A Pain No One Can Bear to Live With

The house on North Hazeldell Avenue has to go. Its two stories, its white vinyl siding, its front porch, its back porch, its windows and doors, ceilings and walls: the entire structure. It has to go. It cannot stand.

The original hope was to burn it, burn it to the ground; fire can cleanse. But city officials stepped in and said no way to setting a house ablaze in the middle of a neighborhood. So now the plan is to stage a communal, cathartic house-razing.

On the first Saturday of summer, residents will gather to watch local volunteers tear the house down. After that, a waste-management company will truck every nail and board out of sight, if not out of mind, to an undisclosed dump site in another, unnamed state, so as to thwart collectors of morbid souvenirs.

Then, someday, instead of that damned house, there may rise from the grass at 201 North Hazeldell a memorial fountain, or maybe a sculpture, to encourage reflections about life, not death. At the moment that seems a lot to ask of the inanimate.

The house, built around 1900, is almost as old as Crandon itself, here for the turns in logging and tourism, for the changes in downtown a block away and the construction of the post office across the street. Here as the city became a place of 2,000 residents related by blood, by church, by school, or by standing together in line for dipped cones at the Eats ’n’ Treats stand.

One Saturday night last October, a few of them were snug in this house, now a triplex. On the side, a tenant named Michelle. Upstairs, the owner, Paul Murray. And downstairs, his daughter, Jordanne Murray, 18, who was entertaining several friends with a pizza party and sleepover.