When it comes to housing market, we've been through this before

I was born in 1928, and according to my children and several friends, this precipitated the crash of 1929. I remember the depression in the early 30s and until it ended when the war began. Life for many was dreadful; there were people selling apples on the street, shanty towns, and a general feeling of malaise took New York and other cities by storm.

Here in Greenwich it was not so noticeable, although there were some men, mostly in finance, who jumped out the window in order to provide insurance for their families. Of course the real estate market succumbed, and many homeowners met their Waterloos. It is fascinating to me that our current problems are similar to what happened before.

Until the '20s, the Georgian-style Bush house stood out amid the smaller back country farmhouses and cottages owned by ship owners on Strickland Road, and blacksmiths and other tradesmen in downtown Greenwich. "Building in Greenwich," by Rachel Carley tells an amusing anecdote about an early business building, namely the watch houses, built by oystermen in an effort to catch poaching "proggers" during the Oyster Wars of the 1870s. These huts were on Bluff Island at the mouth of Cos Cob Harbor, where watchmen were stationed to look out for poachers helping themselves to oysters. This was a dangerous business, as George Lockwood was found with his throat slashed in 1874, and Captain Joseph Wilmot had his Marks Road house in Old Greenwich destroyed by arson.

A middle ground on the way to the '20s was the handsome example of the French Empire Style, "influenced by the Parisian skyline as redesigned under Napoleon III during France's Second Empire period."

Several houses of interest were examples of the then popular Victorian period, especially the Tomes-Higgins house, 1863. It was the work of Calvert Vaux, who according to "Building in Greenwich," published the plans and elevations for it in the second edition of his pattern book, "Villas and Cottages" in 1864. The William Rockefeller estate, "One Elm," was built in the stick style supposedly like the alpine chalets of Europe, again with the typical turret, and ornate gable trusses. Newport, and Richard Morris Hunt and the firms of Leopold, Eidlitz, McKim, Mead and White, and Peabody and Stearns, had landed in Greenwich in a big way and were responsible for homes being built in the late 1800s, such as the Henry R. Mallory house on Byram Shore Road, the Colonial-Revival-style Belle Haven Casino where, much changed, I spent my childhood, and the Henry G. Havemeyer house, Hilltop, another shingle-style house by Peabody and Stearns, who were also responsible for the Groton School.

And then it all began, what I call the pre-depression number one, when building and developing took place in our town, exemplified by the 1918 Tudor-Revival-style Dunnellen Hall by local architect William Tubby. I like this, "the Tudor did not always inspire originality, but it did endow new houses with a reassuring sense of pedigree, age and tradition." Does this sound familiar? It wasn't the only house. Take the Milbank house on Milbank Avenue, with an elevator and up-to-date plumbing, all in the European tradition, reflecting, "the aspiration to crusty old world pretension "¦ the effort to produce designs drawn from so many historical sources, Chateauesque, Norman Italian and Spanish Renaissance. Romanesque Tudor often betrayed the architect's uncertainty about just what he was trying to accomplish. The clients were not always sure either."

That of course is what has ruined our town with its plethora of houses, supposedly of "colonial" design. While they all resemble each other, they too include many types of architecture all rolled into one, stating that big is better; a classic example: the Converse Estate. Conyers Farm certainly leads us into the bigger, and supposedly better, of today's houses. I hardly think so, as many of these dwellings are languishing on the market due to the financial situation, or depression number two, just as happened in the 30s. It is a rerun of that time going on now, the building up, and then everything collapses into a heap. That clock keeps ticking away with the pendulum going back and then forward. A good case of deja-vu.

Norma Bartol, a former Greenwich Time reporter and columnist, lives in the backcountry. This is her final column for the Opinions page. Her next column will appear on page A2 on Friday, Aug. 7.