Give Darren Wood of Riverton, Utah a hand… never mind, he’s already got one and he wants all of his neighbors to see it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Wood felt driven to “vent” his frustration after neighbors repeatedly complained to city authorities about Wood’s then-under-construction home. “This kind of shows the attitude that we’ve been dealing with all along,” said neighbor Stan Torgersen (above), who stated Wood’s so-called “decorative art” in the form of a stylized cactus (yeah, that’s the ticket!) is clearly visible from every window on the back of his house.
Lyon Park Spite House
Be careful what you wish for, fussy neighbors, you just might get it. A developer seeking to build a fill-in residence on an empty lot in Lyon Park, a national historic district and upper class neighborhood located at Arlington County, Virginia was continually rebuffed by neighbors who refused to endorse any zoning variances. The builder took revenge by carefully interpreting the building code to construct the most stylistically-clashing home legally allowed. The bizarre yet completely livable home offers 3,000 square feet of living space and is only 12 feet wide… and it’s for sale.
Irish Hills Towers
In the 1920s auto tourism was just beginning to roll, so to speak, and the Michigan Observation Company was a big player in the burgeoning travel market. When the company wanted to build a tower on a knoll in southern Michigan’s scenic Irish Hills, however, the wheels came off in a hurry. The knoll was jointly owned at the time and only one of the two owners sold their portion to MOC, who built a 55-ft tall wooden tower atop the knoll. Not to be outdone, the holdout owner built a nearly identical tower mere feet away from the MOC’s tower.
Both towers operated independently through the 1950s, when a someone bought out both original owners and connected the towers with a common gift shop. A refurbishment in 1972 left the towers looking like mirror images of one another. Finally in the year 2000, the towers were closed to the public and in 2013 they were deemed to be unsafe. A fundraising campaign appears to have saved the towers from demolition and at press time they’re undergoing restoration. Flickr member Laura Kalish snapped the temporarily topless Irish Hills Towers in November of 2013.
