By golly, a genuine Riverside Murphy House is being resold again

175 Riverside Avenue, which is right across from the entrance to Gilliam Lane, has come back on the market at $2.9 million, a substantial increase from its April 2021 selling price of $1.885, and and an even bigger jump from the sale 10 months before that on June 30, 2020 for $1,675,000.

Murphy Houses were so named by us neighbors at the time not for the convenient Murphy beds tucked away in their garage walls, but after their builder, Bill Murphy, who specialized in cheap (this one cost $27,900, as I recall, in 1965), on-slab homes, built on marginal land — in the case of the trio here, the swampland portion of the Meeker property.

But I’m glad to see a few of them are still standing in various locations around Riverside; when they went up, we had our doubts whether they’d see the turn of the century. Those few that didn’t fall down, either inadvertently or under the pressure of a dozer blade, have all been extensively remodeled and, as is obvious here, now command quite the price.