Charles N. Parker built this house for his wife, and their children, and lived there the rest of his life. According to his daughter Annette Sechen, “The lot at 54 Ridgewood Place was . . . . a tiny lot and my father seemed to think that only he could design a livable house on such a small, precipitous lot. The footprint of the house covered the entire lot with only two to four feet of uncovered land all around. There was no place to park a car. My father designed a half-timbered cottage, one story high on the front, two stories on the right side, three in the back where the basement had a door to the outside, and four stories on the downhill side where there was a garage under the basement. Access to the garage was from the service alley. Utility roads ran behind almost all the houses in Grove Park. There was a turntable in the garage where we parked the car and then pushed it around to face out. It was not hard to do and even as a child, I could push it. Our house was quite comfortable and we never seemed to be on top of each other. There were two bedrooms on the ground floor and one on the second plus two packing rooms, as Mother called them.”