Before the Bed Stuy house, we never found anything of value during our renovations. When we started demo on the 4th floor, we discovered a cubby hole that had been closed off for years. What we found in there was a woman’s trash, but the cool thing was that it was trash from the 1940’s.
As we pored over stacks of love letters, newspapers and miscellaneous garbage, we gathered that the woman was probably renting the room when this was a boarding house. Judging from the hair care products, we guessed she was African American. Judging from the letters, liquor bottles and fishnet stockings, we suspected she may have been a bit of a wild one.
Most of the letters were from Private Jasper, who was getting moved around during the war, but was never in combat. The correspondence went on for about three years. Many of the letters were the same: “I miss you.” “Stay Sweet.” It’s clear from the final letters that Alpine stopped writing back to Jasper and he gave up on her, brokenhearted.
We did a search on the internet, but couldn’t find either of them. Perhaps they’re no longer with us or perhaps we didn’t have the time to try harder. We archived the letters and war time newspapers and I plan on using a few of them in a resin countertop so Alpine and Jasper can keep a place in the history of our home.
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Love this story………
[…] those things I’ve always wanted to do but never got around to. I got goosebumps when we found old letters from the war in our Bed Stuy house. And I was equally excited when we found crack vials from the […]
[…] since we found old love letters and newspapers in a cubby hole during demolition, I’ve been meaning to incorporate them back […]
This is just the way we found love letters, including a “dear John” letter — in a demo. And in the attic of another home, people with the last name of “Liberty” (!) clipped all the Nixon files they could, and left behind many items of Nixon paraphrenalia. So interesting to look through a well preserved lens that way.
[…] But I had forgotten about some boxes in the attic. When I went upstairs in the afternoon, I found Alpine’s garbage scattered about the floor. I felt protective of her. There were a number of antique bottles that we […]
This is amazing. After we bought our home we had to rip up the fir tounge-and-groove floorboards because they were so badly charred from a fire that took place (to the best our our knowledge) sometime in the 20s. We found tons of old stuff under there. I just can’t figure out how it all got there! We also have uncovered a couple large glass pits in the backyard, a few of the bottles were salvageable. But love letters… that would have been AMAZING. How cool!