Weird Wednesdays: The Spite House

Today’s entry into weird architecture, is The Hollensbury Spite House in Alexandria, Virginia.  The house is the blue one in the picture.

From atlasobscura.com:

Works of architecture are often a portal into the headspace of their creators, speaking a unique language of personality, moods, and obsessions. There are few places where this more visually apparent than at Alexandria, Virginia’s squat blue spite house. The two-century-old residence was a delicious poke in the eye to contemporary neighbors and has now become a beloved part of Old Town’s historic fabric.

The man in question here was a local brickmaker and city council member, John Hollensbury. From his nearby home on Queen Street, Hollensbury had a front row seat to a chaotic alley scene of loitering ruffians and dangerous cut through traffic. By 1830 the side of his home was pockmarked from all the collisions with wagons and Hollensbury decided he’d had enough.

In the modern day, the first instinct in a similar situation might be to complain to the police, your neighborhood listserve, or perhaps pursue legal action. Hollensbury had a refreshing streak of self reliance and simply began bricking off the alleyway in question. Two parallel walls and a roof transformed the former byway into a quaint addition to his personal residence. Ripley’s Believe it or Not dubbed it the narrowest house in America.

It’s unclear if any of this was permitted or legal back in 1830. Hollensbury’s seat on the Common Council might have given him the audacity to just build it without asking permission. However, because of the glorious power of Ex Post Facto law, the spite house has been grandfathered into the modern building code, and is presently occupied part of the year. From inside the living room you can still see the spots where wagons smashed against the brick walls and incited the fury of John Hollenbury.

Also from Business Insider:

The Hollensbury Spite House was built in 1830 by John Hollensbury, who owned one of the adjacent homes. The story goes that he was tired of noise from carriages and loiterers in the alley next to his house. To put an end to noise from foot and horse traffic in the alley, he built a house in the middle of it.

“Imagine you hate the neighborhood drunks so you build a house in your alley,” one Instagram user wrote about his recent visit to the Spite House.

Today, the home is a private residence owned by Jack Sammis. Jack purchased the home for $135,000 in 1990, and he and his wife Colleen had been using the home as a pied-à-terre, the New York Times reported in 2008. They did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Not surprisingly, the home is compact. They once rented the house to a couple who wanted to see if they could endure living in a ship’s cabin on a cruise around the world, Jack told the New York Times in 2008. The couple decided that they could after staying at the residence.

The two sides of the house are brick and still have grooves from the wagon wheels that would pass through the alley back in the day. It opens up to a walled garden that is 7 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

“I love the idea of it — that something like this can exist. It makes the world a little more magical,” Colleen told the New York Times in 2008.

The Hollensbury Spite House is one of a handful of spite houses around the world

While the Hollensbury Spite House is the most famous spite house in Old Town, it’s not the only one. There are at least three other spite houses built in the neighborhood’s historic alleyways, according to Old Town Home.

Spite houses have also been built across the world, from a London house painted to look like candy canes out of spite for her neighbors to a home in Lebanon reportedly built by a man who wanted to ruin his brother’s seafront views.

SOURCES: ATLASOBSCURA.COM and BUSINESS INSIDER.COM