This (Weird) Old House

I'm going to miss it.  Before our landlord bought this house in the '90s, I had belonged to a family with five kids and that family had lived here for decades.  The house was built in 1915, and this was considered a nice, if isolated and insular, neighborhood for white working people through World War II.  Cotton mills were the big industry here, and as they started closing down in the decades after the War, the neighborhood really suffered.  A few mills held on, making finished clothing or synthetic fabrics, but the last one closed in the 1970s.  One of our older (gay) neighbors, who grew up here, says that by the '70s our block was dilapidated and the homes were going for rock bottom prices.

Because they are rowhouses, all the houses on the block are roughly the same size with similar layouts. Ours does have some distinctive features like this beauty.

This is a cupboard build into the exterior wall outside our kitchen window and covered with the same asphalt siding that covers the back of the house.  I assume it was used in the cooler months for food (maybe beer) that wouldn't fit in the icebox.