one man's trash...

... is another man’s dollhouse.

Whether you live in a large city or the smallest of towns, you can always bank on discovering the strangest things while walking through alleys. I guess it boils down to the notion that people invest the majority of their yard beautification efforts towards the front of their homes, and neglect the backsides under the theory that no one will see it. Possibly that also indicates that most people are oblivious to what alleys have to offer beyond serving as a path to their garage, or the rare shortcut. Many people also tend to employ “their” alley as an extension of their world.

I think I’ve always been a sort of alley investigator, although I definitely prefer to explore them on foot rather than by car. First, I tend to miss the finer details when traveling at say, 35 miles an hour compared to 2 or even 3 miles per hour. Also, vehicles pretty much remove any possibility of stealth from the operation, whereas on foot a person may only attract the attention of the occasional family dog, or an entire block of family dogs if you have unusually large feet, or haven’t learned how to pick them up when you walk.

I recently encountered this relatively creepy item while on walkabout in search of interesting items to photograph. It was stashed in the alley behind a large house in Albuquerque’s historic Huning Highland Addition that was featured prominently in the nightmarish film “Suspect Zero.”



I was immediately captivated by the amount of effort that appeared to go into the construction of the house to make it look old and run down. Then I realized that it probably wasn’t so much the effort that went into the creation it inasmuch as it was just sloppily constructed and then more than likely left outside in the elements for any number of years. When I reached down to move the house into light more suitable for photography, I was impressed the object’s weight. I was particularly fond of the yellow room upstairs.



Upon reaching the conclusion that the toy wasn’t a scale model of the property’s actual house, I realized that it was time to continue with my exploration. Although I didn’t feel any urges to save the item from an eventual trip to the dump, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is an interesting story surrounding this house.