212 E. 141st Place in Dolton, Illinois, was on sale for $199,000. Then came the election of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV. Almost immediately after his promotion spread around the world, the homeowners took the house off the market. Wise move!
Now, the modest house is expected to go for around $1 million. It just makes sense. Why sell for close to $200,000 when you can easily bring in a million dollars? The brick house boasts three bedrooms, three bathrooms and an enjoyable backyard.
A private online auction is being held right now, and will close this coming Wednesday.
With a rosary on the door and a crowd of gawkers on the front lawn, who wouldn’t want to purchase a tiny home that will always see its owners harassed by lookie-loos? It’ll almost certainly be akin to being the owner of a home that was featured in a television show, like the Bundys’ home, or the Brady Bunch house.
If you want to invade people’s privacy and then feel the need to go to Reconciliation, then you need only walk only fifteen minutes to walk to the same parish that Pope Leo did.
Some people want to turn it into a museum, but I just can’t imagine someone being naive enough to purchase the home for use as a primary family residence. I wouldn’t take this home even as a gift. Yes, it’d be cool to live in the same place that a pope did, but the price is too high, literally and figuratively.
I’ve lived in some notable homes before, but none of them saw tourists or locals gawking at the front stoop. Yes, I lived in a murder house. Where we put the bed was the exact same spot where a jealous lover killed his wife and her boyfriend with an axe. It is said that the boyfriend was almost beheaded.
I’ve also lived in a house where a celebrity whom I won’t name lived as a child before his or her fame.
Neither of those houses saw tourists at all. But if some did show up, I would have been happy to fill a bucket with scalding hot water and then throw that water on the body of a random privacy-invading goon.
And when you rent an apartment or home, do as I did when I had to rent a residence as opposed to today when I own my home…research. I always check the local historical society’s archives as well as search engine results. If anything notable happened, I stopped the application process.
Before I purchased my current home, I did a hell of a lot of research. You can bet that if a pope or a major celebrity once lived there, I would turn away the home. Thankfully, my home seems to be old and boring, just like me.
Whomever purchases this home better be able to put up with a lot of people taking pictures on the lawn and maybe even by peering into windows. They better be ready for a lot of trespassers and evil-doers. Yes, the home looks…quaint, but again, I wouldn’t take this house as a gift. The historicity simply isn’t worth it to me.