On July 10, devastating flooding hit Plainfield. Four buildings, four cars and eight bridges washed down the Great Brook. An apartment building next to the river, which everyone called the Heartbreak Hotel, collapsed and washed away.
Twelve people were living there at the time, and they all survived. Most of their beloved cats did not.
In the days after the flood, reporter Erica Heilman talked with a number of the residents who lost their homes. They sat on porches and in houses where they were camped out, and in Erica’s car. This piece was produced for the ear. Listen to the audio for the full story of what was lost that night, and maybe what it could teach us about what comes next.
The Heartbreak was built in 1912 and housed millworkers who were often down on their luck, which gave it its name. But for as long as anyone can remember, it's been an eight-unit apartment building. It was next to the rec field and a block from the church, a huge clapboard building with wraparound porches on the front strung with lights, and porches on the back that hung out over the river, and a picnic table and a fire pit.
Some people lived there for months, others for 17 years, and by all accounts, the rents at the Heartbreak were several hundred dollars less than most, and the apartments were much nicer than most.
“The Heartbreak Hotel is known in town for being a place where people live for a few years and then they buy a house. It's like a gateway to Plainfield,” Jake McBride said. “And anywhere you go — I mean, I'd go to the doctor's office and the receptionist would take my ID and say, ‘Oh, apartment seven! I used to live in that apartment!’”
It was the kind of place where neighbors saw each other every day, where generations of people, from all walks of life, found belonging and someone to wave to in the morning.
“I didn't plan on staying there; like, I had three children. It was a one bedroom, so a little too tight for a family, but every time we thought about moving, we just couldn't afford it,” said Hope Metcalf. “So my daughter was actually born in the bed in that apartment. My son, my youngest son was born three years later on the kitchen floor.”
“In the summer, Hope and the kids were always just sitting on their porch,” added neighbor Lucy Schmid, “and the kids were running around in our teeny, tiny yard between the cars and the building. Like, I watched her kids grow up from my balcony.”
The night of July 10, residents were alerted of potential flash flooding. The river started to rise, up the side of the building, into the basement.
Julia Wilk set up the automatic cat feeder and got out.
“Then I think the bridge went out, and the water started rushing through that gap, and then probably 20 minutes later, maybe a half hour, the building just collapsed,” said Eli Barlow.
It was dark, and loud, and hard to see. It smelled like dirt, or beets, Barlow said.
Margie Yoder thought maybe a tree had fallen, but then: “A couple of the residents that ran over there said, ‘It's gone. It's gone. It's gone.’”
Yoder had raised grandkids in the Heartbreak Hotel.
“I think something was being able to count on my neighbors. That was a great flavor of things,” Yoder said. “I would ask, ‘Can you hang this curtain for me? Can you check my oil? I don't think I'm getting the right reading.’ Oh, they were always so generous. I could joke with them. I'm gonna miss that. I'm gonna miss my buddies. That's what I'm gonna miss. We are the Heartbreakers. That's what we are. And that's about the size of it.”
Rose Hagan had moved from Pittsburgh, finding a safe place at the Heartbreak as a trans woman.
“I don't know how you expect people to ever get anywhere with their life if you don't have these places like the Heartbreak, where they can land and start doing something different,” Hagan said. “Do you want to live in a world where people can get better, or do you not? And if you want to live in a world where people can get better, you have to have places like the Heartbreak, and now that it's gone, I don't know how I'm going to find a place where I can keep getting better.”
Several weeks after the flood that destroyed the Heartbreak Hotel, Vermont experienced another devastating flood. In July alone, 482 people's homes were rendered uninhabitable. Sixty-five of them were renters. The Heartbreak residents scattered across town.
“My children and I, every day in the summer, would go down there and swim in the river,” Hope Metcalf said. “That river was the river that nourished my children and myself for 10 and a half years, and that was the same river that tore apart our home. But like, that is life, right? You know, I wouldn't want to not have had that river.”
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