The architecture of revenge

There is an oddly shaped house that sits along one of the busier roads in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle, Wash.

It measures 15 feet on one side. That’s the wide end.

The other end is 55 inches wide, comprised almost entirely by a door situated atop a short staircase. Now it is stucco on the outside with hardwood floors on the interior. There are two levels, which add up to 850 square feet of living space.

Most significantly, it sits just 5 feet from the neighbor’s fence, giving you a hint of the history. 

Now there are three different stories about what led to the construction of this particular residence, but all of them agree one one thing: It was the result of a grudge.

In fact, there’s even a name for this category of building: a spite house. Turns out there’s (at least) dozens of examples going back (at least) hundreds of years.

Before we get into that, though, one note I wanted to pass along.

• First, for those of you who read through the account of my radio rivalry with Dave Mahler, we crossed paths earlier this month at a mutual friend’s wedding and I am pleased to report that there were absolutely no hard feelings. In fact, Dave suggested a photo that made light of our previous friction.

This week, as I recounted this to my therapist, she asked me a question that I’m going to try and answer in next week’s newsletter: What changed?

I went more than three years without speaking to him, and then — when he apologized — I provided a fairly indifferent response. Last week, however, I was genuinely happy to see him, and this says way more about changes that I’ve made.

But this week, we’re talking about spite houses.

Monuments to bad intentions

I only became aware of the phenomenon this year, and it was by happenstance, really. In my ongoing effort to become a published author, I listen to the (great) podcast “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing.” The March 14 episode featured Johnny Compton, a fiction writer whose debut novel is called “The Spite House.” 

Now, it’s a horror book, and being fully transparent, that genre is not my jam. The book, however, has been incredibly well reviewed and nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and in writing the book, Compton learned a great deal about something I had no idea existed. 

Here’s Compton’s explanation: “A spite house – as the name suggests – is a house built because someone wants to spite someone else. They’re feeling ill-used, they have a disagreement, they’re angry and they want to in some way convey that anger and the best way they figure to do it or the circumstances surrounding that lead them to build a house.”

In other words, a grudge serves as the foundation. A spite house is built to annoy, inconvenience or antagonize by blocking a view, impeding development or simply being garish or annoyingly close. I’ve spent more time than I should looking online for the best stories on spite houses.

There’s one in Marblehead, Mass., that dates back to 1716 and involves two quarreling brothers.

There’s also the Pink House in Massachusetts, which is said to have resulted from an unusual divorce agreement in which the wife requested an exact replica of the house she’d lived in with her husband. However, she failed to specify where this house should be so her ex-husband had it built in an incredibly remote area that is now a wildlife refuge.

There are even some people that point to the Persian king Khosrow’s invasion of Antioch back in the sixth century, his forced relocation of its inhabitants to a city constructed to look like Antioch as a “spite city.”

The details are both interesting and (often times) unreliable. What is clear is that for at least hundreds years, there are examples of human beings constructing buildings specifically designed to avenge a perceived slight or prosecute a grievance. These aren’t just people holding a grudge, but people expending significant time and resources to act on it.

According to what I’ve been taught about revenge, this would be evidence of how seductive (and ultimately misguided) it is to seek payback. Only a total sicko would become so intent on getting payback that they would spend the time, energy and money required to construct a whole freaking building to achieve that purpose. 

However, speaking from experience, I can say that I’ve found some consolation in doing something bothersome to a person I believe to have harmed me. And while I’ve never gone so far as to build a house specifically to antagonize someone I’ve held a grudge against, I could see myself considering that a “Pro” instead of a “Con” when it came to making a decision on whether to build something on a plot of land I owned. 

Is that mature? No.

Is it a path to long-term happiness? Probably not.

Is it natural? I think it might be.

To explain why I’m going to go back to the Montlake spite house, which I mentioned at the start of the piece. The home was constructed in the mid-1920s, and as I said, there are competing explanations for it. One held that a married couple divorced, and as evidence of the chauvinism of the period, the wife was awarded half the property, not half the house. She then chose to build on the sliver of leftover land to devalue the house that her ex-husband retained. This appeals to our contemporary sense of justice. However, I could find absolutely no historical evidence to verify it.

Another version involves a man from Germany who gave someone permission to build on the property only to come back to Seattle and find a much bigger house than had been agreed to. He built the cheese-wedge home in response.

However, the version that most people believe to be true is that there were always two lots, and the individual who owned the larger lot sought to buy the smaller lot — perhaps for a garden — but made what the owner of the small lot considered a prohibitively low offer. A standoff resulted, and after the larger house was built, the owner of the smaller lot constructed the smaller home between the larger house and what was – at the time – a dirt road.

Ultimately, the owner of the larger home moved out, the view having been ruined.

A very similar scenario played out on the Upper East Side of New York in the 1880s, and while the history of the Montlake spite house remains debated, the details of this one are well-documented. Two developers were seeking to build a large apartment building at 82^nd and Lexington. A third man, Joseph Richardson, owned a skinny ribbon of property next to the lot being developed. By skinny, I mean the lot was 5 feet wide, 100 feet long. He was offered $1,000 by the developers.

Now Richardson was from England and was later referred to as “eccentric” in no less than the New York Times. He also had a great deal of money, having built a number of public utilities as well as railroad lines. He owned ships.

Richardson asked for $5,000 for his ribbon of land. When the developers refused, he labeled them as “tight-wads” according to the New York Sun.

Now, there are reports that before construction began on the apartment building, the developers offered to meet Richardson’s asking price of $5,000. If they did, it was too late. Not only did Richardson refuse to sell, he built two narrow, four-story houses that matched the height of the apartment building next door, blocking the views. A good historical picture is available here. Richardson then moved into one of those houses where he lived until he died in 1897.

The “lost” 1882 Spite House – No. 1218 Lexington Avenue

Richardson had accrued some $20 million at the time of his death, but by then he was perhaps best known in New York for his architectural grudgery.

Before we write him off as a revenge-obsessed kook, though, I want to point out how closely his story hews to something that social scientists have found in an experiment that is referred to as the Ultimatum Game. 

In this game, there are two subjects. One is given a specific amount of money, most often $100.

This individual – labeled the Proposer – is told they must divvy this amount up with the second subject, who is labeled the Responder.

The Proposer can divide the money however he or she wishes. It’s then up to the Responder to decide if he or she will accept the division that is proposed.

If the Responder refuses, the Proposer can make another offer. The game proceeds until a division is agreed upon.

Now, traditional economic theory predicts both parties would act rationally and strictly in their own self-interest. Accordingly, the Proposer would offer as little as possible to the Responder to retain as much as possible. The Responder, conversely, would accept whatever is offered because it’s more than he or she currently has.

However, this is not how the experiment plays out.

The Proposer generally offers much more than $1, occasionally going so far as to offer a 50-50 split. This suggests that there is something other than ruthless self-interest motivating the Proposer whether it’s an underlying sense of fairness or perhaps an understanding that the Responder will not accept a totally one-sided deal.

The Responder, in general, will not accept an offer of less than 30 percent of the total.

Now, what’s even more interesting is that the lower the Proposer’s opening bid, the higher percentage it will take for the Responder to finally agree to the split.

In other words, the Responder will hold a low opening bid against the Proposer in much the same way that Richardson refused to sell his sliver of land when the developers offered to meet his initial asking price if that’s in fact what happened.

So what does this tell us about human nature? Well, here’s an excerpt from a long-forgotten TV show called “Numb3rs” that I found charmingly succinct.

This Ultimatum Game is most often referenced to point out the shortcomings in traditional economic theory. More specifically, human beings are not necessarily guided by ruthless and rational self-interest. However, what I find most interesting is that it points to a tendency that humans have when they feel they’re being treated unfairly. Namely, we try and find a way to stick it to the person we feel is trying to hose us.

And while not all of us go so far as to construct a building to accomplish this end, maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise that some of us do.