The Paris Room

I called it the Paris Room because the entire wall space, such as it was, was covered with prints, maps and photos of Paris. But to call it a room was a family joke. It was more of a closet. To be more precise, a water closet that measured a mere 5' x 6'. It was the first floor bathroom of my father’s row house on Wallace Street in Philadelphia’s Art Museum Area.

It was occupied only by a toilet, immediately to your right when you walked in, and a small sink to the left of the toilet. The rest of floor space was unoccupied because of the simple, but curious fact, that underneath the carpeting and hidden by it, was a large trap door that lead to the basement. The carpeting could be pulled back and the trap door opened and leaned against the wall opposite the door. Steep wooden steps lead from just below the sink down to the basement. The most macabre aspect of the bathroom came from the fact that the edge of the trap door opening was within a foot of the entrance to the bathroom.

A photo showing the door (center) to the Paris Room
No photo exists of the interior.

The real treachery of the Paris Room came from the fact that my father had a bad habit of leaving the trap door open. If you lived in the house or spent enough time there, you would always be wary of stepping into the Paris Room, lest you step into the dark abyss and tumble headlong down the stairs into the unlit basement, which was notorious for harboring very large rats. So, theoretically, if you didn’t survive the fall, and there was high probability you wouldn’t and your body not discovered for a while it would provide a feast for the rats.

It was a bit unnerving, especially to us kids to be sitting on the toilet staring into the gaping black maw of a basement that none of us would have been caught dead in alone. The blackness of the basement fueled our imaginations to speculate as to what lay beyond. I’m sure my sisters never used the bathroom without closing the trap door first.

You might rightly ask if anyone ever did fall down the stairs and land in the basement. The answer is yes. There was one such case. Unfortunately, I don’t know all the details, but sometime in the 1980s when my father was dating again after his last divorce, he had a woman over to the house on their first date.

Of course my father had forgotten to close the trap door and hadn’t even remembered he had left it open when his date asked to use his bathroom. She opened the bathroom door and was quickly sucked into the abyss of my father’s basement.

An ambulance was called, as was, ultimately, a personal injury lawyer. My first fear at the time was that my father might have let his homeowner’s insurance lapse as he had done once or twice before since paying off the mortgage sometime in the late 1970s. I do vaguely remember an insurance company representing him though and ultimately the case was settled out of court for the vague, but often-cited, “undisclosed amount.”