Until then, she said she didn’t even know there was a Hueston Street, which is mostly one block of houses running along one side of a street between Ross and Franklin streets in Rossville.
The house was built sometime in the mid-1800s, she said, but it’s impossible to tell for sure because a courthouse fire in the early part of the 20th century destroyed the pertinent records.
“I just kept looking at the house, thinking how cute it was — or could be,” she said. “We have all these nice houses in Hamilton that are being bull-dozed and it makes me crazy because once you tear them down, there’s no going back.”
But first there was a lot of work to be done.
“You could smell it from the street,” she said.
So they bought the house last December. When they got inside, they found layers upon layers of cat, rat and who knows what other kinds of feces. There’s an area in the middle of the kitchen floor still stained with cat urine, but they’ve gotten most of the odor under control. The lath work was falling in and some of the electrical outlets were simply stuck on the end of wires poking up out of the floor.
“What really makes me furious,” she said, “was that when we came in here and started working, we found food packages that weren’t beyond the expiration date, which tells me that people had been living here in these conditions.”
“We kept saying ‘Hueston, we have a problem’,” she said.
So they got to work, stripping the building back to its bones. Somewhere in its history it had been converted to a two-family home, but they want to get it back to its original single-family status.
Although it’s not technically a historical building, they are treating it as one.
Monty, an orthodontist by trade but an accomplished woodworker, is hand-crafting window fixtures using old-fashioned pulley-and-weight systems, and making doors to match the original ones, even to the point of having a friend custom-make router bits to match the edges of the panels.
While the fireplaces can’t be restored to working condition, Jane found some mantles in a house in Middletown that are of the era to decorate faux-places.
They didn’t get very far on the house, however, when another one two doors down, in equally deplorable condition, went up for sale.
So in February, the Jacobs bought that one, too, and shifted their attention to it. It was a smaller house, but their friend Polly Fairbanks knew someone who wanted to move in if they would get it fixed up.
“It was an absolute wreck,” said Marci Hoesl, who is now their tenant in that house.
Now they’ve got their eye on another home, two doors further down, that is boarded up and inhabited by raccoons.
“I’d like to get some different tenants,” Jane said.
One of the many remarkable things about their effort is that the Jacobs have never rehabilitated an entire house before. They’d done some tile work and remodeling on their own home and helped their son fix up a house in Seven Mile, but nothing to this extent. And they’ve never owned rental property until Hoesl moved in.
“I played a lot of Monopoly when I was little,” Jane said. “So we started here at Baltic Avenue and we’re working our way up to Boardwalk,” which is a 10-unit apartment house on the corner of Ross and Hueston that could use the kind of TLC the Jacobs’ are dishing out.
“I just thought, once we started working on the first house, it would behoove me to have the neighborhood looking good,” she said.
Their goal is to fix up every house on Hueston Street.
“There are only 10 of them,” Jane Jacobs said.
About the Author