Stairs, architecture and modernity

With a cannonball lodged in its wall, the Cannonball House still stands on Morris Avenue, reminding us all of the Township of Springfield's role in the Revolutionary War.

The British, though, won the Battle of Springfield, and the rebel Colonists, under the leadership of George Washington, fell back to Morristown where they'd turn their eyes west to cross the Delaware. Pride in the township's history is evident also in the Colonial-style architecture of Town Hall, the high school, post office, and several other buildings.

The architecture of modern Springfield, however, is what Bryan notices most.
Ranches, split-levels, bi-levels. Much of the town looks like it was built in one week in 1950. I teach Bryan the difference between a split-level and a bi-level. Together, they're probably 75% of the town's homes.

A primer for the uninitiated: a split-level (pictured above, left), the more popular of the cousins has half-flights of stairs everywhere, so your living room is up half a flight from the entry, and the bedrooms are another half a flight up. The kitchen is either on the ground floor or on the half-flight up. The bi-level, however, is the more exotic, although awkward design: you actually enter the house in between stories. You must choose either down or up for the rest of the house. So the bedrooms are either down or up.

Growing up in a one-story ranch, I was envious of friends in split-levels, bi-levels or the best of all, the center-hallway three-story which had an elegant, full staircase right in the middle of a big house, with large square rooms. We had stairs to our ranch's basement or to my illegal attic bedroom, but it just wasn't the same. I never understood why my parents couldn't have us live like normal people in split-levels.

Things to come full circle, though. My brother lives in a split-level, my center has a center-hallways staircase, and I live on the top two floors of an 1846 brownstone.

Stairs, stairs, stairs.