SPITZ: Before the war -- and I lived here before the war, even worked here before the war; this was a mean-spirited city compared to today -- mediocre restaurants and stores, 1percentt sales tax, no income tax, built Queens College, Brooklyn College, libraries were open till 9 every night, free tuition in the universities, expanded park space 50percentt, go on and on.
"I remember the people who lived here before; they took for granted everything this country gave them.
'A lot of people who had lived here before had only lasted three or four years and at that point I thought I bloody well knew why.' The old days when she lived in Walthamstow and dressed in Nicole Farhi seemed a lifetime away.
"I've loved having a chance to learn about everyone who's lived here before through their effects, through the ways they decorated the house, or the furniture they left, or the stories we know about what happened in different rooms," she said, mentioning that the now very grand East Room once housed Abigail Adams's clothesline.
"I said, 'You will live here two weeks and wonder how you never lived here before,' " Mr. Hochlerin recalled.
PARK We've never lived here before and didn't know New York well when we moved.
"Whoever lived here before built this ridiculous tan bedroom," White said, spitting out the word "tan".
"Everything we do at Cragwood, we hope people who've lived here before won't think it is terrible," Mr. Bailye said.
She'd imagined a life for the people who'd lived here before, had pieced it together from the things they'd left behind — the skeleton of a pony trap, its metal spine rusting at the back of the shed, the stone hot-water jars.
Items of beekeeping equipment — a suit, a veiled hat, a smoker — had been among the things left behind in the shed, and she'd taken this as evidence that the people who had lived here before were beekeepers, but perhaps it was better evidence that they were not; that they were, at best, failed beekeepers.
