August 10, 2004
Half-a-Century is a Lifetime... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
I live in a house that's over 50 years old, not all that old, but a lifetime in terms of technology. The kitchen never anticipated a microwave or a dishwasher, but some new technology was certainly planned for. Take the charming little grotto in the hallway which signaled the plan for a single family phone. It was 1940, and there's no doubt this was a deluxe unit: two side-by-side garage spaces at a time when most families could only hope to have a single car.
But these descriptions don't say anything about the building itself.
When I bought the house over 20 years ago, high on its list of features was that it was "Rousseau-built," a term which apparently meant something in this city. "That's very good," intoned the real estate agent, but I was more interested in figuring out exactly which rooms the kids — as yet unborn — would occupy over the years. And this included a ground floor in-law apartment, slapped up during the housing crunch of the 1950s.
And it is on this spot that my technology story takes form.
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These in-law apartments became popular during the post-war boom with all the young people flocking to San Francisco. The city looked the other way, yet with the continuing growth of the decades to come, these units were eventually grandfathered in as legal. Of course, my growing children used every available inch of place. Heck, even Buckingham Palace would feel small if you had to live there with a couple of teenagers. But now that my youngest is safely ensconced in college, it has become time to reconstitute the apartment for the modern era.
In no time at all, we emptied the place and ripped out the walls and ceilings. And it was then we couldn't help but pause. Over 60 years ago, the architect and builder Oliver Rousseau had stinted nowhere: solid beams of lumber, 24-foot across, supported the entire upper floor, the two by six studs in the walls were pristine, and in a bow to seismic considerations, the house was securely bolted to the foundation.
Rousseau, long gone, had done his job. It stood out in bold relief to the fractured sheetrock and slipshod wiring we had just pulled out.
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As we go in now with modern tools and new materials, it seems that the new apartment deserved the old builder's effort. And yet so much has changed.
Today's earthquake bracing accounts for upward motion, in addition to shear. An old electrical junction box still had the price tag on it: $13.50. We replaced it with a new one: all of $3, in today's money. And before we got started, we had bought a complete set of cordless power tools for under $300. Any one of these would have only been a dream for Rousseau's workers, much less the technology to build the kinds of screws these power tools now zip into his precious wood.
Despite the high cost of construction today, technology has made better materials and better tools, each more cheaply than ever imagined. Not only can't we turn back time — we wouldn't want to.
At the same time, my boys have been kind of stunned by this whole production. They came of age when schools dropped "shop," because they needed the room for computer labs.
But I'm beginning to wonder if we haven't made a bit of mistake here: At the end of the day — every day — we all need a roof over our heads.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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