Diane Debevec Paintings & Drawings

After 10 years of pleasure and struggIe, I am chronicling the many stories I have lived, witnessed and created as an urban dweller. I moved into downtown Cincinnati in the spring of 2005, taking on the adventure of becoming an on-site landlady.  I’ve been likened to Mrs.Madrigal, the character from Armistead Maupin’s series of books Tales of the City , Mrs Madrigal was landlady to a group of young San Francisco’ins  in her own version of what I call Artful Habitats.

My urban dwelling is shabby and charming and magical all at once, and I have had the good fortune of finding tenants who have become friends to one another and to me.  We are a community within a community, located in the Historic Neighborhood known as Prospect Hill.

In my early years, I housed many short term roommates, to help me pay the bills.  They included a woman who had climbed Everest with a team of MIT scientists, a massage therapist for Cirque du Soleil, one of the Jersey Boys, and my all-time favorite, a guy I am pretty sure was a spy with the CIA. He’s probably reading this as I type. Hi Sam.

Adventures have included saving a life, gunshots galore, a midnight fugitive who scaled my fence and leapt into the surprise of our pool, a tenant whose parrot mimicked my unique dog call, thus summoning my dogs to his window daily, and a backyard wedding (my own) where the tenants gave up their apartments for four days so that our family and friends could stay with us.

We’ve been snowed in, lived without a furnace for a winter-y weekend, grown some of our own food.  We’ve endured car break-ins, plant thievery, an elderly neighbor who hired prostitutes, and a basement break in where all of my laundry detergent was stolen and large footprints left in the slippery soapy spillage. 

I’ve managed the renovation of 2 apartments, the rebuilding of 2 collapsed retaining walls, the tuckpointing of 150 year old brick. There has been re-roofing, reinforcing, re-building. It seems like we’ve hardly scratched the surface. 

Unlike Anna Madrigal, I do not welcome my tenants with a carefully rolled joint of home-grown, but have been known to share wine and food, especially in the summer months.  I hope these stories will give a sense of the joy and exquisiteness I have experienced in this, the happiest chapters of my life.  So far.