The McMansion Next Door

By Asit Parikh

Growing up in Paramus, NJ, a suburban town just outside Manhattan, we took much for granted: the big spacious lot on which our house sat, the basement and the two car garage, the neighborhood elders and their stories.

William Eberle, or Uncle Bill as we called him, lived behind us; our backyards were connected.   Uncle Bill was a local fireman & carpenter- in fact he built every GI-Bill house on the block—including the one we bought in 1980 and his own.   His generation spent their golden years watering their gardens, walking to the property’s edge, and teaching neighborhood kids like me about the way things used to be.

Uncle Bill knew things, and he had great respect for his land and his materials. His knowledge went deep, it was specialized. He taught us that using well water will give you water warm enough to garden in early spring & how his generation used technology for energy savings—technology that, long before live traffic alerts and gas-price apps, a network of truck drivers calling in gas prices and delays over the CB radio.   He showed us that when he built our house, he used a technique called ‘toe-nailing’ which used fewer nails and gave the structure longer life.     “They don’t build ‘em like this anymore” he said,.

And with those words, a trickle of larger homes in my neighborhood began popping up that dwarfed the simpler structures of the 1960’s and the ones like ours, built in the years after WWII.    Uncle Bill would lament, “there aren’t enough trees around here to build houses that big.    So where’s the wood going to come from?   You can’t use wood from other places- it’s not the same!” With the new homes there in front of my eyes, I began to understand him more. I could see that he wasn’t clinging to the old out of fear of the new but out of a genuine concern and confusion: intuitively, logistically, the giant new homes didn’t make sense to Uncle Bill.

Uncle Bill passed away in 2001 and soon after, the “McMansion” arrived in droves.

We saw so many of the homes he built bulldozed and replaced with bigger  houses thatall looked the same.   The new builders salvaged nothing, imported everything, and structures went up in a week with high-powered nailguns.      Trucks of man-made brick rolled in day after day, baby saplings were propped up by wire to replace big shade trees, and in went giant boilers and air conditioners. It wasn’t the size or ambition of the new houses that was disquieting, it was the slapdash manner in which it all seemed to be happening, without thought or regard for the past or for the future—something didn’t feel good about their scope.

So we set out to do it differently, to re-use the studs Uncle Bill proudly lay with his bare hands for the returning Marine who raised his family there, and give them a new life for new generations.   Watching him work in his garage sure taught me something about old-world craftsmanship, and I hope it’s something we’ve been able to keep tradition with the new home we’ve built.