House hunting on North 6th Street

So I decided to check out 3016 N. 6th Street, partly because I was curious to see the lowest-priced house on the entire MLS.

One day, I thought, I will tell my grandchildren the legend of the 2008 Minneapolis housing market, and the house in North Minneapolis listed at a mere $9,000 with no takers in sight. As usual, it was a “remote showing” where the seller gave me the door code.

Over the phone. On my first call.

By now I’ve become familiar with getting to the North Side from the University by riding the No. 16 to downtown, then waiting downtown in an open, completely exposed spot where there is no welcoming bus shelter, let alone a HEATED bus shelter, for a long time hoping for a “22” bus to appear out of a white curtain of blowing sleet.

This must be what the Twin Cities “branding effort” is all about when they say “More to Life.” More inclement weather, and no place to find warmth and comfort, my back turned against the cutting wind while eons of Norse hardiness rise within me like a hot inner geyser of determination.

It is March. This suffering will come to an end by, say, mid-April. Breathe warmth into the double-layered scarf so it feels good against the face, and hang on until Spring. What else can you do? This is how it is.

There is more than one kind of “22” bus, but so far I’ve found they all run along Lyndale Ave. N. And I’ll say this: even a crowded No. 22 bus has never been as bad as the No. 16 when it’s in Frog Town. Maybe people clam up out of fear, so the bus seems a lot less rowdy.

After so much North Side exploring, when I see the gigantic liquor store at the corner of Lyndale and Broadway, near a Salvation Army facility, I think, “I am not lost. I know where I am.”

I found the place where 31st intersects with Lyndale Ave. N., and I was delighted to see Bangkok Market and Video. Once I found my way there by accident when I got lost, driving around in my rusted 1988 Celebrity, looking for another house. The store is plentiful, authentic to its Thai roots yet also stocked with enough mundane American foods to serve me well enough as a grocery store.

There must be a few thousand Asian movies there, but I bet if I looked through the whole store I’d find two with subtitles. If I end up living near there, I vow to rent a few Thai movies, just for the experience. I will be forced to extrapolate much from those few movies about Thai movies in general, so I hope I make good selections. Maybe I will ask a clerk to help me. Yeah. That’s my plan.

I was hungry, so before striking out from the Thai store to find 3016 N. 6th Street, I went inside to buy some food. I ended up getting a Ziploc bag filled with lavender “Hmong sticky rice cake” and some dried spiced squid, which I long ago discovered is an amazing and wonderful snake food. I’ll eat my fill before it catches on and becomes really trendy and expensive.

There is always a small, exciting moment when you find the house you are looking for amid all the other neighboring houses, and you get your first look. But this “first look” was one of the most anti-climactic in all my experience. If that house had a nickname, it would be “the little house” because all its neighbors are much bigger. The house stands out for its smallness. What were they thinking when they built it?

Or was it one of the very first houses on that block, a pioneering house? Did that house blaze a trail for its neighbors, who later overshadowed it? These are things I’d like to know. Since North Side houses frequently lack abstracts at closing, these are things it might be impractical to learn any time soon.

Even the fence around the place had problems. Where it was chain link, it was broken. In the back yard, the remnants of barbed wire fencing that looked absolutely rural (and I should know) had become one with trees and brush. In some places, the so-called “fence” was actually composed of deliberately-piled pieces of brush

A mature tree in the back yard was spectacular. It was so spectacular, so innocent of the cruel saws of professional tree trimmers, it appeared even a slight windstorm could put those thick, far-leaning branches right into the roof of the house. I walked into some kind of low-hanging line in the back yard. Apparently it was a cable television line, not an electrical line, which was merely a few feet higher and running down the whole length of the back yard

The meter box was nearly inaccessible, because the neighbor’s fence ran so close to the house and a thicket of brush blocked access. Living here would be true pioneering. The first thing you need to do is cut some brush to create a clearing. I actually saw BURDOCK growing in the back yard. I’m a country boy, so I know darn well burdock grows best where there has been a lot of shit for a long time. Pig shit is preferable, but dog shit will do just fine, as long as there is a whole lot of it.

The front door was missing, but the board covering the front was on hinges and swung like a door. Who, I ask you, steals a door? My friend Doug has about 50 used doors in his basement in St. Paul, and can’t find buyers on Craigs List.

The house at 3016 was missing its plumbing, though it was hard to see all the sordid details in the dark. The bathroom upstairs still had a toilet and bathtub, with flower-shaped traction stickers circa 1974, so the dreaded North Side Bathroom Bandits had not yet struck. (Hopefully, they don’t read this blog) Since the house had two windows smashed out and was open to the elements, it was drafty and I couldn’t keep the lighter lit, unlike during my little excursion to 2125 Lydale Ave. N.

It was difficult to determine how long the house had been exposed to the elements because of the broken windows. My feet crunched on broken glass and I told myself this was another good reason to look at houses during the daytime. Upstairs, I nearly stepped in the hole left where a heating grate had been removed, but fortunately the grate was sitting beside it, and I banged into it with my foot before stepping right in the open hole, thank you Jesus.

Before I left, I called my wonderful real estate agent, Juley Viger, and informed her about the situation with the open, broken, unsecured windows allowing anybody who might come by access to the house for sleeping or toilet-stealing.

It was too dark to check out the neighborhood, but I spotted so many empty houses that I vowed to come back and do more exploring of this particular section of the North Side. As I walked to the bus stop, I was salivating in anticipation of the dried squid and the mysterious purple “Hmong sticky rice cake.”