Home Away From Home: Residents Who Move Around Swarthmore

Maria Mooney in front of her current Swarthmore home. Photo courtesy of Maria Mooney

The Swarthmorean first featured Bill Menke’s “Guess the House” in its pages back in 2018. Now, dozens of sketches later, these beautiful drawings of local homes have become a beloved part of the paper. With each installment, readers have the opportunity to guess the address of the home pictured in Menke’s latest study. 

In February, a reader wrote in correctly guessing the address of a house on Cedar Lane Menke had drawn. It turned out the drawing featured the reader’s new home. I was intrigued to learn that the reader’s previous home had also been in Swarthmore. I soon discovered that this is not uncommon. “House hopping,” as I now call it, is not a new phenomenon in Swarthmore.

Becky Hansen is a third-generation Swarthmore resident and local real estate agent. She has lived in eight different homes in the borough. When she was born, her family lived in a house on Dickinson Avenue. Then, after her parents divorced, she and her mom moved into her grandparents’ house on Harvard Avenue. After a few years there, they moved into a rental on Dartmouth Avenue owned by her aunt. Hansen is the youngest of 10; at the time, she was the only one of her parents’ children still at home. 

After her mother remarried, the family moved to Springfield. But Hansen continued going to high school in Swarthmore. “It was so lax back then,” she says. “My French teacher even picked me up and drove me to school every day.” 

After college, Hansen lived in Ridley, but she was determined to move back to Swarthmore before expanding her family. “Once you’re raised here, you realize what a great community it is to raise kids,” she says. “So my whole thing was, before I have kids, I have to get back there.”

Becky Hansen with her husband, Dave Welsh, in front of their home on Haverford Avenue. Hansen has lived in eight homes in Swarthmore. Photo courtesy of Becky Hansen

House People and the Magic of Moving

As an adult, Hansen has lived on Benjamin West Avenue, Ogden Avenue, Dartmouth Avenue, and Haverford Avenue. Now, she is in the process of downsizing from her 3,300 square-foot home to a modest house of 1,900 square feet on Rutgers Avenue. While life circumstances like divorce and marriage prompted some of her moves, Hansen also describes herself as a “house person.” Some people have a “passion for houses,” she says, adding, “I like houses that need updating. I like to put my own stamp on a house.” 

Liz Berman may not exactly be a house person, but she thinks it is a good practice to move every few years. After growing up in Center City, Philadelphia, Berman lived in Virginia and Boston. Eventually, her husband took a job in Philadelphia, prompting the move to Swarthmore. 

“I didn’t really know anything about Swarthmore,” she recalls. A family friend who specialized in relocation helped her and her husband find the borough. In the space of seven years, they moved two more times. A desire for more privacy and space contributed, but Berman also says, “I think moving every few years is good, so you get rid of all the junk you store.”

Despite that belief, Berman has now lived at her current address for 20 years. “It’s an oasis,” she says of the home that she describes as “down valley” from her neighbors. The house is on a flag lot, which means it sits behind another house and is not visible from the street. “We love running into people and catching up,” she says. “The whole sense of community is amazing.”

Missing Home

Hansen got married in the backyard of her house on Haverford. She served as her block captain, and she and her husband, Dave Welsh, held her children’s graduation parties, engagement parties, baby showers, and many Strath Haven High School pasta parties there. 

I wondered what it was like to live so close to a place you once loved — a place that still houses your memories — yet not live there anymore. As I spoke with residents, I asked them if they ever miss the homes they leave behind. 

Maria Mooney, who affectionately refers to her first Swarthmore home as “The Marietta House,” does.

Mooney moved to Swarthmore in 1994. The borough was a midway point between her job in Philadelphia and her husband’s job in Aston. Easy access to the SEPTA train and the short commute to their respective workplaces felt perfect. The first time she stepped off of the train in Swarthmore “it seemed like a storybook,” she recalls.

Mooney thought of The Marietta House as her forever home. But when a larger house around the corner went on the market, it felt like an opportunity too good to pass up. “We had lots of family that came to visit and nowhere to put them,” she says. “We always thought it would be good to have a fourth bedroom.” 

While moving around the corner was practical and allowed the family to remain in their old neighborhood, she says it’s sometimes hard to be so close. From the porch of the new house, Mooney can see her old street. She still misses her first Swarthmore home. 

“Homes become like family members,” Mooney says. The Marietta House is where she began her married life, where she brought her babies home. It became a memory box. She doesn’t live there anymore, but, because she has stayed in Swarthmore, a visit with those memories is just a short walk away. 

This week’s Unscientific Survey asks current and past residents of Swarthmore how many houses in the borough they have lived in.