I’ll Build a House Just to Piss You Off

What is a Spite House?

A spite house is a building whose primary function is not profit, livability, or aesthetics. Instead, these structures are built with selfish ulterior motives such as:

1. Stopping sunlight from hitting a neighbor’s property.

2. Ruining the view of a nearby building.

3. Blocking a road, or forcing a municipality to change city plans.

Spite houses are unusual not just for the idea behind their creation, but for their appearance. Livability and comfort are secondary to the act of saying, ’screw you’, to whoever has offended the builder, so such houses are usually extremely odd looking and uncomfortable/awkward to live in. The odd appearance is because spite houses are often built on plots that are not properly sized and shaped to hold a typical home.

Famous examples of Spite Houses

The most well known example of a spite house was the Richardson House in New York. Joseph Richardson was a rich contractor who had constructed several buildings in the Manhattan area during the mid-1800’s. One of his less valuable assets was an empty strip of land, 5 feet wide by 104 feet long, which sat on 82nd Street and Lexington Avenue.

Hyman Sarner was also a contractor, and owned the lot next to Joseph’s. Hyman wanted to build an apartment building, and felt that it would be sensible to add Josephs lot to his property before construction began. Thinking that the narrow lot would be worthless to anyone but himself, Hyman approached Joseph and lowballed him with a $1000 offer. Joseph scoffed at this, and insisted on $5000. Neither side would budge, and the experience caused the two men to genuinely dislike one another.

Hyman built his apartments anyway, with windows that overlooked Richardson’s property. Joesph saw this, and decided to build his own house for the sole purpose of blocking those windows. The resulting 4 story building was completed in 1882, and would become one of the most famous places in New York.

The narrow plot of land forced Richardson to reduce the width of the walls from the city standard, 18 inches, to 12 inches in order to make the interior inhabitable. Even with the extra room provided by such thin walls, life for the residents of this building was unbelievably cramped. Hallways and stairs were so narrow that only one person could use them at a time. Furniture inside the spite house, by necessity, was extremely small or thin. Stoves were custom-made so they could fit inside the tiny kitchens, and beds were so narrow that they could barely contain the sleeping occupants. The widest dining table in the building was only 18 inches across.