Behind the Scenes Minis: Spiteful Robert

Holly talks about how impossible it is to build a spite house now, thanks to municipal building codes. She also shares some uncertain stories of the childhood of Robert Morris. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:07Speaker 01

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 0:34Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert, Mick, Bill and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.

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• 2:15Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:26Holly Frey?

  Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:30Holly Frey?

  We talked about spite houses this week. I love a spite house. You know why?

• 2:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Why?

• 2:37Holly Frey?

  Because I love a grudge. I love a grudge. I think this came up when we were in Iceland on the bus one day where I was like, I love my grudges and I tend to them like a garden and I love holding grudges. And there was a little bit of like shock. There was some like, what? You do what? I love a grudge. I love them. I don't, I don't have a grudge unless someone earns it. And then.

• 2:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Then it's a grudge forever.

• 3:01Holly Frey?

  You don't make the team again next year or ever again. You're off the list. But I also just love that level of petty where you're like, you know what? Construction project. But as we noted in this, in that episode, some of these spite houses don't seem like spite houses.

• 3:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 3:17Holly Frey?

  I especially liked talking about the Alameda spite house and the fact that, that Froling's son was like, no, no, dude, we were just poor and that's what we could afford to build.

• 3:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 3:29Holly Frey?

  He couldn't buy another lot and we wanted, and he wanted a place to raise his family. So.

• 3:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Holly Frey?

  That's the house we made.

• 3:37Holly Frey?

  I sort of love that. It's very charming in its own right.

• 3:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Holly Frey?

  There were a couple of things I wanted to say about John Hollinsbury.

• 3:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 3:45Holly Frey?

  One is that, because I was really trying to find out more about him and the information was pretty sparse. But one thing that I did keep finding in old newspapers were these ads that he would place, selling things in the local paper, like, this is a man who would have loved like Facebook Marketplace or like Craigslist, because there were a lot of things of like, one, he was a brickmaker, so these make sense. But the way the ads were placed, it was like, if you would like a thousand bricks, come to my house. They're really, really, like, please call on John Hollinsbury. And that would be it. Or like, I have carriage horses to sell. Please come to my house. Like, they were all very charming that way. And I wonder too, if.

• 4:29Holly Frey?

  Because he had built this house, everybody just knew which one was his house. So he didn't put anything other than come to my house, come to the Hollinsbury home. There's another thing that I couldn't definitively tie to him. I found a patent for a John W. Hollinsbury of Alexandria, Virginia. In, I think it's from 1824 and it's for a breech loading cannon. And I couldn't find any other John Hollinsburys that were in the area. But I also couldn't be certain it was him. So he may have also invented a cannon.

• 5:11Holly Frey?

  In which case, you know, he doesn't only have to have the one identity of making a spite house, even though that's what everybody knows him for.

• 5:21Holly Frey?

  I just found that interesting.

• 5:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Holly Frey?

  You can't build a spite house now. It's too hard. Nobody will allow it. Nobody will give you the permits to build a spite house.

• 5:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Holly Frey?

  Yeah, most municipalities have carefully recognized like if your structure is going to be obstructive to your neighbors in a way that is not reasonable, you can't build this. Or if the size and shape of it are in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense. They can't be, you just can't do it, which is.

• 5:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Holly Frey?

  I'm like, is this going to be an art form that will be lost?

• 5:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, well.

• 6:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  I think in addition to building codes and zoning requirements and stuff like that. Now there is a much more coordinated and easy to activate group in a lot of communities to argue against housing. And for whatever.

• 6:26Holly Frey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Like. The like, there are a lot of building codes that make it really a lot easier now than before the days of building codes to bog down a project in approvals and hearings and public comment and that kind of stuff. So like in addition to the building codes themselves, which I feel like a building code that prevents you from building a inherently unsafe thing that is so close to the neighbor's house that like you have to like with the less than an inch of space between your house and the neighbors.

• 7:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  I'm like, I foresee this causing big problems in the future. So like in addition to having laws to prevent that kind of building, like also having a system that makes it a lot easier to derail projects, basically.

• 7:24Holly Frey?

  Right. Yeah, I mean, there it's interesting, right? The idea of building code gets into a whole other space, right? Because there are certainly a lot of building codes that have been created that have very little to do with

• 7:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Holly Frey?

  Safety.

• 7:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Holly Frey?

  Concern for anybody that are like inherently racist. Like there are certain kinds of buildings you can't put in a neighborhood that would be primarily occupied by marginalized communities that are very racially oriented in its design to keep those communities from thriving and having any kind of upward mobility for anyone. There are a lot of those, but I

• 8:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Holly Frey?

  I think for a lot of spite houses, it's more like, please don't ruin your neighbor's life because you had a fight.

• 8:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, yeah, I think there are a lot of building codes. We've talked about so many fires, especially.

• 8:20Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  And like building codes are important and necessary to build structures that hopefully are not deadly fire traps from the moment that they're opened. But also like, there's a lot of building codes that have been passed in the last decades and centuries that. Just create a bottleneck for actually building the housing that communities need.

• 8:41Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  The reasons we have a housing crisis in a lot of the United States.

• 8:46Holly Frey?

  Lot of giant, empty houses and people with nowhere to live simultaneously.

• 8:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's one of the, one of the, one of the causes. Please, please do not email me lengthy explanations about the the causes of the housing crisis. I'm aware.

• 9:00Holly Frey?

  Right. Um, like I said, there are a lot of other spite houses that I want to talk about. If anyone listening is a big fan of the Plum Island spite house. And the efforts going on right now to try to save that house. Please know I know about it and it's top of the list for next time around, but part of why it didn't go on this one. There's some legal and financial juggling going on right now. It's a, an older structure and it's in very bad shape. And there is the threat that it's going to be torn down, but there are a lot of people that are trying to save it. And that is in like a stasis state. It appears right now, at least in terms of what I was able to uncover. So I didn't want to just like leave it as kind of a floopy, I don't know.

• 9:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 9:45Holly Frey?

  Maybe it's still there when we publish, maybe it got torn down in the two weeks between when we recorded and when it goes live. So that's why that's not on there, but it is on my list for a future version of this.

• 9:57Holly Frey?

  I, I think of these, the only one we know for sure is a spite house is the Dr. Tyler one.

• 10:06Holly Frey?

  Who was like, no, no, no road here. I'm under construction. I love that idea so much. Bias for action for spite is very much in my wheelhouse of love. That might be my love language.

• 10:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Holly Frey?

  Well, in that case in particular, right? Because he did try to do everything through legal channels, you know? He went to, um, city planning meetings. He went through various offices and filed protest documentation and tried to explain that that was gonna, you know, impact him in a negative way. And they were like, too bad, too bad. Uh, so he, you know, took matters into his own hands.

• 10:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Holly Frey?

  Spite, spite house. I love you spite house. If you would like a thousand bricks, just come to my house. I got you. I don't know why that's so funny to me.

• 11:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Holly Frey?

  Just come to my house, dude. I got you. I got you. It occurs to me that it would be fun to do a tour of spite houses.

• 11:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Holly Frey?

  But the problem is that many of these are privately owned homes.

• 11:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 11:20Holly Frey?

  The people that own, I'm trying to remember which one. It might be the Alameda spite spite house, which again is not really a spite house. In the interview with the East Bay Times that they did, they mentioned like, people are not especially respectful of them as a private residence.

• 11:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:46Holly Frey?

  Like she, the woman that was interviewed told a story about how like, at one point on Halloween, a trick or traitor just walked in and started commenting on the house. And she was like, not someone she had invited in, just like buried past her.

• 12:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Just a person.

• 12:02Holly Frey?

  And that like, people will just come and knock on the door and stuff. So that would be the downfall or the downside, I guess, of, of living in a unique structure like that. I mean, the flip, right? The one in Alexandria, those people seem pretty accustomed to people doing that. However, it is also not their only or primary residence. So it probably is not as disruptive to their day to day lives. To have tourists standing outside it, reaching their arms out and going, look how skinny this house is. Which brings me to my last point.

• 12:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 12:37Holly Frey?

  People may have noticed that we avoided superlatives like, this is the skinniest spite out. This is the.

• 12:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, sure.

• 12:45Holly Frey?

  Um, several houses claim that. I think, unless there's one I haven't found, that the one in Alexandria is the narrowest at seven feet. Cause the others that we mentioned are all like 10 feet, the other two that we mentioned. But I don't know for sure. And I don't, um, you know, they're all just interesting in their own right.

• 13:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 13:07Holly Frey?

  I'm here for the spite house. There are also a couple I want to cover that are no longer exist. And so it's going to take a little more work to find the information and make sure I have the, the right info on them. But spite houses.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 13:27Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:47Speaker 04

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• 13:55Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:02Speaker 05

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• 14:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:19Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:21Speaker 06

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• 14:27Speaker 01

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 14:55Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:40Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays returned for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 16:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:07Holly Frey?

  We talked about founding father Robert Morris this week.

• 17:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Holly Frey?

  I have some thoughts about him.

• 17:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I like how we both just sort of stopped.

• 17:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tell us your thoughts, Holly.

• 17:23Holly Frey?

  Well, first I'll include a thing that I didn't put in the episode. There are a couple of things about his youth and his father that are not really substantiated. One is that his father died in a freak accident.

• 17:39Holly Frey?

  Where there were two ships involved, a fly allegedly landed on his father's nose. And he swatted it away and the other ship took that as a signal to fire their cannons. And that's how he died. I don't know if that's true, but it's an interesting story.

• 17:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  All right.

• 17:58Holly Frey?

  Also, how would anyone survive to know there was a fly involved at that point? I don't know.

• 18:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  I have that question with a lot of stories, like this seems like no one would have been there to witness this. So how do we know?

• 18:10Holly Frey?

  And if they were, who are they?

• 18:15Holly Frey?

  The other thing that can't really be substantiated at all, and I wondered it from the gate in reading the little we have about his youth. I was like, wait, why was his dad in the colonies already while he was still in England? Like, what is going on there? And the supposition by some historians is that Robert may have been born out of wedlock. He appears to have been raised by his maternal grandmother. So it could just be that his mom was somehow not in the picture for another reason. But that his grandmother raised him until he was old enough to go to be with his father.

• 18:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 18:59Holly Frey?

  Again, that's not substantiated, but I wanted to mention it in case anybody's like, yeah, but what, what exactly was going on there? I don't know for sure. That seems like a sound theory, but I don't know.

• 19:11Holly Frey?

  Can you imagine?

• 19:14Holly Frey?

  I can.

• 19:18Holly Frey?

  If someone like a congressman was like, oh yeah, I was on this committee that was supposed to raise money and we didn't raise enough. So I just wrote a check. What? Like if it's supposed to be an official government channel situation.

• 19:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right, right.

• 19:36Holly Frey?

  Seems very odd to me. Somebody's going to write us and be like, that happens all the time. Here are examples and maybe, but I don't think so.

• 19:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  I feel like everything I could say about this is just gonna get me yelled at.

• 19:49Holly Frey?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah. So that's fascinating. I also do like that the way the investigation into his dealings as superintendent of finance.

• 20:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh huh.

• 20:04Holly Frey?

  Is very like, don't worry about it. We looked into it.

• 20:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Well, and

• 20:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  uh, I kind of wondered whether or how uh, his, u- using his, uh, his position to enrich himself led to any perceptions or standards about doing that in the future. Because there are still plenty of ways that people serving in the US government can enrich themselves through their jobs.

• 20:42Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some of which are basically illegal, but others are not.

• 20:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Um, and so I was just, I don't know. It was, I was curious about that. And that also seems like the, you know, somebody's PhD thesis, not something that we can figure out in a week on our podcast.

• 21:02Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because there, it may have been a factor, but we would have to comb through like all of the writing of every legislator who introduced bills or whatever, trying to reform and amend those kinds of practices. Which, as you just said, is not really something we can do over the course of a week.

• 21:26Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I, it's, I definitely found it very, very intriguing how much in reading about him, it splits so 50/50 of super crazy. He was, you know, he's the reason that the US exists. Because without the money that he came up with, we never would have been able to stand up to Britain, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. And others who are like, super shady.

• 21:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right, right.

• 21:54Holly Frey?

  It splits completely down the middle.

• 21:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:57Holly Frey?

  My take is always that probably irritatingly middle ground of like, both can be true.

• 22:07Holly Frey?

  Uh. You know, he clearly did get a lot of stuff done. He clearly was close with a lot of the people that the US likes to hold up as like icons of our foundation. But it doesn't mean he wasn't a little slippery about some of it.

• 22:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL dot sport.

• 23:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

• 23:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:01Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 25:13Speaker 07

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• 25:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  I loved that quote from the William and Mary 1934 piece where it was like, it was like, no, absolutely. Here, here are all the ways this could easily work for him to be doing this and juggling money on the back end in ways that no one could ever track.

• 26:03Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 26:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Especially when you consider that when he took that job, he was like, by the way, I have rules. And those rules are, nobody's the boss of me, which is, you know, a thing.

• 26:16Holly Frey?

  Let's put kitties in charge.

• 26:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's

• 26:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  it will be like naps in the sunbeam all day.

• 26:23Holly Frey?

  Maybe. I was just thinking, one of our newer kitties is diabolical. She's super smart and a little bit sneaky. So I don't think she should be in charge as much as I love and adore her, but she's like, I really expect to wake up in the middle of the night and have her tiny paws gripped around my hand with a pen in it, signing away the deed to my house. She's just like that. Smart and diabolical and her sister is very sweet.

• 26:52Holly Frey?

  And not a fool, but she's not that diabolical.

• 26:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right, right.

• 26:58Holly Frey?

  I'm like in the nature or nurture question, like here's an obvious example. Like, yeah, they are from the same litter and one of them owns the house already and probably has power of attorney. I don't even know about. And the other one is like, I just want to sleep in my tower.

• 27:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Holly Frey?

  Anyway, I had to turn it to kitties in the interest of levity.

• 27:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Holly Frey?

  Just remember, all the stories that you hear are told from someone's point of view. I'll say that about history. All of history. I mean, we talk about this. We're both pretty transparent about that with us. Like it's told from our point of view. And we try to take in all of the, the information we can from a variety of sources and ideally primary sources. And we try to be objective as we evaluate that information. But everybody comes to every table with a little bit of bias, whether they're conscious of it or not. And even if you're conscious of it and working against it, you, you can't eradicate it. So

• 27:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Holly Frey?

  Always keep that in mind, just as a rule of thumb.

• 28:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Well, and I will also say, this is totally true. Everything that you just said. And it's also totally true that it's possible to take a, just a bad faith reading of things.

• 28:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, and leave stuff out on purpose. To tell a specific narrative of, for example, the founders as flawless idealists.

• 28:28Holly Frey?

  Which to me, I mean, from my perspective, is not very interesting.

• 28:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  No.

• 28:35Holly Frey?

  It's more meaningful to me to know that the people that were trying to build something new and what they hoped would be better were messy because like it's, it's that, um, that Blakean thing of like, you can't really be good unless you know of evil, unless you, you know, uh, like it's, it's not, it's not realistic. And it also creates this complete fictional standard of behavior that's not realistic.

• 29:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 29:06Holly Frey?

  It's, it's more interesting to know they were grappling with their own mess and yet still managed to pull through a fairly ideological, um, government plan with a lot of money problems.

• 29:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  And also problems about who was fully a person.

• 29:25Holly Frey?

  Right. I mean, obviously that's like a huge thing. There are a lot of problems with, you know, the, the early stages of, of the US story.

• 29:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Holly Frey?

  That get really, really, um, occluded in a lot of discussion of them. Um, but there are also a lot of founding fathers that we don't talk about very much. And we might do some more on, on some more of them because they're, they're there. They count in the, in the mix. Um, but Robert Morris is not somebody I was ever taught a lot about in school.

• 30:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Me neither.

• 30:01Holly Frey?

  I don't really remember ever being taught about him in school. That doesn't mean I wasn't ever, but I have no memory of it.

• 30:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Holly Frey?

  But yeah, definitely not in the mix of all the heavy hitters, even though he was a heavy hitter.

• 30:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Holly Frey?

  So interesting. Just again, history, history comes with bias. Uh, if you are headed into some time off this weekend, I hope it's amazing. I hope you can give your brain a rest from the tumult of the world and that you can do some things you love, be with the people and animals and whatever else you love. The art you love and that you are cool to everybody that you encounter and everybody is cool to you. If this is not your time off coming up and you have obligations or you have to work, I also hope everybody's really nice to you and nobody's a jerk and that we all try to do better. I can always be improving because I have dark thoughts

• 30:56Holly Frey?

  sometimes. I got mad at somebody on the phone last week. It happens. We're working on it. But in any case, I hope everybody is finding whatever pockets of joy you can. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode and then on Monday with something brand new.

• 31:20Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 32:40Holly Frey?

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