Saying ‘screw you’ through architecture: America’s spite houses

Number 44 Hull Street is so narrow that residents have to enter from the side. (Elise Amendola/AP via CNN Newsource)

It all started out because he was playing around on Google Earth.

Aaron Jackson was at a crossroads. He was living in New York City and working at a nonprofit when the city was devastated by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Stuck in his small Queens apartment, the self-described “news junkie” spent long stretches online, falling into internet wormholes.

At some point, he says, he came across the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC).

The Church, which is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is best known for organizing pickets at soldiers’ funerals and emblazoning anti-LGBT slogans on protest signs and billboards.

“The first thing I saw was that (the church) was in a neighbourhood. I was walking around and I decided to do a 360 view and I saw a ‘for sale’ sign in front of the house on Google Earth. I thought it would be really funny to buy that house.”

Although that specific house in Topeka, Kansas, was no longer for sale when Jackson inquired, another one on the street was. Jackson bought it sight unseen. Despite never having been there, he was ready for a change, so he moved to his new digs in Topeka, the state capital.

But becoming the WBC’s neighbour was only the first step in his plan.

Next, he painted the house’s exterior in rainbow stripes to make it look like a Pride flag. The act was intentional, agitprop for the social media age. It was a response to the the church’s anti-gay rhetoric, and it was right in front of their living room windows, impossible to ignore.

He named it the Equality House.

Photos of the home went viral, but Jackson thought people would see a picture, have a laugh, and then move on.

Instead, they showed up to visit.

Although Topeka has a population of about 125,000 people, its location along I-70, a major highway that cuts east-west across the U.S., makes it a convenient stop along road trips. The Westboro Baptist Church, and the Equality House, are just off the highway.

A few years later, Jackson bought a second home on the street and painted it in pink, white and blue stripes to resemble the trans pride flag.

Jackson doesn’t call the Equality House a “spite” house, but he knows that a lot of people disagree. The house is part of a wider nonprofit he’s established called Planting Peace, which has launched other initiatives including orphanages and elephant rescue efforts.

“The Equality House is a symbol of compassion, peace, and positive change,” the organization’s website says. But its location, facing the infamous church, makes a case for its “spite” house label.

Hostile designs

Spite architecture has a short but vivid history, most of it American.

It’s sometimes mistakenly linked to “nail” houses, where owners refuse to sell to developers, leaving a single structure marooned amid new constructions. Sometimes owners are holding out for a bigger payday. Others stay put out of stubbornness — think of the little house at the beginning of the movie “Up.”

But spite houses are different. They’re built not to resist developers but, as their name suggests, they’re intentionally designed, with a degree of malice, to annoy someone specific.

Boston’s “Skinny House” may be the most famous example.

Ten feet wide and four stories tall, it rises from the city’s historic North End. According to a real estate agent who once sold it, two brothers owned the plot. One built a grand home for himself while the other was away fighting in the Civil War. When the soldier returned, furious that his brother had left him a smaller portion of the plot, he built a narrow tower to block the mansion’s view and sunlight.

Today, a plaque outside the diminutive 44 Hull Street property reads “Skinny House,” with “Spite House” in parentheses. Although it’s still a private residence, it has become a tourist attraction in the tony Boston neighbourhood, which also contains the Old North Church, the city’s oldest, and a statue of Paul Revere.

On Google Maps, it’s labeled “Boston spite house.” Instagram is full of photos of tourists visiting the house, with “stretching my arms out between this house and the one next door” by far the most popular pose.

Spite is one thing. Prime location is another. Despite its dimensions and the regular parade of visitors outside, the home sold for $1.25 million in 2021.

While spite houses aren’t an exclusively American phenomenon, they do flourish in the United States. The mix of private-property culture, individualism, and the country’s fragmented zoning laws creates ideal conditions for personal grudges to solidify into real estate.

“Hostile architecture is very American,” says Paavo Monkkonen, assistant professor in the University of California, Los Angeles’ Department of Urban Planning. “Your house represents more here than it does in other countries. It’s a more personal symbol because it’s a home ownership society. There’s more neighbour-to-neighbour conflict.”

Spite houses are a kind of hostile architecture, but usually on a local scale —built for the irritation of a particular person or family. Broader “hostile architecture” includes things like uncomfortable park benches meant to keep homeless people from sleeping on them.

“The U.S. approach to urban design is often not people-centric,” says Monkkonen. “In the sense that in certain parts of the city you want to build things that no one will go to, plazas that will be empty, because you want to protect your own peace and quiet.”

There are spite houses outside of the U.S., too.

Sarajevo’s Inat Kuća, or House of Resentment, offers a Balkan version of the genre.

In the 1800s, Austro-Hungarian authorities wanted to demolish homes alongside the Miljacka River to make room for a new city hall. One homeowner refused to sell. The eventual compromise saw the government move his house, brick-by-brick, and rebuild it in the opposite river bank.

Today, the structure is home to a traditional Bosnian restaurant, but to locals it will always be the House of Spite or House of Contempt – a moment of David defeating Goliath, and a symbol of Bosnian pride.

And it doesn’t have to be a full-on house of spite to get visitors interested in stopping by.

In New York City’s West Village, one of the most desirable neighbourhoods in the United States, a small, easily missed corner of pavement has become an unlikely tourist attraction.

This isn’t just any old piece of Manhattan asphalt.

The 500-square-inch triangle carries an all-caps message: “PROPERTY OF THE HESS ESTATE WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN DEDICATED FOR PUBLIC PURPOSES.”

Officially, it’s called the Hess Triangle. Unofficially, it’s the “spite triangle.”

Its existence began as a beef between the Hess family — German immigrants who owned large plots of land in this part of Manhattan — and the city, which seized most of their land in the early 1900s to build the subway.

When a survey showed the city’s measurements of the land were slightly off, the family refused to surrender the remaining two-foot sliver. Instead they tiled their protest into the ground.

The appearance of the spite triangle made headlines in July 1922, with the New York Times giving it an aptly small amount of newspaper real estate.

For Aaron Jackson’s Equality House project, going viral had pros and cons. He was happy that the wave of attention got people to learn about Westboro Baptist Church and educate themselves on LGBT issues.

However, it got to the point that he no longer wanted to live in the house day-to-day. Instead, Jackson is converting the home into a museum and library so that people who visit can do more than just take a picture.

Some guests, Jackson says, want to show support when they visit the Equality House. Others want to argue. Some consider it a spite house, while others think it’s an activist experiment.

“At the end of the day,” says Jackson, “it’s an art project. I don’t tell people how to feel.”

By Lilit Marcus, CNN