons, you really didn't want to reveal your location by responding to your friend from there but yet they would keep calling if you didn’t – the proverbial rock and the hard place.
Coming up on the next episode of 1521 Tour: The Attic
