My childhood neighborhood contained three notable houses that were featured in the Miami Herald. One of them was a stunning rectilinear modern-architectural Frankenstein’s Castle that stood at the very end of 66th avenue—my street. You leave my driveway and take a right and go and go and the you see it in the distance—the tall central tower, the 18-foot high window, and shining behind it a grotesque 10-foot high HAND. The hand was a bronze-colored print of a Renaissance palmistry diagram, a mottled brown tarnish on a white background that you could see from half a mile away. It faced you all the way down the street, its sickening beam of evil Wicker Man energy running right past my house.

The building was a congeries of incongruous boxes, like a vertical Fallingwater. It’s bricks were castle-sized light gray blocks, about 18" x 12". The main column of the castle was an imposing cyclopean juggernaut, something Corman would film from far below, to create the sense of heaviness about to topple. The column was cubical, about 2.5 stories high, and slightly to the right of the center of the box-sprawl.

The house was on a hill. The driveway moved up the hill, and then down and slightly to the left and into a “garage” under the center of the building. The main column (with the hand) was to the right of this “bridge,” and the garage below was full of plants. I mean, the entire floor of the garage was a gapless array of 2" square black plastic seedling pots. They were perfectly arranged and contiguous; from a distance it looked like an array of hexagonal tiles, each with a scrawny green shoot.

It took my years before I had the courage to climb the hill and approach the front door, which you could not see until you got very close. When I finally did, I was awestruck—for the door itself was a Frankenstein monster, made of overlapping rust-colored metal plates stitched together into a patchwork of smooth dark-brown metal flesh. Like the cover of the Necronomicon in Evil Dead. The door was ancient—a old as Abdul Alhazred—and yet it surged electrical power. It had a electric numberpad combination lock in place of a handle or latch. The buttons were bronze and the pad was pewter, like a piece of steampunk Atlantean technology.

We called this terrifying anomaly the Hand House. You might expect to encounter such building in LA, where the owner would be an artist or other eccentric, and he would use it to host decadent parties. But its presence in our conservative and hyper-normal neighborhood made it both shocking and uncanny. Uncanny because what kind of adult would design and build such a wonderwork, something that was clearly a tribute to the Universal Monster aesthetic.

I suppose the Hand House would be officially designated as postmodern, given that its conflicting signifiers were on display. It was electronic, white, and staggered in the FLW way. The monumental door was archetypal steampunk way before steampunk had been picked out (1976 vs 2002—see the Ngram Panel below). Its interior was modern and functionally compartmented. This made the erection of its Frankenstein exterior intentional and ironic; it “hung” on the interior like an discordant façade.