The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by E.L. Konigsburg

Author:E.L. Konigsburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2004-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

—the best monument

I found the same bench in Town Square. I sat down and read Uncle Alex’s statement to the city council:

The city says that we built three tall structures without a permit. The city refers to them as structures. If you’ll permit me, like everyone else, I’ll call them towers.

The city says that without a building permit, the towers are illegal. And the city also says that we couldn’t have gotten a permit unless we had a plan. The city says, “No plan, no permit.”

Does it surprise you that every house in what you are calling Old Town was built without a permit? Look it up. You’ll see. The Tappan Glass Works owned the land where they built our house and every house on Schuyler Place, and all the other houses in the neighborhood were built without permits. The glass factory built them for their workers, and they built them without permits because they owned the land, and they were the boss, and nobody was going to tell the boss what it could do and not do on its own land.

Now the city council has declared that the Glass houses are a zone. And the zone has a code. When we started the towers, my brother and I, we had no zoning code—or zip code or area code, either, for that matter. We had an address: 19 Schuyler Place. And we had a neighborhood. We loved our neighborhood and everything in it—our houses and our streets paved with bricks in the herringbone pattern. We loved the chestnut trees that lined both sides of the street. The branches of the trees make a canopy from the odd-numbered side to the even. And we loved our backyards, too. Some of the backyards had vegetable gardens of cabbages and tomatoes. Some had gardens of hollyhocks and irises, and in one of those backyards there was a garden of towers. The neighbors shared the cabbages and holly-hocks and Mrs. Bevilaqua’s tomatoes. Mrs. Bevilaqua’s tomatoes were so special, we called them by the name pomo d’oro, “golden apples.” The neighbors loved those tomatoes. The neighbors loved the towers too. You see, when we were a neighborhood, there was not a zoning code, there was an unwritten code. That unwritten code was: Love thy neighbor. But when we became a zone, we got a zoning code, which is written into law. And the city council says that the towers don’t belong inside the zone because they don’t fit the code.

Since we are now a zone and not a neighbor-hood, we also don’t have neighbors. We have home owners. And just as the zone wrote a code, the home owners formed an association. The Home Owners Association. Very official. It has bylaws. The Home Owners Association says that the towers lower property values for the professionals who have bought these old houses as an investment. When the Glass Works put the houses up for sale, people like my brother and me, we bought these Glass houses to live in, not to invest in.

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