Not too long ago the house at 44 Hull Street in Boston went on the market.
It offers two bedrooms, one bath, and about 1,100 square feet… for $1.2 million.
That’s pricey even by Boston real estate standards.
But then 44 Hull Street is an unusual house: it’s known as The Skinny House, and like a few other unusual houses in the world, it was reportedly built for spite.
These are known as spite houses, in fact.
Boston Magazine wrote that The Skinny House was reportedly built by a man who had inherited a piece of land along with his brother.
But when he came back from the Civil War, he found that the brother had built himself a big place with a great view of the harbor on their shared property.
So the man built a four story house in between two others, with rooms only ten feet wide, just to block his brother’s view.
Other spite houses have been built to block other coveted views.
And stll others went up for maybe even more ice cold reasons.
There’s a house in a national wildlife refuge in Newburyport, Massachusetts, built in 1925.
The story goes that a married couple split, on the grounds that the wife would get an identical copy of their house built elsewhere.
But the agreement didn’t say where the house could be built, so the husband had it constructed in a salt marsh.
Today in 1504 Michelangelo completed David; it took him three years to finish.
This landmark work has, of course, been at the center of a lot of interesting stories over the centuries.
Interesting fact: the pupils of David’s eyes are heart shaped.
And nobody knows for sure why.
I say, embrace the mystery!
Five Spite Houses in New England (Boston Magazine)
10 Fun Facts About Michelangelo’s David (The Florence Insider)
Our Patreon backers help us build new episodes, but out of love, not spite
Photo by Scott D via Flickr/Creative Commons
