A spite house is a building put up to punish someone — by blocking a neighbor's light, ruining a view, or planting a permanent monument to a grudge in their sightline. America has been building them for centuries. In 1716, sailmaker Thomas Wood built the ten-foot-wide Old Spite House in Marblehead, Massachusetts — by one account, sized precisely to block the view of two houses on Orne Street after its owner got a small share of his father's estate. It's occupied today.
Boston's Skinny House, 10.4 feet wide, was allegedly built in 1874 by a soldier who came home to find his brother had taken most of their inherited land; he built on the sliver that remained to block his brother's sunlight. New York's Richardson Spite House was four stories tall, 104 feet long, and five feet wide — built in 1882 after a neighbor offered $1,000 for the strip and owner Joseph Richardson wanted $5,000. It held eight functioning three-room apartments. And when William Waldorf Astor feuded with his aunt next door, he replaced his mansion with the original Waldorf Hotel in 1893, towering over her home with no windows at all on her side.
Modern building codes have mostly killed the form. In Finland, spite construction is illegal.
Previously:
• Vermont's tilted "witch windows" were supposedly designed to stop witches
