I was skimming the Classmates.com message boards for my old hometown and I came across a thread regarding Munchkinville.
Munchkinville? What the heck is that? It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. A place in Ridley where the houses were munchkin-sized? Where was this all the time I was growing up?
So I asked my family and had the answer immediately. Munchkinville was a lane behind the houses across the street from me on Swarthmore Avenue. It was an alley with small houses, but the odd thing was that the doors and windows were very small; hobbit-sized, in fact. I walked down the alley once, but I’d forgotten all about it. My father told me that these houses had been built long ago as small vacation cottages for people from Philadelphia. My brother told me that he was in front of the houses once talking about them and a woman came out of a munchkin house yelling at him. “Normal people live here! Go away!”
Munchkinville is gone now, all but a few of the houses, and they have normal doors and windows. Here’s to a unique architectural and historical landmark.