The story of Mary Casavecchia and the house she won't leave began decades ago.
There was a brief, disastrous marriage to a man who made her heart flutter, then abandoned her. She was on her own, raising two children on a bookkeeper's pay.
She never wanted to marry again. When it was time for Linda, her oldest, to go to school, Mary Casavecchia did an unusual thing for a woman in 1965: She bought a rowhouse by herself in Northeast Philadelphia.