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How cool would it be to live in a funky old house rent-free? Ask eight people in Queens who are doing so right now. Better yet, give it a try: There's a vacancy at the Onderdonk House in Maspeth. Of course, there's a catch. Tenants must be home every night and perform light maintenance and cleaning. But besides the work - and living in a place likely to attract visits from the beyond - it's not too difficult being the caretaker at one of the local historic house museums.
"It's the best place I've ever lived, by far," said Roy Fox, caretaker at the King Manor Museum for the past 13 years. "There isn't even a close second."
That's easy for him to say: His digs are probably the nicest of the five houses in the borough that have caretaker apartments, all of which are equipped with modern amenities. Fox's flat, carved out of the attic during a restoration completed in 1989, has a bedroom, a study, a large kitchen and an alcove bathed in light, where Fox gazes over his "back 40" - the verdant expanse of King Park - and putters away on his computer.
"We had just moved from Detroit and I was talking to my wife's boss," he said. "I told her we were probably going to rent a place in Park Slope and she said, 'If you don't object to living in a free apartment, I can save you some time.' I said, 'If you're looking for my attention, you've got it in spades; what are you talking about?' So I shook hands with the [Parks Department] commissioner at the time, and we've been here ever since."
The main purpose of having a caretaker on the premises is, of course, security. But the Louis Armstrong House and Archives in Corona deploys uniformed guards, director Michael Cogswell said.
The house has never been open to the public without appointment, and is maintained just as Armstrong's widow, Lucille, left it when she died in 1983. So there is no caretaker's apartment. But the house is undergoing a thorough restoration and will open to the public next spring with its architectural integrity intact.
"We looked into the possibility of having a caretaker...