At 150 Edgars Lane, Changing the Idea of Home

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: January 2, 2006 (NY Times)

HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. - The handsome Tudor-style home at 150 Edgars Lane, built for less than $10,000 in 1925 on a hillside in this Hudson River town, never seemed to change much through all of its previous owners. Each family updated the house, but in modest ways until Tom and Julie Hirschfeld came along.

The Hirschfeld family enjoys the expanded kitchen in their home at 150 Edgars Lane in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. Built for less than $10,000 in 1925, the home is valued at $1.2 million. A succession of previous owners might not recognize its interior today.

The Hirschfelds purchased the two-story house with its gabled roof and stucco-and-wood-beam exterior for $890,000 in the fall of 2002. Good schools, safe streets, a picturesque community, like-minded neighbors, a relatively short commute to New York - all these drew the family, just as they drew the previous owners.

But as home prices have soared in recent years, houses like this one have become not just nice places to live but remarkably valuable investments as well. Responding to this newly embedded wealth, the Hirschfelds, like hundreds of thousands of other families living in suburbs of cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, have transformed their homes into something grander and more personal.

Tracing the history of the house at 150 Edgars Lane through the decades shows how the Hirschfelds have broken with the past - and how the idea of what a house means to a family has changed. Eight different families have lived in this house for at least a year. Most were middle-income earners in their day: a high school principal, a typographer, a civil engineer, a psychiatrist, an environmentalist, small businessmen.

In contrast to the previous owners, the Hirschfelds have poured many thousands of dollars into renovation, making their home more comfortable and well-appointed than the earlier owners considered necessary. And more so than the others, they can certainly afford it.

As the chief operating officer of a hedge fund, Mr. Hirschfeld has plenty of income to sink into renovation without going into debt. The couple has not held back. Lifting the house to their standards has become so important to them that between the purchase price and the outlays for improvements, Mr. Hirschfeld says, the investment exceeds his home's current market value, estimated at $1.2 million.

Juliet B. Schor, a Boston College sociologist and the author of "The Overspent American," classifies the burst of spending on home improvement in recent years as "competitive consumption going on in the top 20 percent of the income distribution."

But many home owners, the Hirschfelds among them, insist that quite apart from status and comfort, what was once mainly a dwelling in a compatible suburb now assumes even greater personal importance in an age when families increasingly focus on themselves.

"Community is still very important," said William M. Rohe, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "But homeowners today pay greater attention to the house itself as an expression of themselves and as a haven for family life."

For the Hirschfelds, a spacious new kitchen wing that juts into the backyard of their property embodies their sense of how they want their home to enhance their lives. Finished a year ago, the kitchen has become a gathering place not just for cooking and meals, but for homework, games, art projects, reading and conversation with the Hirschfelds' children, Ben, 12, and Leila, 8.

"We didn't build this kitchen for any trophy motivation or to achieve any level of luxury," Mr. Hirschfeld said, pointing out that the appliances, including the refrigerator and stove, are ordinary off-the-floor models, not state-of-the-art extravaganzas. "We did it to make our family life more free-flowing and warm."

The yard was not suitable for the new kitchen wing, however. So a stone retaining wall went up to carve more flat space from the sloping land - unexpectedly adding thousands of dollars to renovation costs.

The Hirschfelds also spent more than planned to reverse the deterioration of their 80-year-old house - one of the tens of thousands built during the nation's first great suburban housing boom, before the Depression.

"We really bought this to be our family home," Mrs. Hirschfeld said, "and we made an error in judgment in not knowing what it would cost to deal with the deterioration." But the basement, she added, which "was wet for 40 years, is no longer wet."

Before the Hirschfelds, each of the previous owners made incremental improvements, spreading renovation over their years in residence rather than bunching it at the beginning. Mostly those earlier owners lived with the house's shortcomings, including the cramped kitchen, now converted into a mud room.

Wealthy Buyers Move In

The Hirschfelds, in their early 40's, were less constrained by income, an increasingly common characteristic of the households engaged in home improvement. Those with at least $120,000 in annual income accounted for 32 percent of all the spending on home renovation in 2003, the latest year for which data is available. That is up from 21 percent in 1995, adjusted for inflation, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. The spending itself reached $233 billion in 2003, a rise of 52 percent from 1995.

For decades, a home in the suburbs was a family haven for the middle class, "a kind of anchor in the heavy seas of urban life," as Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian, put it in his 1985 book "Crabgrass Frontier."

That was true of the owners of 150 Edgars Lane. But with the surge in home prices, the big side yard took on a new dimension as a potentially valuable building plot. It was no longer cherished as the colorful, terraced flower garden nurtured by several former owners and written up admiringly in the local newspaper.

The objections of neighbors stopped the owner of the house in 2001, a woman who had received it in a divorce settlement, from obtaining a zoning variance so that she could split off the old flower garden and sell the property as two lots for more than the $819,000 that she finally received.

With that sale, the house moved out of the reach of middle-income buyers. The buyer, Matthew Stover, came from Wall Street, and he soon sold the house to Mr. Hirschfeld, also from Wall Street.

Still, the Stovers and the Hirschfelds, like nearly all of the owners before them, came to Hastings from apartments in New York City, choosing the town in part because it offered a demographic mix greater than many other suburbs, as well as neighbors who were often artists, writers and academics.

The intellectual aura was particularly present on Edgars Lane. Margaret Sanger, an early leader of the birth control movement, lived across the street from 150, and Lewis Hine, the famous photographer of industrial realism, owned the house two doors up. They are long gone, but the Hirschfelds, who received graduate degrees from Oxford after going to college in the United States, are proud of this legacy.

"We really wanted to live in Hastings," Mr. Hirschfeld said.

Suburban Diversity

The homes that made this town a suburb went up in the woody hills above Broadway. Below that dividing street, blue-collar workers, many of them Polish and Italian immigrants, occupied the apartments and row houses near the waterfront, close to the chemical plant and the copper mill that employed them, until the last factory closed in 1975.

The children of those workers went to school with the children in the hills and "there is still a feeling that the diversity continues to exist - more a feeling than a reality," David W. McCullough, a local historian, said.

As a community, Hastings tries to resist the trappings of affluence that are spreading through so many suburbs. The downtown is still a collection of mostly older stores and restaurants - reflecting "a certain pride that we have in the shabbiness," as Mr. McCullough put it.

Very few of the upscale stores and restaurants evident elsewhere have arrived here yet. But almost certainly they will as rising home prices, which limit eligible newcomers to families like the Hirschfelds, gradually squeeze out lower-income families.

The Hirschfelds, adding even greater value to their home, have installed air conditioning, expanded the master bathroom and more than doubled the size of Leila's bedroom, by constructing a second story on top of the kitchen wing. They rebuilt the basement, spending far more than they intended to get rid of mold and wetness, and took down the wall between the living room and the dining room, creating what Mr. Hirschfeld described as "a flowing space so we can have a conversation from the kitchen with someone who is two rooms away in the living room." New windows are next.

"You can't live in this day and age with drafty windows," Mrs. Hirschfeld said. "Either you pump your furnace for all it's worth all winter, or you have double-glazed windows."

Drafty windows did not bother Ralph Breiling, who designed and built this house in 1925 on land he had purchased three years earlier, spending less than $10,000 in all, or about $111,000 adjusted for inflation. Mr. Breiling was an architect, but in the severe recession after World War I, he shifted to teaching school, later rising to assistant principal and then principal of Brooklyn Technical High School.

A group of teachers had purchased land in Hastings, and Mr. Breiling joined them, buying one of the lots.

"He loved the Hudson Valley and when the leaves were off the trees, we had a view of the river and the Palisades," Robert, one of his sons, remembered. For years, "he commuted an hour and a half each way to his job."

When the Breiling family moved to Edgars Lane, the exterior was finished - it looked then much as it looks today - but the interior walls were mostly unfinished plaster. From then on, until he sold the house in 1950, Mr. Breiling renovated, with his own hands.

A Love for the Hudson Valley

He built the one-car garage that is still there, and the room above it, which became a children's playroom. He enclosed a patio, incorporating it into the living room. When his third child, Clover, was born, he expanded a small sewing room into the fourth bedroom, building out over the front door.

"He spread the work out; he could not afford to do it all at once," said Robert Breiling, 83, now a retired engineer. "The Depression hit him hard. The New York City schools cut pay in half. They said they would make it up after the war, which they didn't. My mother started a nursery school in the dining room. She had a bunch of little tables and chairs; made a schoolroom out of it. I thought she liked doing it. But looking back it was for need."

The Breilings' lasting legacy was the garden in the big side yard, which Mr. Breiling's wife, Leila, tended. In a 1933 article on "beautiful gardens of Hastings," the weekly Hastings News had this to say about the Breilings' place: "From the stone retaining wall along the street with its dense privet hedge up to the children's terrace that now backs against the farm wall on the garden's highest level, one passes, terrace by terrace, through grassy greensward, flowering shrubs, long borders aglow with a hundred blossoms."

From that garden came the holly that Duncan Wilson fashioned into wreaths and sold at Christmas. His parents, Byron and Jane Wilson, purchased 150 Edgars Lane in 1951 for $25,000, the equivalent of a little less than $190,000 in today's dollars, moving from a smaller home in nearby Dobbs Ferry when their third child was still young.

"My mother decided that the family needed more space," Duncan Wilson, now 69, recalls.

The Wilsons put energy into maintaining the elaborate garden, but they did little to the house itself. They were square dancers, so they fixed up the basement, refinishing the walls and tiling the floor, Mr. Duncan said. Like the Breilings, they sold the house after their youngest child finished high school, in 1963.

The next four owners either moved on quickly, to new jobs in other cities, or stayed to raise children. The turnover helps to explain why the typical American family owns a home for five or six years, a tenure unchanged going back decades.

Jerome and Carolyn Zinn stayed for eight years, having purchased the house in 1964 from a psychiatrist who lived in it only 18 months. The Zinns paid $40,000 - roughly $250,000 adjusted for inflation - coming from a city apartment with eight-week-old twin boys.

"I knew that you raised children in a house," Mrs. Zinn said. "I didn't know anything about Hastings or anyone in the community. We started out looking in Yonkers and we wandered into Hastings and we liked the hilliness and the trees."

Mr. Zinn had started as a linotype operator, and his wife taught school, saving enough from her salary for the $11,000 down payment. The remaining $29,000 was the amount still owed on the psychiatrist's mortgage, which the Zinns took over - a common practice in those days. Before coming to Hastings, Mr. Zinn had gone from printer to owner of a small typography shop. It flourished, and in 1982 the Zinns built a bigger home in Irvington, a neighboring town.

"I kept thinking I wanted to do this to the house and that to the house," Mrs. Zinn said, "and then I said, if there are so many things I want to do we should buy a house, or build one."

In 1974, the Zinns sold 150 Edgars Lane for $67,500 - adjusted for inflation, not that much more than they had paid - to Gerald Franz, a specialist in environmental issues then employed by the New York City Planning Commission, and his wife, Susan, a public school math teacher. They had been married five years, hoping to have children - they later adopted two daughters - and the purchase price was a stretch for them.

"My expectation was to be married forever and to live there forever," Mrs. Franz said.

What Was Once a Garden

The Zinns agreed to let the Franzes postpone payment for the side yard, and they waited nearly a decade before they purchased that portion of their property for $17,000. By then, with neither family caring for the garden, it had gone to seed and Mr. Zinn, in any event, was thinking of its value as a building plot. "I had always hoped in the back of my mind to get the variance to build," he said.

Divorce interrupted those plans. Mrs. Franz, who recently remarried and is now Susan Franz Ledley, got the house in the 1996 settlement. By then, it was valued at $500,000. As a school teacher, she could barely afford the upkeep and in 2001, while her youngest daughter was a high school senior, she sold it for $819,000 - about $900,000 in today's dollars - to Mr. Stover, a stock analyst for Citigroup, and his wife, Jeanine.

The Stovers were in their 30's and planning a family, like the Franzes nearly 30 years earlier. Unlike the Franzes, however, and all the other earlier owners, they began to plan renovations, hiring an architect.

"Just as we were starting to get some steam, we were called to Boston," Mr. Stover said. He took a better job in that city.

Now that housing prices are subsiding, the future monetary payoff from owning 150 Edgars Lane is clouded. But for the Hirschfelds the pleasures of indulging themselves count for more. Julie Hirschfeld points to the new bathroom sinks, for example, which resemble 19th-century wash bowls, and the "ridiculously expensive" border tiles in the master bathroom.

"Once we started," she said, "because we had to do so much, it seemed we should make the choices about how we wanted it to look."