The House Everyone Forgot

Perspective

WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I live in the La Jolla Triangle, they usually think I’m referring to the Golden Triangle area encompassing the University Towne Centre mall and surrounding business complex. No, the Triangle where I’ve lived for 35 years is more of the Bermuda variety where, as my friend Barbara says, “ships, planes and municipal services mysteriously disappear.”

We got our first inkling there were some anomalies with our location soon after my former husband and I moved in, when we called 911 to report an accident in front of our house. The police dispatcher called back 10 minutes later to clarify our location since, she said, “there is no such address.”

As it turned out, four of our neighbors’ homes were AWOL as well. Most of our street of four-digit addresses meanders along the west side of La Jolla Boulevard but inexplicably skips some 5100 numbers when it crosses the boulevard, marooning five houses with three-digit addresses on the east side.

It wasn’t only the police department that was a little hazy on the whereabouts of these 1940s-era homes. The regular mail carriers knew where we were, but the substitutes would routinely return any three-digit-numbered mail to sender as undeliverable, resulting in unpaid bills, DMV fines for expired registrations, shredded bank statements and unanswered invitations. Calls to the post office would only temporarily sort it out; in that era, the La Jolla postmaster position seemed to have a higher turnover than the swing shift at Burger King.

Our own problems were further compounded by an unoccupied vacation home on the west side of La Jolla Boulevard that contained our three digits in the same sequence. Both the USPS and UPS were notorious for writing a fourth digit in front of our house number and abandoning our mail at the vacation home, whose owners would kindly return it to us once a year. It was like Christmas in July.

When my husband and I divorced after 10 years in the house, I had to ask myself: Did he just want his mail?

It didn’t help, of course, that the house across the street from us, built at the same time and whose front door and driveway faces ours, is deemed to be on a different street, as is the one kitty-corner to us. How some houses on our street came to be assigned to one street and others seemingly randomly to another remains, in my view, one of the great unsolved address mysteries of all time.

Episodes of lost mail might still be occurring except that after a two-year spate with only substitute carriers on our route, my second husband received a final notice from the fund company handling his IRA. Since three previous communications had been returned as undeliverable, his retirement account was being turned over to the state as abandoned. The sheer force of ballistic energy from our house could have fueled a missile to Mars——or more likely, a direct hit into our postal substation. Less than a week later, the regional postmaster had changed our route to connect it with the west side and promised us a regular mail carrier, a really terrific guy we’ve now had for some years.

But would that it were just the mail. Neither SDG&E nor the city of San Diego will lay claim to the streetlight in front of our house. Eerily, both insist that there is no streetlight in front of our house. (Cue Twilight Zone music here.) Fortunately, it only goes out every few years.

And just when I thought that after 35 years and the advent of GPS locators, our 61-year-old house could finally acquire its rightful place on a map, our trash pickup suddenly ceased this summer. Just ours, not any of the neighbors’. Unlike most of the blocks in our neighborhood that come in nice rectangular shapes, the end of our block is rounded, with our house on the tip and—— count ’em——five thoroughfares coming together at the end of our driveway. Backing out on a foggy morning has always been a leap of faith, but that’s another article. After the fourth missed pickup, my new best friend, the La Jolla sanitation supervisor, revealed that routes in our area had been reconfigured and that somehow, given our quirky address and our location at the hub of so many streets, we’d dropped off the grid. But even the truck he’d sent out to pick up our trash several days later returned empty-handed. “Where are you?” he queried into my voice mail.

So at this point, we’re very, very clear why the previous owners moved. But what about us? If we ever sell, do we have to disclose that our mail service is iffy, trash pickup sporadic, the streetlight a phantom and pizza delivery a mere wishful fantasy? Does real estate law have a “black hole rule”? And since half our neighbors are deemed to be on a different street anyway, could the new folks choose a new address?

In the meantime, we suggest low-flying aircraft steer clear.

Philomène Offen is a freelance writer.

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