Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The Fern Street Apartment House in San Diego -- Post 301 for (Not So) Wordless Wednesday

I'm posting family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be Wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

Here is a photograph of an ancestral home from the Seaver//Carringer family collection handed down by my mother in the 1988 to 2002 time period:




The photo above is the two-story apartment house at 2114 (downstairs) and 2116 (upstairs) Fern Street in San Diego.  The photograph was probably taken in the 1925 to 1930 time frame by my grandfather, Lyle L. Carringer.  

The apartment house was built in the 1925 to 1927 time frame by Lyle's parents, Henry Austin and Della (Smith) Carringer on land they owned since the late 1890's.  To the rear of this Fern Street apartment house was the two story apartment house at 2115/2119 30th Street, and to the north of the Fern Street house was Lyle Carringer's home at 2130 Fern Street.  The building footprint was about 32 feet east-west by 26 feet north-south.  

A current street view of the 2114/2116 Fern Street house from Google Maps is:



My recollection of the downstairs flat (2114 Fern Street) is that the front door opened into a living room, then there was a kitchen, a bathroom, and one or two bedrooms.  My parents rented this flat in 1946-1947 from my great-grandparents, and moved in 1947 across the way to 2119 30th Street in 1947.  My very first memory of life is my mother walking in the front door with my baby brother, Stanley, in September 1946.  

I don't think that we lived in the upstairs flat (2116 Fern Street), although I visited the people in this flat from time to time.  It had a larger living room, a bigger kitchen and dining area, a bathroom, and two bedrooms.  The open porch opened off the living room.  

There was a garage on the bottom floor that took significant space away from the flat at 2114.  My father used it for his car from 1946 to about 1970, and it was also his workshop.  I spent hours in that garage on Friday nights (his bowling night) listening to the radio for faraway stations in the 1962 to 1965 time period on the old Zenith radio he had there.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/04/the-fern-street-apartment-house-in-san.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

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