You're on Park Avenue now, and this whole stretch is Earl Young's neighborhood — in the most literal sense. He didn't just build one house here and leave. He built a cluster of them, right next to each other, and lived in the middle of his own creation. These are private homes, so admire them from the sidewalk, but do admire them, because this little row is where you meet the two most important characters in the story. One is Earl. The other is his wife, Irene.
That house — three-oh-six — is the one Young built for himself and Irene in the years right after the war. Look at the chimneys. They don't look built. They look like the cement got warm and started to slump, like a candle someone left too close to the radiator. That's on purpose. Earl rounded and slumped the mortar so nothing would read as machine-made, so even the chimney would look like weather made it instead of a mason.
Now — the two houses beside it. Earl Young named his houses. Not nicknames the town gave them. He named
them, himself, like children or boats. That one is called Abide. The one next to it is called Betide. Abide and Betide, sitting side by side on Park Avenue since before the Second World War, because Earl Young thought a house deserved a name and possibly a small rhyme.
But here's why Irene matters, and it's my favorite thing in this whole tour. Remember how Earl didn't use blueprints — how he'd
