900 Virgie Street

Amazing what the contractor did with this house.  My mother's maternal grandparents, Franklin and Cora Watts, owned it for many years.  When she died in 1961, my grandmother, who worked for Erwin Mills, inherited the house.  So my mother grew up there, and in those days, she tells me, the neighborhood was somewhat disreputable.  In my earliest memories of the house in the 1970s, it was was a typical mish-mash of that time: green aluminum siding, faux-pine paneling throughout, orange shag carpet, oil furnace in the floor of the foyer, yellow ceilings from years of deep frying and chain smoking, claw-foot tub in one bathroom and a flimsy metal shower stall in the other, etc.  Nice to see that the house has been restored to something like its former glory.