THE DOWNEAST DILETTANTE

SIX MONTHS AND 100 DEGREES AGO

2012-01-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

I awoke at 6:15 this morning. The sun was rising, the sky a clear brilliant blue, the temperature minus three--yes minus three--- degrees Fahrenheit. Now, two hours later, it is a balmy minus one. According to the online weather report, the windchill is -21). Welcome to little Antarctica. Is it possible that only six months have passed since the hottest day of last year, and now it is 100 degrees colder?

On that day, with temperatures flirting with the 100 degree mark along the Maine coast, , not a cool breeze to be found. At the hottest part of the day, I was driving North on I-495 through Massachusetts, heading back to Maine. At five P.M., after I exited onto 95 to Maine, the New Hampshire toll booths ahead looked like the Gates of Hell, summer traffic, rush hour traffic, and people heading to and from the beach traffic, all backed up on the steaming black pavement.


The Emerson house in York village, dating to the early 18th century, site of the Decorator's show house,.

Fifteen miles further up 95, edging toward the Maine toll booth, I cracked, and veered off highway at the York exit and headed for the ocean. In York Village, a lovely history proud town founded a few seconds after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, I was momentarily distracted by the Olde York Decorator's show house, held an 18th century house in York Village. Ever mindful of my readership, I intended to take photographs for the blog, but was firmly (but pleasantly) told that I might not do so. As with most decorator show houses, the mix was evenly balanced between very good and very bad. Most compelling to me was not the decor, but an 18th century painted floor treatment that had survived through 200 years of family ownership.

In the neighboring village of York Harbor, which split off from York proper when it became popular as a fashionable summer colony in the late 19th century, I left the air-conditioned discomfort of the car to stroll along the water. What confronted me was not the expected cooling of the late afternoon ocean breeze, but rather a wall of heat, apparently blowing straight in from Morocco.

The village of York Harbor is anchored by a large colonial revival building, housing a theatre on the second floor above former storefronts. Built in 1895, it is attributed to architect William H. Dabney, whose also designed 'Redcote', a charming small shingle cottage built in 1882.

I had not wandered around York Harbor for years. Though much has changed in the world, the prevailing tone, architecturally and socially, is still English and aristocratic. The architecture is a handsome mix of crisp early New England, and shingle and colonial revival styles from the resort days. The big surprise was that the shops, of the usual sort that service summer colonies---tweeds and tearooms, linens and fancy groceries--- had almost completely disappeared, with only a few offices occupying former commercial spaces.

At 7:30 PM, the light was still strong, the temperatures still in the mid-90's, and the beach was as busy as it were 2:30 in the afternoon

Beaches are rare in Maine, rocky ledges not so much. The little beach in York Harbor is bracketed on one side by Stage Neck, looking for all the world like a luminist painting by Kensett in the early evening heat.

York Harbor, as painted by Martin Johnson Heade in 1877

As at Newport, a public cliff walk separates grand old summer cottages from their ocean frontage.


The principal club, The Reading Room, is in an English picturesque style building, designed by James Purdon in 1905, splendidly located on the cliffs overlooking the harbor.

As at Newport, a public cliff walk separates summer cottages from their ocean frontage. Beyond the reading room, this buttressed wall with its corner turret supports the terraces of the house.above

Do not be deceived by these photographs. The breeze that evening was not the cool salt tinged ocean breeze one expects, but rather a solid wall of heat from North Africa


The rambling white house is Milbury Meadow, designed by John Russell Pope in a non-classical mood for Harold C. Richard in 1926. According to John Harris in Moving Rooms, the house contained a 17th century oak paneled drawing room imported from England, since destroyed when fire gutted the interior.


A classic, and almost archetypal Maine cottage, this superb example has escaped the insensitive modernization and 'upgrade' fever that has infected so many.

The very English Episcopal chapel was designed in 1906 by Henry J. Hardenburgh, best known as the architect of the Plaza Hotel. A bench in its lovely sunken garden invites contemplation---of the portapotty at the opposite side of the garden.

For another view of York Harbor, I recommend this post from one of my favorite blogs, Streets of Salem.

HISTORIC INTERIORS: A Country House Near Boston

2011-12-27T22:40:00.000-05:00

Blogging is very self-indulgent. One gets to think out loud about one's interests, and share the musings with interested readers---who, with their comments, give the blogger new insight into old passions.

I've been thinking a great deal this year about the graceful old Federal houses of New England---those first flowerings of design from our young country, that so well reflect the ideals, political and social, of the founders, and that for so long defined the look of most New England towns. In particular, I determined to write about a group of country houses, those with the newly fashionable oval rooms in particular, built around Boston between 1790 and 1820. I don't flatter myself that I have new insight to add to the impressive body of scholarship published about these houses over the last hundred years, but hope that you enjoy my light summaries.

What brings me back to the subject of oval rooms today is a group of late 19th century photographs passed on by a friend---but more about those in a moment...

McIntyre's drawing for the entrance front of the Vale, which looks backwards to the Palladian tradition of Somerset House, more than to the newly fashionable neo-classicism that characterized the Federal style (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

McIntyre's drawing of the first floor plan (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952

'The Vale', in Waltham, Massachusetts was designed in the 1790's by the great carver-architect of Salem, Samuel McIntyre, for merchant prince Theodore Lyman. Lyman began development of his estate in 1793, laying out a park and garden in the informal English style of Capability Brown, with a stream dammed to form an ornamental lake, and glasshouses against a brick wall, in which Camellias and other exotics were grown.

The entrance front in the mid-19th century, showing McIntyre's completed design. The Greek Revival entrance portico is an early 19th century addition

The house designed by McIntyre, completed in 1798, was based on designs in English builder's pattern books, but executed in wood, the plentiful building material of New England, rather than the stone of Old England. With his typical mastery, McIntyre translated details like quoins and pilasters, meant to be stone, to wood with high effect, yet the scale (the main block was only fifty feet wide), unlike its English prototypes, was domestic, not palatial.

The Ballroom as it appeared in the early 20th century.

The composition was Palladian, with a separate kitchen wing connected by a hypen, balanced a few years later by a ballroom wing. The center hall led directly to an oval room centered on the garden front facing the glasshouses, referred to by the family as the 'Bow Parlor'.

The Bow Parlor, as it appears today. The white painted Hepplewhite chairs are part of the original Lyman furnishings

Lyman lived in great style in his new house. After his death, it passed to his son, and in turn his grandson, Arthur Lyman, treasurer of the Lowell textile mills. What had been one of the grand houses of the area at the beginning of the century was by now dated and old fashioned, and not suited to the more expansive scale of living made possible by industrial age wealth. Fond of the old house, Arthur Lyman hired the local firm of Hartwell & Richardson (no relation to H.H. Richardson, about whom more in a minute) to enlarge and remodel the family homestead in 1882.


First floor plan as it appeared before 1883 renovations. Note the long curved interior walk to a privy at top right, forming one side of kitchen courtyard, and at a further extreme, a two-holer in the shed at the upper corner. An indoor water-closet may be seen left of the bow parlor . (Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

The new plan, with modern interior plumbing, but the outside privy still survives. The staircase has moved to left of Bow Parlor

Their first design was for a complete transformation of the house, and was not executed. Evidence is strong that Arthur Lyman had second thoughts about how drastically he wished to alter the old family homestead, and the final design, completed in 1883 sought to save some of the character of McIntyre's design, even to the extent of re-using the second floor pilasters by McIntyre to frame the new two story bays that pushed out from the entrance front. Although respectful by the standards of the time, in fact McIntyre's elegant composition was irrevocably altered and subsumed by the new house. Inside, mantels were replaced, high wainscots installed, yet the Bow Parlor and the Ballroom both survived untouched, as artifacts of the family's past splendors.

The rejected proposal for renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Hartwell & Richardson's accepted design for the renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Interior details in the 'Colonial' style for the new staircase and parlor (American Architect & Building News)

Mr. Lyman writes to American Architect explaining his desire to preserve as much as possible of the old house

Which brings us back to the photographs that my thoughtful friend supplied. She thought I might recognize them (I'm a bit of an idiot savant at recognizing buildings from minimal evidence---emphasis on the idiot part), and indeed I did. They are 21 views of the interior of 'The Vale' after the Hartwell and Richardson remodeling of 1883. In the rooms can be seen a mix of 18th and 19th century furnishings accumulated by several generations before a 1930's 'restoration' that sought to do away with many of the Victorian 'colonial' flourishes of before. Like their ancestor before them, that generation of Lymans preserved the Victorian parlor, with its oak woodwork and fire surround of deMorgan tiles. Today 'The Vale' is owned by Historic New England.

Please click on pictures to enlarge

The Bow Parlor. The French style furniture suite is original to the house

Two views of the new family living room in the location of the old kitchen. The tiles surrounding the fireplace are by William deMorgan

The ballroom looking toward the cross hall

The cross hall looking from the new staircase toward the ballroom

The second floor landing

The Drawing Room. Two of the White Hepplewhite chairs can be seen

The cross hall toward family living room

Dressing room, opening to entrance portico roof

Two rooms in the nursery suite. Ever thrifty, the Lymans retained the 1850's ingrain carpeting.

The bedroom above the Bow Parlor

Two views of the master bedroom.

A present day view of the master bedroom, after being stripped of its Victorian decorations in the early 20th century (photo uncredited from Historic New England Website.

Present day view of the garden front. The central bay of the Bow Parlor remains as McIntyre designed it.

FURTHER READING:

Before we end today's lesson, it is worth noting that Arthur Lyman's sister, Lydia, married Robert Treat Paine, a housing reformer descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. They lived across the street, on property given them by her father. When they remodeled the existing house on that property, they hired the other Richardson, H.H. himself, as their architect, and their naturally landscaped grounds were a collaboration with Frederick Law Olmstead. For that house, click HERE

For previous Dilettante posts about lost Federal country estates in the Boston area, please click HERE, HERE, and HERE.

For more about The Vale, click HERE for the Historic New England website

TWO DAYS BEFORE (AS SEEN ONE DAY AFTER)

2011-12-26T11:53:00.003-05:00

I'm working on two of my usual sorts of posts, but I'm suffering from the after-effects of a little to much food, candy, wine, and general holiday cheer this morning, so you'll have to wait. Overeating was a problem this fall as colder weather set, but I am happy to report that after the last few days, I finally have had enough food. Way enough.

The local Historical Society's 1815 house, decorated for its Holiday open house. The wallpaper is an Adelphi reproduction of an early 19th century paper found in another local house (Click HERE for more). The ship in the painting, the 'Ranger', was built only a few dozen feet from this room.

At dinner last night, over smoked salmon and crab mousse, friends and I were commenting about the relative lack of Holiday decorations around town this year. Was it an effect of the poor economy, or was it because our village suffers from a surfeit of 'Good Taste', and therefore people are too timid to put on a display that doesn't involve more than a few white twinkle lights--here the Dilettante confesses that no matter how much 'Good Taste' he may suffer from the rest of the year, he does love the occasional over the top kid-pleasing, crowd-pleasing, awe-inspring Christmas light display. Nothing says Christmas like electric Santas visible from space.

The local bookstore after the rush. Earlier, the counter was a frenzy of gift-wrapping . For those who don't have a good independent bookstore nearby, I can only say I'm so sorry.

For me, the Christmas shopping season begins not on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but on the 23rd of December. If only the canned Christmas music that has accompanied my daily errands in stores for the last six weeks would wait that long, the world would be a better place.

Without, a local restaurant in the former blacksmith shop (click HERE for more) had almost the only bright lights on Main St. Within, a bartender wearing a Santa hat was ready with two martinis for us. That's my idea of a Santa.

At the other end of the Christmas decorating spectrum was the sweet, restrained Charlie Brown tree at the local Library. Under it were placed donated presents to be taken later to the area homeless shelters. Beneath the gloss of affluence that veneers our area, shelter occupancy and food pantry demand are at an all time high, even as our accidental Governor, although once homeless himself, continues to demonize the poor.

In this part of Maine, the biggest Santa this season has been Stephen King. His output of horror stories belie a very generous man, who has given tens of millions to this region, in the most thoughtful and personal of ways. Click HERE for that story.

RICHARD RUSSO TAKES ON AMAZON

2011-12-13T20:06:00.001-05:00

For all who love books and community, this Op-Ed piece from today's Times. Read it, and make certain that your next book purchase isn't online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/opinion/amazons-jungle-logic.html?_r=1

SOLON MAINE, VIA CHINA AND ROME

2011-11-30T08:39:00.000-05:00

On the first Sunday in November, the weather was gray and indifferent, not pleasant enough to encourage outside chores, not bad enough to stay inside with a book. Even as I was contemplating this dilemma, knowing that outdoor chores were really the correct answer, the phone rang. It was Sidekick, in much the same mood, wondering if I might be interested in a road trip 'up' to the Colby College Art Museum in Waterville (although actually due west a couple of hours, like all trips inland in Maine, it feels 'up'). Road trip with a favorite partner in crime or chores? The decision took about 1.3 seconds.

On the outskirts of China, a Greek Revival farmhouse with beautiful Ionic columns


Further down the road, this handsome whitewashed brick Federal was once the summer home of Ellerton Jette, who was the chairman of the Hathaway Shirt Company, whose long defunct factory was once Waterville's major employer. Here was housed much of the collection of American art that Jette later donated to the Colby Art Museum.

For those too young to remember, 'The Man in The Hathaway Shirt' was one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time. Hathaway was a small regional manufacturer when Ellerton Jette went to David Ogilvy, then arguably the most powerful man in advertising, with a tiny budget and convinced him to take on the Hathaway account. The rest is history. When the Dilettante was little, Dunham's of Waterville, with its rows of pastel oxford button downs was where we all got supplied with our Hathaway shirts and Bass Weejun loafers.

Not quite two hours later, after a drive through China, we arrived at Colby. The campus is a handsome one, created in the 1930's. It is a classic of its era, the creation of one Dr. Bixler, then the ambitious president of what the then small regional college. Sitting on Mayflower Hill, its Georgian buildings and quadrangles were inspired by the great early Universities, including Harvard and the University of Virginia.

The original 19th century Colby College Campu

The centerpiece is the Miller Library, a Colonial Revival building with a whiff of Independence Hall in its architecture. 191 feet high, it was, until the 1970s the tallest building in Maine. (Since you ask, the current tallest building is an apartment building in Portland. At 203 feet, it ranks 46th or 47th---depending on how you interpret the Wikipedia information---among each State's tallest buildings. Only Vermont, North Dakota, and Wyoming rank higher, I mean, lower.)

The Miller Library on the 'new' campus at Colby College, for years the tallest building in Maine.

We parked and strode to the museum entrance, only to be confronted with a chain link fence with a sign that said 'Closed for Renovation until November 8th'. We had checked the schedule online before leaving home, and on the museum's schedule page found no evidence that the museum was anything but open. As it turned out, the closure was mentioned on the home page, but we had googled 'schedule', thus by-passing that page. You'd think those smart people at the museum would have troubled to mention it on their schedule page also, wouldn't you? Thank-you. So would I. Especially on the schedule page. Really.

The museum was closed to prepare for the construction of the new Lunder Pavilion, to house a collection of artworks donated by the Lunder family, heirs to the Dexter Shoe fortune. While I find it a handsome design, I question the agressive way in which it breaks scale with the surrounding buildings.

Colby's collection is well worth the visit. Among the works we didn't see that day are:

John Singleton Copley
Mrs. Metcalf Bowler (Anne Fairchild), 1758-1759
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ellerton M. Jetté

Winslow Homer
The Trapper, 1870
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mrs. Harold T. Pulsifer

John Marin
Stonington, Maine, 1923
Watercolor and charcoal on paper
21 3/4 in. x 26 1/4 in.
Gift of John Marin, Jr. and Norma B. Marin

Fairfield Porter
Stephen and Kathy, 1963
Oil on canvas
Museum purchase from the Jere Abbott Acquisitions Fund

Regrouping, we decided to save the day by going through Rome---and then continuing on to South Solon and visit the South Solon meeting house, with its amazing frescoed walls, for our dose of art.

In Norridgewock, on the banks of the Kennebec, this 18th century tavern hangs on, barely....

Hungry, we stopped for lunch in Skowhegan, an old mill town on the Kennebec, where a few years ago HBO filmed 'Empire Falls', based on the novel of the same name by Richard Russo, about...an old mill town. The first time I went to Skowhegan, decades ago, the last log drive was taking place on the Kennebec---millions of logs being floated downriver for processing. Not environmentally sound, but a stirring sight nevertheless.

The last log drive on the Kennebec. In places, one sees the Kennebec as it appeared 240 years earlier, when Benedict Arnold led his troops upriver to Quebec during the American Revolution

The 'Empire Grill', the old diner from the movie, had closed, and a sports bar offered no sustenance. On the strip heading out of town, we found a family restaurant, in what appeared to be a converted Pizza Hut---the architecture is unmistakeable. Perhaps here I should mention that a friend refers to the road out of Skowhegan as 'the driveway to Quebec', and one definitely senses the French Canadian influence in the area culture.

For these two hungry tourists, the defining moment was when we spotted Poutine on the menu. Somehow, in a lifetime of trying all foods bad for me, this one had eluded me, a Canadian logger favorite of French Fries covered with brown gravy (ever the effete elitist, I was about to type 'sauce', but in fact, it was gravy) and melted cheese curd, and in our case, crumbled bacon. Appalling in concept, delicious in execution.

Poutine. Okay, so it wasn't Lutece, but trust me, we licked the plate clean.

We reached Solon in the mid-afternoon bellies full, arteries clogged (did I mention that we also had the restaurant's home-made meatloaf sandwich, well prepared and delicious---comfort food on a crisp fall day,on the largest slices of bread I have ever, ever, ever seen? It was a sandwich for Brobdinagians). Solon is an old town, its streets lined with handsome buildings that have see better days. In this part of Maine, the way of life is often hard, employment scarce, and the smug pleasures of the coast, romanticized and ordered to the satisfaction of the well to do, are far behind.

Up in the middle of nowhere: the Solon hotel anchors the town. A friend said 'Oh yeah, the Solon hotel. R.E.M. played there'. One learns to expect the unexpected in rural Maine.


As in most of early 19th century Maine villages in more prosperous times, the evidence of talented builders using Asher Benjamin's pattern books for inspiration can be found. This lovely little Greek Revival doorway, complete with triglyphs and metopes (however oddly spaced in the apex of the pediment) can be found on a Cape on Solon's Main Street. In this part of Maine, tin roofs are the norm

Across the street, this oddly shallow 19th century house, not even 12 feet deep, is irresistable.

The road to South Solon

A handful of early 19th century farmhouses survive on this high ridge--this example has escaped modernization, and has yet another lovely pattern book door surround. It sometimes seems that the early builders could do no wrong.

At the meeting house, we spent a happy hour marveling at the 1950's frescoes in the late afternoon fall light. While there, we were charmed by the appearance of a young man who had grown up in the neighborhood and had brought his son to see the murals and the pew where his father had sat when he was a boy. For a full account of the Meeting House and its frescoes, please click HERE

We decided to go home by way of Athens, and mapped out our trip, only to find that the road petered out to a single dirt lane. With the light waning, we decided this was not the day to be lost driving about the woods of Maine, and turned around and head down to I-95. All was not lost, though, for we were rewarded on that back road by this view of Saddleback Mountain and the Rangeley hills an hour distant.

Leaving the Meeting House, a rainbow illuminated a sky that echoed that of the frescoes within

The view from a field near Athens.

(Skowhegan was also the home town of Maine's estimable Senator, Margaret Chase Smith. In this season of really silly presidential hopefuls, here story is worth recounting. Click HERE for the Dilettante on Mrs. Chase)

ELSIE GOES REGENCY

2011-11-21T10:27:00.001-05:00

From Elsie deWolfe, who gave us such deathless design advice as "I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint", came this design for a house in the 'Modern Regency' style in 1926. It was published in Arts & Decoration, and appears to have been a promotional gimmick, much like the "House of Tomorrow" or "Idea House" spreads that one reads in today's magazines, with lots of cross-promotional ads. Whatever the intent, it presages the style so beloved of Hollywood moguls for the next 2 decades.

One suspects that the future Lady Mendl did not actually do the architectural design, nor the professional looking sketches--or maybe she did, for the plan is very eccentric.

Beyond that, I know nothing more about it. You heard it here.

LATE AFTERNOON, ASHINTULLY, OCTOBER 2009

2011-11-10T22:34:00.000-05:00

I intended to visit Ashintully again this fall, but schedule, weather, and a bad cold all played against me. Well, procrastination was involved also, but the point is, I didn't get there.

I'm a road trip kinda guy---I've never met a road I didn't like. A car, a road, I'm there. Some are better than others, but all offer something to think about. I remember watching the landscape of urban industrial New Jersey flash by from the back of a town car on the way to the Newark Airport from Manhattan one day years ago. It was a grey day, the driver was listening to a classical station. The bleak industrial landscape reminded of Charles Sheeler paintings, and of F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of a similar landscape on Gatsby and Daisy's fateful drive. Suddenly, in that unlikeliest of surroundings, I saw a palace fit for a czar rising on a hill to the left. At second glance, it proved to be a just a high school, but its proportions, classical details, and pastel painted stucco surface would have been at home on the banks of the Neva. In the time it took to travel a thousand feet, Daisy Buchanan had been replaced by Natasha Rostova.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Main Road in Tyringham, Massachusetts, one of those beautiful winding lanes that the Berkshires do so well, taking one through hill and dale, past farms and little hamlets of toy buildings. Ethan From is long forgotten in this 21st century version, hardscrabble farms replaced with weekend houses. I'm sorry that I was rushing to my destination. It was the last hour of the last visiting day of the season, and I didn't dare take time to stop, not even to photograph perfect Federal farmhouses, not even to photograph the surprising cottage at Santarella (speaking of Hansel & Gretel), the former studio of Henry Hudson Kitson, sculptor of the Lexington Minute Man statue. Fortunately, one can remedy this with the aid of Wikipedia Commons:

According to the Santarella website, the 'thatched' roof is actually composed of 80 tons of asphalt shingles. But, I digress---This post is really about Ashintully, which I first read about decades, centuries, ago in an article in Horticulture. I'd ever since wanted to see it, and finally I managed to be in the Berkshires on a visiting day, and racing from the other garden wonder of the region, Naumkeag, I arrived 45 minutes before closing.

The Ashintully estate was created by Egyptologist and politician Robb de Peyster Tytus (An Egyptologist! Hard to believe that nowadays one need only to own a pizza chain to become a politician), who combined three farms in the Tyringham valley to create a 1,000 acre estate. Titus had Hoppin & Koen design a large classical house (with more than a whiff of that high school in New Jersey in its aspect) sited halfway up a mountainside, with spectacular views across the Tyringham Valley and Bartholomew's Cobble.

Titus died young, of tuberculosis, and in due order, his widow married Canadian publisher John Stewart McLennan. Their son John McLennan, the noted modern classical composer, inherited Ashintully, and took up residence in a farmhouse at the foot of the hill, on the corner of Sodom Road. Here he created a garden, both modern and classical, full of surprises and mystery. I've visited many beautiful gardens, but never one more affecting.

These pictures cannot convey the full experience---the gray fall afternoon, the sensation of ever-chaging vistas---one moment formal, the next wild and asymmetrical, the allusions to other times and places, and the sound of the jet of water in the central pool mingled with rustling leaves, and the sesation of fine mist blown in the air from the fountain as one approached. It is a complex garden of simple elements.

The stairs to a little mount topped by a finial are mysterious and dramatic, and the effect breathtaking.

The Regency Bridge

The Ram's Head Terrace

A minimalist vista, created with little more than a pair of finials and judicious pruning

The big house, known locally as 'The Marble Palace', burned in 1952. This gate at the end of McLennan's garden leads to a trail up to the house site.

The dramatic ruins of the gardens of the old house are slowly being reclaimed by nature, but at the end of the trail one is rewarded by the breathtaking sight of the columns of the house breaking the sky, with the valley spread out below---Greek ruins, New England style (and yes, I do realize the columns are a Roman order).

For a more comprehensive history and description of this amazing garden, with pictures taken in high summer, please click HERE for a link to 'Great Gardens of the Berkshires' at Google Books.

And courtesy of the superior search skills of a favored commenter, is a lovely video about the history and making of the garden at Ashintully. Click HERE.

THE ROCKEFELLER GATE HOUSES

2011-11-06T21:46:00.000-05:00

I first consciously saw these buildings when I was five or six, and my little eyes nearly popped out of my head---veritable fairy tale houses sitting at the edge of the woods in the enchanted landscape of Mt. Desert Island. Whither Hansel? Gretel? Sleeping Beauty, are you there?

Designed in 1930 by Grosvenor Atterbury, they were built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. as protective entrances against motor cars for his great public/private project, the network of carriage roads that traverse Acadia National Park and the Rockefeller estate in Seal Harbor on Mt. Desert Island. Rockefeller's vision for the park was one in which the public could travel and recreate quietly within the wild landscape. With the gatehouses, beautifully designed and maintained carriage trails and their ornamental bridges, the effect is often less of nature unspoiled than of a very sensitively landscaped country estate amidst spectacular surroundings, and very beautiful it is, regardless.

The two structures, with their unlikely evocation of rural France, one at Brown Mountain in Northeast Harbor, and the other at Jordan Pond in Seal (we'll deal with the Jordan Pond House and its famous popovers another time, class) are far more charming than they have any right to be. Textures and picturesque details are all at high volume, but in the hands of a master designer like Atterbury, they are always under control, each playing its part in the whole.

THE JORDAN POND GATE HOUSE


Drawings and b&w photos from Historic American Buildings Survey

The larger of the two gatehouses is at Brown Mountain. Long used as housing for park staff, it is no longer in use as an entrance, in favor of a new gate a hundred feet away.

THE BROWN MOUNTAIN GATE HOUSE

Details count: Naturally, masonry repairs have been necessary over the years. Originally, under Atterbury's watchful eye, local craftsmen carefully distressed brick, and used dark mortar. Repairs have been made with smooth modern brick, and wide white mortar joints. While obviously the work of a good mason, they stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Yeah, I know I'm a grump, but details count. (When I'm King, things will be different. Fake plastic shutters will be first to go). We so need to give the National Parks more money---or is this one of those sometimes misguided but well intentioned edicts from the Department of the Interior in which new work on historic buildings must be identifiable from the old?

Looking at the new gate, I am reminded of Vincent Scully's great quote about the new Pennsylvania Station after the demolition of the old one: "We used to enter the city like Gods, now we scurry in like rats". And so though luckily the Gate House is in no danger of demolition, one still enters more like a racoon. When these gate houses were built, Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., Beatrix Farrand and others, as well as Atterbury, were involved in the design of public circulation and space and they chose their materials wisely to integrate with the landscape and designed entrance to the beautiful land beyond as an event. We so need to give the national parks more money. And who designed those Leaning Tower of Acadia trash cans?

I had originally intended to natter on at length about the history of the Gate Houses (the Dilettante does tend to go on), but while researching facts, I read a piece by Aimee Beal in the National Park Traveler that tells the story so well that anything I write would be tantamount to plagiarism. For that account, click HERE.

For the Dilettante's account of another section of the Rockefeller Carriage Roads, click HERE

A BUSH ON THE POINT IS WORTH TWO IN THE WHITE HOUSE

2011-10-15T23:06:00.002-04:00

One of Maine's most popular tourist attractions is Walker's Point, the summer home of former President George Bush (but you already knew that, didn't you?). Even when I passed through the neighborhood late last March, I was astonished by the constant stream of traffic coming and going from the scenic turnout looking out to the Bush estate. Once a popular spot for fishermen, the rocky mini-peninsula was purchased by a group of land developers in the late 19th century who called their development Point Vesuvius. From them George Herbert Walker, Bush I's namesake and grandfather, purchased the property, and in 1904 hired the Boston architectural firm of Chapman & Frazer to build a substantial summer cottage near the end of the point. The new house was christened 'Rock Ledge' (betcha thought it was always called Walker's Point).

While not a masterpiece of the shingle style, the large (135 feet from end to end) house contoured agreeably to the site and took full advantage of the 360 degree views.

These photos of the house when it was one year old are from an article by Barr Ferree in the short lived 'American Homes & Gardens' magazine, July 1905 issue, and show the house as it originally appeared, before alterations to the service wing, and changes in the windows.

The floor plan reveals precious few bathrooms for the family and servants for a relatively large house, even in that less plumbing-centric era.

The interior appears, um, to have been a bit dumpy, but comfortable, even by the standard of the day...

...and not much appears to have changed.

Uncredited photo, Parade Magazine

The superb porch has long since been enclosed, and the stone columns covered with trellis. I seem to remember reading somewhere once that this is Barbara Bush's favorite room, and has several times been damaged by hurricanes. Even in this badly scanned illustration (when will Google Books develop quality control in their rush to digitize? When???), the pleasure of the old open porch, with its swing, striped awnings and shining floor, practically at the edge of the sea, is obvious.

Chapman & Frazer designed a second house on the property a few years later for Walker's son, which has long since been demolished.

For the complete text of the article in 'American Homes & Gardens', click HERE.

SITTIN' ON THE DOCK OF THE BAY

2011-10-04T15:33:00.002-04:00

Conversation up here at the beginning of the summer centered on real estate. Indian Head, a large and not particularly attractive new-ish house in Northeast Harbor, sold for $12,500,000, the first time a residential property in Maine sold for over $10,000,000 (not that many owners and realtors haven't tried to hit that mark over the last decade). Hardly Hamptons prices, but enough to give hope to many whose expensive properties had been languishing on the market. As the summer ended, conversation had turned to another sort of real estate. private docks.

Indian Head, Northeast Harbor (Landvest listing photo)

Docks have always been a feature of the waterfront here---first in the 18th and 19th centuries, as transportation, fishing, and trading hubs. By the end of the 19th century, private docks became prevalent, as the shoreline was increasingly colonized by summer folk, and the ocean and harbors became pleasure grounds. As to real estate prices, conventional wisdom is that a less expensive, but no less grand, property near Indian Head has failed to sell for lack of a dock.

For many years, one thought very little one way or the other about docks. Utilitarian and often picturesque, they seemed a natural part of the landscape. In recent years, as environmental concerns have become paramount, and the shoreline ever more divided and built upon, and planning regulations fortunately ever more stringent, they have become a subject of controversy, and even rancor, pitting neighbor against neighbor. The nadir was reached a few weeks ago when our local paper published a long letter by a writer publicly and nastily reacting to his new neighbor's proposed 300 foot dock on a stretch of shore that does not have particularly deep anchorage, and where there traditionally have not been piers.

After being at several parties around the county where these discussions had come up----every town around here seems to have its newly arrived gazillionaire who wants to extend his property far into the ocean itself, with resultant backlash, I started thinking about a few grand docks from the past, built in a simpler era when such a structure was considered an ornament to an estate.


The dock at Borderland at High Tide

And at low tide. Walking up the pier are H.B. Slaven's grandaughter, Orillia, and her friend Helen Chapman, not incidentally later to become the Dilettante's grandmother

The first dock was built around 1903 by H.B. Slaven on 'Borderland, on the eastern shore of our town. Slaven, a successful pharmacist in San Francisco, had joined his brother Moses in the construction business, and together they invented a dredging machine that was essential in the building of the Panama Canal. After retiring from that business at the end of the 1880's, he purchased and operated the Chase Granite company, whose quarries occupied over a mile of shorefront. By the early 20th century, concrete was replacing granite as a construction material, and Slaven began developing the property as a summer estate, with extensive outbuildings and services. Although there existed a long granite wharf, extending far into the bay, for the quarries, Slaven had a wooden pier with pavilion constructed.

Borderland from the air. At the upper right can be seen the huge stone pier that was loading dock for the granite quarries


The hall fireplace and granite steps of Borderland were quarried and cut on the estate

As for Borderland itself, Slaven died in 1904, the year after construction, and it was eventually inherited by his daughter Nila, who chose to live in a smaller house on the property, and rented it to a roster of tenants of strong literary leanings---first E.B. White in the 1930's, before he bought his farm in neighboring Brooklin, then A.J. Cronin, who wrote Keys to the Kingdom there in the 1940's. The main house was razed in the 1960's.

On the other side of town, W.P. Palmer, president of the American Steel & Wire Company of Cleveland, later absorbed by U.S. Steel, built a dock with a large Adirondack style gazebo, one of several such structures on his estate.

1910 renderings by John Calvin Stevens of proposed house for William P. Palmer (Courtesy Maine State Historic Preservation Commission)

The cottage that Palmer actually built, 1921

Palmer originally had John Calvin Stevens design a Colonial Revival cottage for the property in 1910, but did not actually build a main house for the estate until 1921. The Stevens design was abandoned in favor of a Tudor design, by an architect whose name has been lost with time. That house was demolished in the early 1950's.

The dock at Hauterive, the Miles Carpenter estate at Bar Harbor (photograph by E.E. Soderholtz, Country Life in America, August 1911)

And over in fashionable Bar Harbor, Mrs. Miles Carpenter, a stylish New York socialite, purchased an estate overlooking Frenchman's Bay, and promptly had the Boston firm of Andrews, Jaques, & Rantoul enlarge it and lay out extensive gardens as a background for entertaining. An elaborate seawall was built as part of the garden scheme. at each end of the wall was an opening. At the south end, the opening gave access to the dock, which was formed an extension of the garden axes, from the croquet lawn, down steps through the sunken garden, to a lower terrace, and through a pair of gates whose posts were cast in Persian style by E.E. Soderholtz . At the end of the long pier was an elegant pavilion in French Medieval style.

The seawall at Hauterive, as seen from the dock (photograph by E.E. Soderholtz, Country Life in America, August 1911)

The dock at Hauterive overwhelmed the more modest pier of the immediate neighbor to the south, E.T. Stotesbury's Wingwood House (Town & Country, August 1933)

Hauterive was inherited by Mrs. Carpenter's daughter, Agnes Miles Carpenter, who continued her mother's stylish ways (many of her Paris gowns survive in the Costume institute at the Metropolitan Museum)--she remodeled the gardens (future post), and had society photographer Baron deMeyer redecorate the dining room in sleek red lacquered moderne style in the 1930's, a stark contrast to her mother's Louis XVI drawing room across the hall, furnished a generation earlier by Lord Duveen.

The MVN Bluenose and its pier, as seen from the remains of the terrace at Hauterive, in startling contrast to the view above, just 50 years before. (1960's postcard view by Paul Knaute)

In 1953, despite protests from the Miss Carpenter and other neighbors, including Lady Harry Oakes to the immediate south, the abandoned Stotesbury cottage was purchased by the Canadian National Railroad as site for a new terminal for its Bluenose Ferry service to Nova Scotia. The view from Miss Carpenter's terrace, once so peaceful with her elegant dock, was never the same.

After Miss Carpenter's death in the early 60's, Hauterive itself was demolished. For many years after, the grounds were kept in good condition, and the iron gates to the pier remained. In recent years the property has become a Holiday Inn (where the Obama family stayed on their visit to Maine last year), the grounds are in ruins, and returning ghosts would be hard put to find their way to the long vanished dock.

TEAR DOWNS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AMONG US

2011-09-05T23:34:00.005-04:00

Much as we like (or dislike) to think that the tear down phenomenon---someone buys a perfectly nice house, demolishes it, and puts up something larger, and usually less lovely---- is an invention of the last two decades, a result of greed and pretension, it actually has ever been thus, particularly in times of prosperity.

I thought of it today as I came across these photos of a pleasant small summer cottage on a point of land near our village. Relatively small, it is a pleasant mansard roof shingled cottage built in 1886, typical of many built for the professional classes up and down the New England Coast. The owner was Professor Junius Hill, head of the music department at Wellesley College. He was part of a small music colony that sprang up around the neighborhood in the late 19th century, and that included composer Horatio Parker, head of the music department at Yale, world famed violinist Franz Kneisel, considered the father of the modern string quartet, music critic Henry Krehbiel, pianist Bertha Tapper, and around the corner, Effie Kline, owner/manager of the Boston Ideal Opera Company.

The name of Prof. Hill's architect is lost in time, but it seems likely that he had plans drawn up by one or another of the good architects practicing around Boston at the time. In the mid 1890's, the Hills remodeled their cottage, adding an octagonal tower in the most modern shingle style.

I've always been fascinated by this tower. A much more sophisticated work than the original house, it is architecture of a high order---note particularly the rear elevation with its secondary tower for the upper flight of the staircase, and the smooth balance of horizontal and vertical design elements. The tower's suavity and quality of detail relate closely to work being done in the area, including three here in town, at about the same time by William Ralph Emerson, the Boston architect credited with originating the shingle style.

A second possible attribution, though I'm sticking with Emerson, was George Clough, the 'Official City Architect of Boston', who was born here, and maintained a summer practice that include several summer cottages and renovations. But, frankly, his work just isn't usually as good as this tower.

I'm sorry I never got to see this cottage, but I was born 40 plus years too late. As our town's reputation as a summer colony grew, a wealthier crowd began moving in, old cottages were enlarged, and new cottages tended to be built on a larger scale. In 1912, the Hill cottage and the neighboring Rose cottage, a hip roof affair of no particular distinction, were both purchased Coburn Haskell. Haskell was married to a daughter of one of the Hanna brothers, the industrialists who dominated Cleveland business in the gilded age. Haskell himself was the inventor and with B.F. Goodrich president Bertam Work, manufacturer of the modern golf ball.

The Haskells tore down the Hill and Rose (above) cottages, erected an enormous stone and shingle cottage on the site, designed by a Cleveland architect named Howe, completed in 1913. With sixteen bedrooms, and 10 bathrooms piped for both fresh and salt water, the house was one of the largest in town, and to this day dominates the entrance to the Harbor. However expensively constructed, it is an uncomfortable design visually, with a large roof whose wide overhanging eaves are unconvincingly supported by anemic brackets below.

So, you see class, tear downs are nothing new...

For the story of a more recent tear down, and its appalling replacement, click HERE

PS: Since originally posting this, I realize from several of the comments that I didn't make clear that actually I don't find integration of the pleasant small cottage and the stylish tower particularly good---but that nevertheless, I like the tower itself very much (as well as the cottage)

THREE MINUTES OF SUMMER

2011-08-21T22:02:00.000-04:00

Life has been uphill this summer----tightly scheduled, hot and muggy, and played out against an unenthusiastic economy. However, one occasionally steals a moment here or there---an hour spent with cousins too seldom seen, mussels with bright amusing friends, likewise too seldom seen (have I remembered to send a thank-you note? Is September too late?). This weekend, was especially crowded with people and events, but one was able to steal a happy hour from packing for an Antiques show to visit with a cousin too seldom seen, and then, in the evening, dinner with friends also too seldom seen, up for the week.

I'll soon be back to posting about antiques, architecture and the usual subjects, honest, and if DPC is still speaking to me, I'll finish four pieces I've been working on for him. In the meantime, three of the nicer minutes of my weekend---for which I had to pay by working Sunday to catch up. No fun goes unpunished up in the Puritan air of eastern Maine:

Here is the Dilettante having sunset swim with friends before dinner, a fog bank rolling in to take off the heat of the day---Thanks Wendell, dinner was delicious!

And here is the Dilettante having a glass of wine with another friend, admiring her lovely late summer garden and watching boats go by, after both of us spent a twelve hour day working at an Antiques show for benefit of a museum whose boards both sit on. The shadows are growing longer....

Back soon, with the usual tales. In the meantime, a preview of things on my mind:

A Lost Garden

Fletcher Steele Down East

A grand house that saw many lives

Chicago spends the summer Down East

Greater Down Town Head Tide, Maine

Lord Kavanaugh's Mills

Down East Real Estate Highs & Woes

The Genius of Place

Columns along the Kennebec

Columns beside the Golf Course---A Temple for the Arts Down East

Republicans are not always ungrateful

A Federal Case

Elsie Does Regency

Looking at Color Theory

When the Dilettante went green

An artisan's bungalow

Rich Down East Dilettantes & their personal museums

(Not to be confused with poor Down East Dilettantes & their personal blogs)

Mr. Rockefeller & Mr. Atterbury channel Hansel & Gretel

See you soon.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

2011-08-15T01:51:00.010-04:00

I was flipping though the September 1922 issue of Town & Country---ever up on current affairs, the Dilettante---when this demure debutante caught my attention. Understated to the point of plain, who would guess she would one day advise mothers to wash their children's hair in dead champagne, let alone commission for herself a garden in Hell?

PINK PALACES

2011-08-02T16:13:00.007-04:00

The Dilettante is completely flattened by projects at the moment, leaving no time to blog, and I probably miss all of you more than you miss me, as I thrive on feedback (as the guy said, I don't care what you say about me as long as you say something). I am happy to report, however, that so far this summer there have been no exploding cars, although the heat, with barely any rain, has been almost unbearable, reducing the lawn to dust, and the Dilettante to a sweaty puddle (am I supposed to say 'sweat'? It seems so non-u).

Pictured below is a house in Castine, Maine, designed by fashionable architect William Lawrence Bottomley for Miss E.K. Branch, a banking heiress from Richmond Virginia, related to writers James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow (who herself summered in Castine). For my article about this fascinating house, in the current of issue of Portland Monthly, please click HERE.

There have been a few interesting developments in Dilettante Land. Bloomberg News wanted to take my picture for an article in which I'll be quoted, but the photographer didn't show up. Guess he was busy photographing the Mayor's new house in Southampton. Just as well. One is not completely fond of being photographed.

In addition, I'll be back soon with a major announcement (fingers crossed), or at least some interesting gossip. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's hot, it's nearly 5:00 PM, and I know there's a martini with my name on it somewhere. Sidekick?

OLMSTED AND A GATE

2011-07-08T09:26:00.014-04:00

This gate is a footnote in landscape history. Subtle, deceptively simple, it is only as one examines it that one realizes how good it really is. It is the main entrance to Pointe d'Acadie, the long demolished George Vanderbilt estate at Bar Harbor. Like all of his family, Vanderbilt was an inveterate builder, and in 1889, even as he was acquring the 146,000 acres of North Carolina that would become the Biltmore estate, he had Frederick Law Olmsted at work landscaping this smaller (by Vanderbilt standards) project at Bar Harbor. Olmsted's work at Pointe d'Acadie, a prelude to his final great work at Biltmore, would include new roads, carefully composed clearing and tree plantings, a new stone terrace and stairs that would enhance the transition of the large shingled house to the landscape, and the damming of a small cove to be used as a naturalistic swimming pool, Bar Harbor's first, complete with rustic Adirondack style cabanas. All this even as George Vanderbilt was embarking on the largest private building project of the era at Biltmore. The site of 'Pointe d'Acadie', which Vanderbilt had purchased for the then large sum of $200,000 (Approximately $7,000,000 in today's dollars) is a spectacular little Peninsula jutting into Frenchman's Bay, views of water and mountains on all sides.

Later highway construction has partially submerged the gate, but it is nevertheless a classic example of Olmsted's approach to designed elements in the landscape, subtle, with materials and shapes carefully considered in relation to the landscape. The sweep is broad and gentle, the granite coping carefully rounded and shaped. It is almost in rebuke to the massive Beaux Arts gate of Vanderbilt's neighbor, railroad tycoon John Stewart Kennedy of Kenarden Lodge (below).

The driveways at Pointe d'Acadie, carefully constructed to Olmsted's exacting specifications, although today not maintained to the manicured, daily raked, standards of the Vanderbilt era, have rarely needed major work since.

The terraces of Pointe d'Acadie with their broad shallow stairs to the lawns, with stonework and coping matching that of the gate, were similar to other examples by Olmsted, and typify his approach to integrating house and landscape. The terraces survived for many years after demolition of the house---I regret never having photographed them.

After the house was demolished, the lawns, seen above in the 1920's looking across to the Kennedy estate on the next point, were left to meadow, which probably would have pleased Olmstead, and the effect of nature, as enhanced by Olmsted, was gorgeous.

Vanderbilt's naturalistic swimming pool started something of a trend at Bar Harbor, and several other estates featured them. Above is are early spring views from the ruined cove side pool (nature reclaims her own) at Old Farm, the George Dorr estate, looking across to Pointe d'Acadie.

In recent years a new house was built on the Pointe d'Acadie site, which is private property. Old Farm is now part of Acadia National Park, which was founded by Dorr.

INTERMISSION: ON THE ROAD TO CASTINE

2011-06-27T00:51:00.004-04:00

So many deadlines, so little time. I'm knocking down four articles for publication, opening the shop for the season---delayed by the endless bad weather and a sewer construction project that has deposited more bulldozers, one lane traffic, and orange cones to block the drive than I ever imagined existed, over the last two months, and basically, I am running backwards to catch up, and finishing up a renovation project for a friend that should have completed a month ago. So, backwards I run, never catching up. I promise, promise, promise to come up with something interesting once the Fourth is behind me.

In the meantime, a couple of favorite houses on the road to aristocratic Castine, one of Maine's loveliest and historic villages, its streets still shaded by elm trees and lined with handsome white houses and gray shingled cottages overlooking a beautiful harbor. My assignment was to interview the owners of one of the most unusual houses there--but more about that, and breathtaking Castine itself, another day.

Both of these houses, dating from the first quarter of the 19th century, have that 'just right' quality---the elegance and spareness that characterizes early Maine architecture at its best----gently landscaped without the suburban displays that people nowadays just feel they must have. When did people start forgetting that sometimes what one leaves out is more important than what is added?. For me, this is how an old building looks best in Maine.

In Maine, the old houses were usually attached to their barns by a series of sheds, so that one did not have to go outside on howling winter nights to use the privy, collect firewood, or feed the horses. In local parlance, this type of building is known as 'Big House, Little House, Back House and Barn' (an excellent book by that title explores the type further). Along the Castine Road, there are many old capes where this arrangement survives. My particular favorite is the one above, built for a farmer of refined taste, painted a subtle washed gray. In the fifty years that I've been admiring it, it has remained in this perfect state---neither shabby nor tarted up, shaded by massive oaks on its rolling old lawn, sheds and barns rambling off to the side, free of 'tasteful' renovation.

Almost across the road, this house also sits unchanged behind its stone wall, having somehow miraculously survived 200 years without the indignities of replacement windows or doors. Behind it, fields slope down to the mouth of the Bagaduce River. The worn white clapboards, hand sawn, give pleasing texture, and the thin muntins and wavy glass of the windows have a delicacy that Marvin cannot duplicate, no matter what they say. The yard is full of old fashioned shrubs. Looking at the huge Kolkwitzia blooming in front, one understands its common name, 'Beauty Bush'.

Next door is a small ancient cemetery, with beautiful cut stone wall. Everywhere along the roadside, wildflowers bloom alongside garden escapees gone wild. Every year, this lovely season, hard won and delicate, seems to go by at greater speed, and one races to soak it all in. There are many versions of Maine, but in Spring and early summer, this is the one I like best.

FAIR WEATHER

2011-06-20T12:20:00.005-04:00

Finally, for Father's Day, the weather was perfect---the kind of day that we have seen far too seldom this year---blue skies, no haze, not too cold, not too hot, a breeze making waves lap gently on the shore---in short, perfect for lunch with parents and sister on the deck at the cottage. Dessert was shortcake, with the first native strawberries of the season, deep red and succulent.


From the deck, a view beyond the neighboring dock to the Mt. Desert Hills

As my father and I sat enjoying the view, he reminisced that he owes this piece of real estate good fortune to his maternal grandfather, a speculative sort, who bought the small piece of ocean frontage in the Depression for $35.00 (Thirty-Five Dollars). unable to turn it for a quick profit at $85.00, my great-grandfather instead purchased a cute little dairy cottage from a local farm and had it moved to the property, and later gave it to my parents, who added a large living room and a deck dramatically poised high above the edge of the beach (which is what we call the mix of pebbles and rocks along the shore in Maine)

Because of the unending bad weather this year, very few boats are out yet

My father went on to remember that later on, his paternal grandmother, who owned a larger place just down the road, decided after WWII to sell that cottage, for $2,000. Lest the reader be gasping in amazement, in that same era, the grandest shore front cottage in our town, 3 floors of hulking stone and shingle 16 bedrooms strong, on a 3 acre plot in the most fashionable summer neighborhood, was sold fully furnished, for a mere $15,000. The next time that house, still hulking, still fully furnished, sold, in 1963, the price was $55,000. That purchaser sold it a decade and a half later, now unfurnished, but hulking still, for an even million, a local record at the time. And so it goes...the last sale of my great-grandmother's cottage was in the early 80's, in the low six figures. The next time it goes on the market, it will likely be much higher, and the purchaser far more likely to be wealthy than before. And so it goes...

Looking directly down on the beach---when I was growing up, this was the best time for a swim, when the tide came up over the sun washed beach (yes, that's my shadow, increasingly large these days), and the water might be as warm as 60 degrees, though more likely 58. One doesn't do it as willingly now...

MEMORIAL DAY AROUND THE VILLAGE

2011-06-06T11:51:00.005-04:00

This post is a week late---I got distracted by architectural frivolity and Edith Wharton, and forgot I had these pictures.

Of course I spend many days of my life running errands, going to meetings and parties, passing through our village. But it is on Memorial Day that I slow down for a few minutes, literally smell the flowers, and stop and think about where I live. It takes an even harder heart than mine not to be moved by this day of remembrance, solemn and sweet, played out against the reluctant, delicate, spring.

The weather this year has been----how do I say this gracefully----perfectly, absolutely, shitty---cold and rainy 24/7, a slight improvement over the winter, which was grey or snowy 24/7. Above is an old untended crab apple at the edge of my field, the mountain behind obscured by cold fog. It was a perfect cloud of blossom the day before, disregarding all rules about wearing white before Memorial Day. Memorial Day came off hot and hazy, and by evening, the blossoms were gone. Life is short.

I wandered down the street to the parade. Around the corner, at the school, the band---a very good band---was warming up, not yet in formation.

And everywhere, in yards, hanging over fences, were lilacs and apple blossoms. The short week or two that lilacs are in bloom in New England are justification enough for the unbearable winters, and hot humid summers that we endure to enjoy another season of bloom. Almost.

A mill stream meanders through the village, emptying into the harbor from a small fire dam in the village. The small gristmills and sawmills, and even an early 19th century cotton carding mill that flanked it are all long gone, leaving a few traces. Just upstream from this view is a flat hollowed out ledge, where long before the settlers from Colonial Massachusetts arrived, the Native Americans who were here first ground their corn.

The combination of Memorial Day and spring makes one tend toward reflection, even---don't tell anyone---sentiment. My family is long settled in this region, and were active in the affairs of the village when I was growing up, and we were related to everyone, but now, half a century later, our relatives are fewer, their houses occupied by people 'from away', the points of the compass have changed, and my father and I are the last of our line in town.

Above was my great-grandmother's lawn, sloping down to the millstream and a view of the harbor and main street. Her white Victorian house, with its bay windows and faded parlor filled with curiosities, is long since demolished, but I still walk past this spot, 45 years later, and remember the scent of the old fashioned monkey faced pansies freshly planted around the birdbath in the garden, the sugar cookies baked in a wood cook stove, the mints kept in a covered dish on the sideboard. Her father was a 19th century schooner captain, born around the time of the Mexican war. His oval framed portrait glared down on one in the parlor. The past was always just around the corner in my childhood.

Looking toward Main Street, the crowd gathers for the parade. A Civil War cannon on the lawn of the Legion Hall was fired, with great noise and even greater smoke, a momentary reminder of the spectacle of war, and the parade was begun.

The village square, above, is but a triangle. Originally, the parade ground was a quarter mile away, at the top of the hill in front of the meeting house. There mustered the local militia for the War of 1812, when we briefly found ourselves British again.

When I first remember this parade, there were still survivors of the Spanish American War. Someday will someone write that when they first saw the parade there were still survivors of the Iraq war? I look at my friend holding her granddaughter's hand, and like so many before me, I make the futile wish that by the time she's our age, war has ceased to exist, but of course I know better ( I also marvel at the passage of time: When did my friends become grandparents???).

At the bridge where the millstream empties into the harbor, a remembrance is read, a gun salute is fired, a floral wreath thrown into the harbor, and taps is played, followed by the National Anthem. My neighbor, an extreme conservative, and I, an extreme liberal, are the only ones who remove our caps, to my great surprise. There is not a dry eye in the house. For many, it is the remembrance of personal loss, or battles fought. For others, the sadness and futility of wars past and wars to come. I'm just glad I was wearing my Wayfarers. Walking by two hours later, a friend and I note that the wreath has floated out to sea.

The local fire department loves a parade. I remember the thrill of riding in the old Mac pumper as a kid, of going down to the firehouse to look it over with my dad. It was definitely one of the ten coolest things in town. Perhaps still is.

The local historical society decided that it needed a float---the only one---in the parade. It was sort of cute, a capsule rendition of the town's history. Following behind, at the end of the parade, the soldiers of tomorrow's wars. "When will they ever learn?"

Did I mention lilacs everywhere?

Facing each other across Main Street, two versions of remembrance. The Legion Hall, in the old Academy building, and a lawn with thousands of white flags, symbolizing those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The blue flags represent soldiers from Maine.

After the parade, some gathered on the lawn of the parsonage for bluegrass music

And everywhere through the village, old white houses that have lived through more wars than can be counted.

In a moment of personal remembrance, I walked up my grandparent's former driveway, for the first time since they ceased to live there 20 years ago, though I pass it nearly every day. The magnificent elm tree on the lawn, which barely survived them, is gone, but a couple of the elms that lined the drive are still there, and the forget-me-nots still bloom in the shrubbery

And that's it. The sweetest, most nostalgic week of the year up here at the eastern edge of the country. In two or three more weeks, it will be summer, and the world will be on our streets. Celebrity sightings will be made, real estate and sailing gossip will rule conversation, checkout lines at the grocery will be unbearable, and the snarled traffic on Main St. will remind one of the Hamptons.

LAND'S END

2011-06-05T12:12:00.007-04:00

One tries to avoid excess in all things. Heaven forfend the Dilettante should ever gild a lily, post too many pictures, drink too much diet Coke, let alone say too much---so I did not include a picture, as I should have, of Land's End in the previous post about Lippitt's Castle in Newport, a grim affair erected on the rocks opposite Edith Wharton's summer retreat---one which she decamped soon after construction of the hulking affair opposite her gate on Ledge Road. Partly I did this in the assumption that Land's End, much published, was well known enough, more so than the two successive neighboring houses that formed basis for my ramblings.

Naturally, a commenter plead for pictures of Land's End, and The Ancient, a formidable researcher, came up with many. Such requests, and such heroic efforts, should be rewarded, and herewith, a selection of photos of Land's End, none of which I had to seek out myself.


Land's End, entrance front as originally built

Land's End entrance front after being Whartonized and Codmanized.

Land's End was originally built in the 1860's for Samuel G. Ward, the brother of Julia Ward Howe, who was a symbol of pre-gilded age Newport, when it was a summer colony of 'nice' millionaires and high minded intellectuals, and who, like Henry James regretted the loss of the resort of simple fields and seaside verandas. The architect was John Hubbard Sturgis, who coincidentally was married Ogden Codman's aunt (and who would remodel the Codman family home in Lincoln, also later to be done over by Ogden.

Sam Ward, as would Edith Wharton a generation later, decamped Newport and Land's End for Lenox, Massachusetts, where he built Oakswood, one of McKim, Mead & White's finest early shingle style houses. (Oakswood itself would be replaced by another forbidding Edwardian castle, Shadowbrook, which also went up in flames as did Lippitt's, but that is a different story).

Oakswood, Sam Ward's Lenox cottage by McKim, Mead & White

And herewith, photos of Land's End as it appeared after the 1890's remodeling by Ogden Codman---whose collaboration with Wharton led to the book which helped change the taste of fashionable America---itself looking a little dated to 21st century eyes.

Land's End, view from garden designed by Wharton's niece, Beatrix Jones, later Farrand.

Dining Room. Most of the furnishings in these rooms can be seen in later photographs of The Mount in Lenox during Wharton's occupancy

Drawing Room, looking through to sun room

The sun room, full of sparkling light from the sea, despite the heavy Louis-Louis valances.. From the windows at right, one assumes that the sun was partially blocked by Lippitt's Castle looming on the near horizon.

Mrs. Wharton's sitting room, displaying the taste 18th century taste for all-toile rooms, revived by Codman, and enduringly popular still

The formal entrance court designed by Beatrix Jones Farrand with Trellis by Codman, replacing the rocky landscape shown in the first view of the entrance front at top of page. In the background is the stable and coachman's house, converted by a later owner, Mrs. Oates Leiter, to a cottage known as 'The Whim'.

Much as Mrs. Wharton decried the increasing shallowness and show of Newport society, her own tastes ran to formality, and the rocky former pasture that had originally surrounded Land's End were flattened and groomed to formal lawns, as above. (The eight preceding photos are from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Ocean front of Land's End today (Asergeev)

Click HERE for an article about Land's End today.

Postscript: Two weeks ago, I wrote a post bemoaning some serious cataloging errors in the Historic American Buildings survey. The madness continues, as included in the Beinecke's collection of Wharton photographs is this image, cataloged as of Land's End, but in fact of the August Belmont cottage, By-the-Sea, on Bellevue Avenue.

ACROSS THE STREET FROM MRS. WHARTON

2011-05-30T00:20:00.012-04:00

In 1903, Edith Wharton, who had spent summers at Newport since childhood, sold Land's End, the cottage that she had renovated and decorated with the help of Ogden Codman, but had not occupied since 1900. The project had been so successful that the pair collaborated on The Decoration of Houses, which was both Wharton's first book, and which was one of the most influential design tomes of its era, helping to sweep out the gilded excesses of the late 19th century, and bringing to the fore a preference for classical simplicity.

Although Wharton had long had a love-hate affair with the resort, and her reasons for departure were many----the lack of intellectual discourse endemic to places of fashion, and the damp climate among them----I like to think that (and I realize that this is not an officially sanctioned notion, but mere whim on my part) perhaps the last straw was in 1899, when the view from her elegant octagonal sun room was compromised when construction commenced on grim new house across Ledge Road, one whose unknown architect clearly had not yet absorbed Mrs. Wharton's design principles.

Breakwater as it appeared from Mrs. Wharton's lawn

That house, named Breakwater by its owner, Charles Lippitt, son of, and later himself a governor of Rhode Island, was one of Newport's largest cottages, a fair approximation of an English Castle---a little Belvoir, a dash of Windsor, a soupcon of Carnarvon---and the very image of what Wharton's friend Henry James a few years later would so famously refer to as one of the 'white elephants, all house and no garden...witless with no soul', that had risen up to replace the simpler wooden cottages of his own youth in Newport. The pile of mortar forbiddingly dominated its spectacular site on rocky ledges at the end of a point between Bellevue Avenue and Bailey's beach.

In an 1899 news story, a reporter for the New York Times speculated that Mr. Lippitt's grand structure, then under construction, was to be an apartment house, or first class hotel, so large were the foundations.

But it was not to be a hotel, much as the reporter felt one was needed in Newport, but merely the Lippitt's summer cottage, three floors of gloom, in sharp contrast to the sparkling marble and gilt palaces around the corner.

The site had long been a favored spot for local fishermen, and was also traversed by the last stretch of the Cliff Walk, that ancient right of way that passed between mansions and shore. Finding both facts unsatisfactory, Lippitt proceeded to eject the public from his property, building a wall to prevent the Fishermen (it was soon demolished in protest), and to cut off access to the Cliff Walk, complaining that picnickers could be seen at the edge of his lawn. He failed in both attempts.

Lippitt died in 1924, and the castle which had burned around the same time, was not rebuilt. In 1926, the ruins were purchased by architect John Russell Pope, as the site of a new summer home for his family.

Pope's had a long relationship with Newport. In 1901, he designed Whiteholme, Beaux Arts palace for Mrs. Robert Garrett, later Mrs. Henry Barton Jacobs, widow of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Whiteholme, the Garrett cottage at Newport

And in 1912, he married Sadie Jones, the daughter of the very Social Pembroke Jones's of Wilmington North Carolina, whose own Bellevue Avenue cottage, Pembroke Lodge, a fussy affair loosely based on the White House, was designed by Hoppin & Koen (who also designed The Mount, the Lenox house Edith Wharton built after leaving Newport)

In 1915, Pope completed one of his most famous houses, Bonniecrest in Newport, for Stuart Duncan, the Lea & Perrin's King. It was a grand and faithful representation of a Tudor country house, based most notably on Compton Wynates. For the design of his own cottage on the Lippitt site in 1927, Pope chose a simpler Olde English idiom, that of a half timber English cottage, albeit on a scale probably never dreamed of by the simple yeomen whose cottages inspired it.

Bonnie Crest, the Stuart Duncan cottage at Newport, by John Russell Pope. The property immediately to the left was Pen Craig, the home of Edith Wharton's parents.

The Waves, John Russell Pope's own house at Newport, built on the ramparts of Lippitt's Castle

Using the ramparts of the Lippitt Castle as the starting point, Pope built a house, which for all its deliberate aged charm, nevertheless was attuned to its site in a very modern way, seeming to grow out of the very ledges upon which it was built, its weathered natural materials in harmony with the land in a way that the castle had never been. A rambling arc plan allowed every room sun and views, and protected a courtyard garden that evoked the work of Jekyll and Lutyens in England. Taste had indeed changed in the fewer than three decades that separated the buildings. Facing the house across the garden was Pope's studio, where he indulged passions for painting and photography. The Popes named their new house The Waves.

The south front of The Waves

The Waves, garden front

Two aerial views of The Waves from Country Life, 1935

After the Popes, the Waves was owned by Josephine Hartford Bryce, heiress to the A&P Grocery fortune. Her daughter, Nuala, married Senator Claiborne Pell, and built a cottage, Pelican Lodge, at the northern end of the property. Later, The Waves was purchased by Barclay Warburton, an heir to the Wanamaker's Department Store fortune, who divided it into condominiums, which it remains to this day. In a 1961 article about the decline of Newport, Time Magazine reported that the dining room alone now held a four room apartment.

A long hall ran the length of the garden front

The Studio

Looking at the interiors of The Waves in old black & white photographs, one has to remind oneself that these rooms were actually alive with color. This was brought home to the Dilttante when he realized that in these 1930s photos, the library chairs are covered in the very same Chinese inspired block print linen that he used for a pair of chairs in the 1970s, in a palette of green and brick and blue on tan ground.

Would Mrs. Wharton have approved of the Waves? Might she have remained across the street? Doubtful, but it is entertaining to speculate the course of American literature had she not left...

All uncredited black & white photographs of The Waves from the Gottscho-Schliesner Collection, Library of Congress.

HABS AND ACCURACY: You Still Have to Be Able to Think for Yourself

2011-05-22T11:29:00.011-04:00

Fast quiz: Which of these two houses is the Ruggles House at Columbia Falls, Maine?

A.

The answer of course, is that 'B' is the Ruggles House, one of the most exquisite Federal era structures in Maine. Photo 'A' is of the James P. White house in Belfast, Maine, designed by Calvin Ryder, and one of the finest Greek Revival houses in the state. Both photos are from the estimable online catalog of the Historic American Buildings Survey, the staggering catalog of American architecture, humble and grand, started as a works project during the Depression, and which continues its important work today. Many buildings long lost are thus preserved for our collective memory. Many of the earliest photographs in the catalog are evocative in a way that modern pictures cannot be, as below:

That's the good news. The bad news is that both photographs appear in the catalog entry for Ruggles House with this caption:

10. SOUTH FRONT FROM THE SOUTHEAST
HABS ME,15-COLUF,1-10

In my frequent wanderings through the HABS catalog, I have found many such errors, enough sadly, that they make suspect the accuracy and reliability of the catalog as a whole. I confess, as if the regular reader hadn't noticed, a passion for the facts---accurate, hard facts. I enjoy the hunt, separating urban legend from what really happened, reconstructing a scenario from sometimes conflicting accounts, bringing logic to the proceedings. It's why I prefer the New York Times to Fox News, any political leanings aside. When I'm wrong, as I often am (don't tell my friends that I admit it), I am glad of being corrected and set on the path to truth and righteousness. And so it is always disheartening to discover that a major and authoritative source has strayed.

One assumes, of course, that the huge job of scanning and uploading these thousands of images was performed by interns, and in fact hopes, given the evidence, that it wasn't done by Library of Congress staff. Or, in fairness, perhaps the pictures have been mislabeled from the beginning, Either way, most of the errors are easily enough spotted by merely looking at picture and caption and stopping for a moment to assess the information given. Internships are important----they give a student experience in a chosen field, they give needed assistance to organizations and institutions whose resources are stretched. But interns need the ability to think critically, and to ask questions---and staff need to supervise, else you wind up with examples like below, also from HABS, this time of Chateau Sur Mer, the grand Wetmore cottage at Newport designed by Seth Bradford, and variously altered by Richard Morris Hunt, John Russell Pope, and Frederic Rhinelander King.

It starts out well enough, with this photo of Chateau Sur Mer, captioned as a view from the northwest, as indeed it is:

But things start to deteriorate a few photographs later, with this view of the opposite corner, described as from the northeast.

Um, no, that would be from the southeast. Looking northwest. One looking at this photograph cold, neither knowing the geography of Newport, or this house, would have no reason to doubt the caption, all the more reason that it should be accurate.

From there, things go rapidly downhill----For example:

14. MOON GATE FROM THE SOUTHWEST HABS RI, 3-NEWP, 59A-1
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-14

Obviously, regardless of the caption, this is a photograph of the stair hall, looking North-northeast, if anyone cares, but one imagines the hapless surfer of the photographs scratching his head to try to figure out what in hell constitutes a moon gate in the picture.

But that's as nothing---let's continue on our tour of Chateau Sur Mer via HABS. The alert reader will immediately note that not all is what it claims to be:

15. SOUTH GATEWAY ON BELLEVUE AVENUE FROM THE SOUTHWEST HABS RI, 3-NEWP, 59B-1
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-15

16. PORTER'S LODGE AND ENTRANCE ARCHWAY FROM THE WEST HABS RI, 3-NEWP, 59C-1
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-16

18. VIEW OF STABLES FROM THE SOUTHWEST HABS RI, 3-NEWP, 59E-1
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-18

19. FRONT OF STABLE FROM THE SOUTHWEST (CLOSE VIEW) HABS RI, 3-NEWP, 59E-2
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-19

24. LIGHTING FIXTURE IN BILLIARD ROOM
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-24

26. SOUTH WALL OF LIBRARY WITH DESK CLOSED
HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-26

The photo of the library is my particular favorite, because as anyone can seethe desk is open.

But, back to serious. Each photograph is numbered on the negative, as one sees. The numbers are tied to a photo caption list, from which the captions seen here are generated. Hence, the level at which whoever did this was not paying attention had to be off the charts, and likewise the lack of supervisory checking. For example, the photo accompanying caption # 18, claiming to be the stable, with # 24 written on the negative, indeed does match the caption for # 24. And # 24, numbered 30 at the top of the negative, appears again later, as itself with this correct caption:

30. GREEN PARLOR, LOOKING WEST FROM THE BALLROOM HABS RI,3-NEWP,59-30

I'm sure I appear didactic, but it is worrisome that the organizations charged with research and accuracy sometimes fall down beyond the point of acceptable human error. Recently, while seeking material for a recent project, of importance to the money-making career enhancing portion of my life, not merely blogging fun, I wandered to the Bangor Public Library. I needed something very specific from a vintage issue of Country Life in America, and knew that the Bangor Library had a complete run of the magazine. And here's where the trouble began. The Bangor Library, a magnificent structure designed by Peabody & Stearns, expanded a few years ago, more than doubling its faciility with an addition by Robert A.M. Stern Associates. More recently, they purchased another buiding across town for use as a 'last copy' storage center, and moved their bound periodicals there. Inconvenient though it is for the general public---it is not staffed, hence materials have to be requested and brought a few at a time to the main library building, a delay of sometimes days. But at least they are not throwing out the primary materials, as are so many. I went to a reference librarian, who looked up Country Life in her periodicals catalog, and determined that there were no issues in the collection from the 1930s. As they had all dates both before and after, and the library had had a complete run, this seemed unlikely---that they would for some reason dispose of just those years and keep the rest. I gently pushed, and hit a complete stone wall---basically 'catalog says NO'. I went back again a few days later, and this time at least got her to find that the magazine had gone through several subtle name changes, accounting for the different blocks of cataloging. But, the issue I needed still did not appear in her list, and there the request died. A plea to at least check the shelves resulted, surprisingly, in refusal. But never underestimate a Dilettante in need of information. Finding a different person at the reference desk I asked a third time, laying out my case, and he quickly agreed that it was likely there, lost in the cataloging crack, would check himself, and within 48 hours had provided the needed issue. One still can't beat first hand knowledge and engagement in the task.

As for HABS, for all its flaws, where else would interested parties be able to find such wonders as a set of cross section drawings of Chateau Sur Mer? Or from the floor plans that a windowless room on the fourth floor mezzanine of one of the towers, accessible only by many far flung flights of stairs, and through a warren of attics and trunk rooms and service passages, was called the liquor room? And why? Is it where the Wetmore sisters stored their booze during prohibition? Where a dipsomaniac uncle retired to drink in secrecy?

Unfortunately, for many of the recorded buildings, the earlier the material, in particular, data pages are missing.

End of rant. In a couple of days, you'll be able to read the post whose research started all this.

In the meantime, for more about the Ruggles House, click HERE for a post on that most delightful structure.

For the full catalog entry in HABS about Chateau Sur Mer, click HERE

SO A DILETTANTE WALKS INTO A CONVENIENCE STORE, AND THERE'S THIS ELEPHANT...

2011-05-20T12:19:00.016-04:00

I used to think, even if not trendy or fashionable myself, that at least I had some bead about what was going on in those worlds. However, I guess not so much, because more and more, things get by me---and how.

While stopping for gas at a less-than-upmarket convenience store in a not-so-chic part of rural Maine the other day, I wandered in for a snack, and scanned the displays for my choices. All the usuals were there: Cheetos, salted peanuts, Famous Amos Cookies, Lilly Pulitzer Special Edition Animal Crackers, Snickers Bars, beef jerky----whoa, wait a brightly printed cotton pickin' second!

LILLY PULITZER SPECIAL EDITION ANIMAL CRACKERS???? In East Podunk? Anxiously awaited by the mill workers and fishermen stopping by for a six pack and snack on their way home from their very hard, very dirty, work, no doubt? Talk about ironic---I'm still trying to picture it--- "Forget that beef jerky, Mike, I'm gonna have me some of them Lilly Pulitzer Animal Crackers with my Bud tonight!"

It turns out, after googling 'Lilly Pulitzer Animal Crackers', that I am indeed the very last person on earth to know, let alone blog, about this, the strangest marketing marriage since Joe Namath donned pantyhose, but that doesn't stop me from duly noting my amusement. One wonders where the nice folk at whatever corporation now owns the Lilly label---I'm not interested enough to Google the answer---thought these 'special edition' crackers were going to wind up? Grocers in Palm Beach and the Hamptons perhaps? Or is this a clever attempt to broaden the brand, and we can soon expect Lilly Pulitzer for K-mart? They've got to do something to replace Martha now that she's gone to Macy's. No, wait, I've got it, Lilly Pulitzer for Carhart safety wear! Lilly Pulitzer steel toed work boots!

The Lilly Blog announces that 1.5 million boxes were produced, and placed in sometimes unexpected places (no kidding), in addition to a few saved for their stores, and that one can even get on their facebook page for finding them. Well folks, I found three of them, and I wasn't even looking. (click HERE for Lilly blog)

Already, they are apparently collector's items---I see them on eBay for thrice what I paid (silly reader---you didn't really think I'd just pass them by without buying a couple, did you?), so maybe I'll just put mine away for retirement. Right next to the Beanie babies.

As you see, once again, I'm behind the curve, but if you'll all promise to be kind, I'll tell you about the pair of pink and orange Lilly Men jeans I had back when I was a skinny teenager. On second thought, I've changed my mind. Not on your life. And all the pictures have been destroyed.

UPDATE: Color me fuschia pink and lime green with embarrassment. Upon closer inspection, I find that a portion of the proceeds from this special edition go to the Urban Arts Partnership. I can't make fun of that.

MOVING HOUSES: A LA ROCHELLE POSTSCRIPT

2011-05-15T22:05:00.004-04:00

Moving one's house has always been a popular pasttime in New England. Since the earliest days, buildings have been on the move, by land, by sea, by oxen or truck, whole or in parts. My own house, a cape built in 1814 was replaced when the family who owned it achieved a modest prosperity in the late 19th century and built a new larger house designed by William Ralph Emerson. Rather than demolish the existing house, where the owner's wife had grown up, they lifted it from its foundations, put it on greased logs, and then moved it across fields to its present location.


Drawings of the house that caused mine to be moved ( Drawings by W.R. Emersonformerly in possession of the Dilettante, now in the collection of Maine State Historic Preservation commission

In the neighboring town of Castine, Tory loyalists, not wishing to live in the new United States after the Revolution, took their houses apart, and transported them by boat to Saint Andrews New Brunswick, where they were re-erected, and their owners remained subjects of King George. Elsewhere in our town is a house built in Ellsworth, 15 miles away, in 1796. When threatened with demolition, it was purchased by a decorator who borrowed a barge from the St. Regis Paper Company (''fortunately, our family had stock in the company'') and floated it to her parent's summer estate here. And, in a post last year, I told the tale of Spite House, a Federal Mansion that took an 80 mile trip by sea from its original site in Phippsburg Maine (click HERE).

After writing last week about "La Rochelle" a grand old summer cottage at Bar Harbor, I was reminded of another traveling house (Click HERE for the previous post).


Early postcard view of three of La Rochelle's neighbors on West Street, built within a few years of each other, before trees and planting matured and gave some sense of separation. L - R, 'Sunset', designed by Fred Savage; 'Far Niente' designed by Bruce Price, and 'Aloha' designed by William Appleton Potter of Potter & Robertson

One of the fascinating things, to me, about fashionable summer resorts is how the desire to be near society trumped the need for a little elbow room, and how the variety of architectural styles, sit cheek by jowl on lots often as small as those in the city, making strange bedfellows in their architectural cacophony. West Street in Bar Harbor was no exception. The first house on the street was La Rochelle in all its French Renaissance glory. Its nearest neighbor, the summer cottage of Kentucky poet George Douglass Sherley was a log and stone lodge on a mere half acre of shorefront, and so it went down the street, as one passed shingle style, colonial revival, and Eastlake Victorian cottages by some of the most important architects of late 19th century America.

Photograph of the Sherley cottage by E.E. Soderholtz from The Country House, A Practical Manual by Charles Edwin Hooper, 1903.

The addition of the Sherley property allowed Mr. Bowdoin's cottage a central location on its property.

The Sherley cottage was built and designed by a local carpenter to Mr. Sherley's specifications sometime after 1900. When Mr. Sherley decided to give up Bar Harbor in 1912, he sold the land to his neighbor, Mr. Bowdoin of La Rochelle, who desired a larger lawn. The house, however, wasn't included in the sale. Mr. Sherley instead had the place dismantled, as if it were a giant Lincoln Log kit, and had the whole shipped back to Lexington, where he had it re-erected. And of course, I'd love to know if it still exists. I once saw a picture taken in the 1950's at its later location, but there the trail grows cold.

WHAT SURVIVES: LA ROCHELLE

2011-05-09T02:50:00.010-04:00

During the gilded age, when the remote Maine resort of Bar Harbor was considered second only to Newport on the summer social tour, partners in the Morgan Bank, or 'Morgan Men', as they were known, were mainstays of the opulent summer community. It was understandable. Their employer had long and deep ties to the resort---J.P. Morgan's wife, the former Frances Tracy, had summered there since childhood, when Bar Harbor was still called Eden and had returned most summers since. The great banker, more restless, traveled back and forth on his yacht Corsair, an imperial presence on the social scene. Louis Auchincloss, in A Voice From Old New York, remembered his parents, who summered in Bar Harbor, cancelling a previous social engagement when summoned to dine with Morgan aboard Corsair. When young Auchincloss questioned his parents---his father did a great deal of business with the Morgan firm---about throwing over their intended hostess for that evening, his mother simply told him that 'someday you will understand'.

One of the Morgan partners at Bar Harbor was George S. Bowdoin, a grandson of Alexander Hamilton---another of whose grandchildren was married to Morgan's son-in-law Pierson Hamilton, also a partner in the bank, also a Bar Harbor summer resident. Mrs. Bowdoin, the former Julia Irving Grinnell, was the great niece of Washington Irving.


The newly completed 'La Rochelle', 1903

Ocean Front

In 1901 Bowdoin purchased an in-town shorefront lot on West Street, and commissioned a cottage from architects Andrews, Jacques & Rantoul. Completed in 1903, the house , curiously urban in that way of houses in grand resorts---were it not for the ocean behind it, one could imagine this house in Kalorama---was a blend of French Renaissance & Georgian, built of brick and Indiana limestone. Large (Some 35 rooms on four levels) but not vast, elegant but not opulent, it was the first major brick house in a resort hitherto filled mostly with massive stone, shingle and stucco cottages. The new cottage was called 'La Rochelle' after the Bowdoin family's ancestral town in France.

First floor and grounds plan

Second Floor Plan

Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul, who designed many of Bar Harbor's finest cottages---Herbert Jacques summered on Schooner Head south of town---excelled in the design of integrated houses and landscapes, and 'La Rochelle' sat well supported by an elegant entrance court separated from the street by an brick and iron fence. On the ocean side, a huge curving terrace with lattice brick and limestone balustrade on the ocean bluff anchored the house to its site. An intimate sunken walled garden was adjacent to the entrance court. Although the architectural framework was provided by the architects, the layout and planting plan were by Beatrix Farrand, whose family had an estate nearby.

The sunken garden at 'La Rochelle', once upon a time, and last week

George Bowdoin died the same year as J.P. Morgan, 1913, and his son, Temple Bowdoin, also an associate of the Morgan Bank, died the next year. "La Rochelle' was inherited by the Bowdoin daughter Edith. Miss Bowdoin, intensely proud of her Huguenot heritage, sometimes styled herself as Edith Baudoin. Earnest and serious, a major supporter of the ASPCA, she was a firm opponent of the motorcar on Mt. Desert---a battle soon lost---and is best known today for her donations, both in Bar Harbor and New York, of watering troughs and fountains for horses.

The entrance portico is beautifully detailed. Sadly, the balsutrade on the entrance terrace, seen in the top photo, is lost.

After Miss Bowdoin's death in the 1940's, 'La Rochelle was acquired by the Tristam C. Colkets of Philadelphia. Mrs. Colket was the former Ethel Dorrance, daughter of John T. Dorrance, the Campbell's Soup king, who had summered at Kenarden Lodge south of town. The Colkets maintained 'La Rochelle' in perfect order---one of the last houses in Bar Harbor to be kept to the precise standards of earlier time, every shrub groomed to perfection, the lawns mowed in English stripes by reel mowers, the gravel in the drive raked daily, the shutters kept in perfect gloss.

Also lost are the brick balustrades that defined the terraces around the house.

After Mrs. Colket's death, 'La Rochelle' was donated to a favorite charity, The Maine Seacoast Missionary Society, which maintains the boat Sunbeam as a floating church, providing services to the islands of the region. As so often happens, the Mission took their lovely gift, and immediately started thinking of ways to change it. And change it they did, almost immediately. Down came the lovely brick balustrades, whose plinths had only the summer before held pots of perfect geraniums. Out went the French doors to the lovely iron balconies on the driveway side, replaced by solid panels topped by a single square pane of plate glass. The iron gates were removed. Inside, a partition went up, separating the central hall from the cross hall, and cutting off the vista of Frenchman's bay from the front door.

A small circular vestibule opens under the curved double stairs and looks ahead to French doors to the ocean terrace, and a 90 foot cross hall. Notice the curved mahogany door.

Although Ogden Codman is known to have done the interiors of the Bowdoin's Park Avenue town house, this picture of Mrs.Bowdoin's sitting room at 'La Rochelle' would suggest that he probably wasn't involved at Bar Harbor.

After a few years, happily, the Mission reconsidered these early changes. The partition was taken down inside, and although the windows have been replaced in recent years, with square heads instead of the graceful round head they once had, French doors were put back, although not as well designed as the originals, it is a vast improvement, and despite the loss of the balustrades, a chimney, and the formal landscape of the entrance court, I will complain less than usual, because unlike most of its peers, at least it survives and is respected.

Side terrace, once upon, and now. The eastern end of Bar Island, once owned by another Morgan partner, E.T. Stotesbury, is visible on the right. Stotesbury purchased it in the early 1900s and had intended to build a cottage there, but, his second wife clearly had other ideas about accessibility for entertaining, and the Stotesburys finally built a cottage on Eden Street, dead center in the heart of fashion

The sun never shines in Maine in May. When I picked up the camera, the sky was blue with puffy clouds. By the time I started taking pictures, blue had turned to gray. If one squints one's eyes, the neighborhood around 'La Rochelle' retains a bit of its old lustre. The house on the left, seen from the side terrace, is 'Reverie Cove', once the summer home of Abram S. Hewitt, mayor of New York, and later his daughters, founders of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. It too has lost its elegant terrace balustrades.

Another survivor near 'La Rochelle' is Greenlawn, built in 1884, and typical of the medium-size shingle cottages interspersed among the grander houses throughout Bar Harbor. Not so many years ago, the brick red windows shades were in every window, a perfect counterpoint to the blue trim.

Of the gilded age resorts, Bar Harbor's decline was more dramatic and final than that of any other. After weathering the vicissitudes of the Great Depression and World War II, a forest fire swept through Bar Harbor, destroying half the remaining great cottages overnight. 'La Rochelle', the first house on the West Street as one turned from Eden Street, Bar Harbor's grandest thoroughfare, missed the fire by only one building. Its neighbor on the corner of Eden and West, the exclusive De Gregoire hotel, burned.

The De Gregoire hotel on the Corner of Eden and West streets, burned in the Bar Harbor fire. A few hundred feet to the right, La Rochelle escaped the flames.

And there the tale would end, but for a tiny postscript: In 1905, 'La Rochelle' was published in House & Garden. The article was seen by a Hartford industrialist, Dr. George C.F. Williams, who so admired it that he commissioned Andrews, Jacques & Rantoul to design a smaller variation of the design on Prospect Avenue in that city. The Williams house is now the Connecticut Governor's mansion.

The Connecticut Governor's mansion

For the 1905 House & Garden article about 'La Rochelle', click HERE

AND THE ANSWER IS....

2011-05-03T15:08:00.003-04:00

Thanks to the intrepid Flo, yesterday's beautiful mystery house (click here) is a mystery no longer. The handsome house was built in Roxbury, near what is now the intersection of Washington St. and Blue Hill Avenue, around 1800 by one Thomas Kilby Jones, a prosperous merchant, as seen in the 19th century engraving below. It was demolished in 1898, as the tide of development overtook the neighborhood, which had become 'Grove Hall' which had been the name of the estate. General Dearborn never had anything to do with the house, and it is apparently just one of those labeling errors. Any study of history is a search for the truth, often obscured below many layers of urban legend.

The embarrassing part? I had gotten as far as the first page of the website that Flo found, and failed to click the link that would have taken me to the place of enlightenment.

The house had a checkered history, related here in an excerpt from http://www.gettingtotheroots.org/grove_hall_history:

"The Grove Hall estate and mansion stood at this crossroads for nearly a century from 1800 to 1898, although it served many different purposes over the years. The original owner, Thomas Kilby Jones, was “a prominent merchant and auctioneer of Boston and a gentleman of liberal hospitality.”¹⁵ He joined the First Church of Roxbury in 1804 and was a trustee of the Roxbury Latin School.¹⁶ In 1832 the original Grove Hall mansion was enlarged and became a hotel and summer boarding house resort. By 1837 it was owned by Edward D. Clarke and managed by C. A. Flagg. Bowen’s 1838 travel guide describes it as “a delightful resort for private parties, having every accommodation for their recreation and amusement.”¹⁷ The estate was converted into the American Orthopedic Institute in the 1840s by Dr. Alanson Abbe. The institute treated various medical conditions (curvature of the spine, paralysis of the limbs, club feet, etc.) and offered several regular school courses so young people could continue their studies."

And there you have it. Thanks Flo. My best regards to Frederic March. But now I have more questions: What sort of space did that pavilion at the top of the house hold? A study? The nursery? An observation room? Maybe even, as sometime happened, a ballroom? Or was it merely attic behind that ambitious facade?

AN INTERESTING HOUSE, & QUESTIONS WHOSE ANSWERS I DO NOT KNOW

2011-05-01T14:16:00.016-04:00

I have a particular fondness for the houses of Federal era New England---and if that house, as is increasingly rare, has survived in untouched condition---free of replacement windows, plastic shutters, or any of the dozens of injustices so often inflicted upon them by well intentioned (or not so well intentioned) owners, then so much the better. A little faded neglect? Better still. I understand all too well when I read Nancy Lancaster's musings on how the shabby and pure Virginia houses of her youth affected her aesthetic sensibilities, for so too is it for me with the faded houses that still populated New England in my own youth some fifty years later.

I love these buildings for many reasons---for their reflection of the aspirations of a new country, for their classically inspired proportions and details, and for a certain provincial quality that pervades all but the most sophisticated examples. I wonder at their details, executed in the pine that was so plentiful in New England, but based on examples that would have been executed in stone in England, or in Italy whence came their ultimate inspiration. I mused recently in other posts about a pair of country houses in Dorchester, built for members of the glittering new society that formed around Boston after the Revolution.

Thus, when I came across the photograph above in the course of searching pictures for my posts about the Swan (click here) and Morton (here) Houses, I was, as they might have said in Federal America, 'smote' between the eyes. Here it all was---and with the bravura gesture of the high pediment, a detail traveled from Palladian Italy via Georgian England. In years of passionate architectural tourism, I thought I had encountered them all, but this one, at least to me, was news. And its condition! Untouched, unimproved, shabby but not derelict. If I could marry a photograph, this would be the one. But, being an old fashioned guy, I thought we should become acquainted first, yet maddeningly little information could be found about my new love. The caption stated that it was the 'Dearborn Mansion, Grove Hall' and that the picture was taken in 1868, and apparently, like the Swan and Morton houses, had been in Dorchester. I googled myself into a stupor, and nearly went without dinner trying to find out more about my mysterious new love, but came up empty. I roamed through my own library, and not a bit more solid information could be found. A General Dearborn had been prominent in Roxbury and Dorchester affairs. A neighborhood in Roxbury, which borders Dorchester, is known as Grove Hall, after a long demolished mansion---but, that mansion was not Dearborn's.

Plate 55, Design for a House, from Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion

And what of its amazing design? What early designer had created this? One of the many talented carpenter builders? One of the early and rare architects, like Charles Bulfinch? Had its design come from a pattern book? And how, without knowing it, had he nevertheless so evoked the Veneto in this house, while he was probably only thinking of England? There are several related houses in New England that follow the general design of this house, but none quite have its elan. In Asher Benjamin's Builder's Companion, one of the designs shown is for a house with a tall central pavilion, and the fanlight in the Dearborn house, with its spiderweb tracery, follows one in Benjamin. Charles Bulfinch, like Stanford White, has more buildings attributed to him than are reasonable, but the central pavilion on the Dearborn house certainly makes one think of the library building that centered his design for the long vanished Franklin Crescent, Boston's echo of Adamesque London (and whose ambitious development ruined Bulfinch financially).

The Franklin Crescent, and Bulfinch's original drawing for the library at center.

And then, what of those grand and graceful spandrels that flank the pavilion and give the design its unexpected Bravura? It is a composition and motif one sees over and over in English work, in turn inspired by Italian originals. One is immediately reminded of the end pavilions at Palladio's Villa Barbara at Maser.

End Pavilion of Villa Barbaro at Maser, by Andrea Palladio

And Bulfinch mined the composition for his brilliant masterpiece, the so-called 'Brick Church' at Lancaster Massachusetts.

The First Church of Christ Unitarian, Lancaster Massachusetts, by Charles Bulfinch, 1816

The composition of the Dearborn house had been used before in New England. An early example is a house built around 1800 for Samuel Tenney in Exeter, New Hampshire. This house was built by a housewright named Ebenezer Clifford, working with a designer-housewright named Bradbury Johnson. Although probably nearly contemporary with the Dearborn house, its design, thought to be based on a plate in a pattern book by English architect Roger Morris, looks backward, and Georgian, rather than neo-classical in aspect appears to be earlier than it is.

The Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1800 (Historic American Buildings Survey)

A few years later, Johnson would design his verion of Bulfinch's crescent for the New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company on Market Square in Portsmouth, again utilizing the high central pavilion (the right wing is now much altered).

The New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company building, now the Portsmouth Athenaeum, 1803

In Kennebunk, Maine, the William Lord mansion, built in 1801, closely echoes the design of the Dearborn mansion, but without the quite the scale and bravura and perfect integration of parts.

The William Lord mansion, Kennebunk, 1801 (White Pine Monographs, Volume IV, no. 2, 1916)

The Sullivan Dorr house in Providence, Rhode Island, designed in 1809 by John Holden Greene follows the center pavilion composition, but with a flat roof.

Sullivan Dorr House, Providence, Rhode Island, 1816

Here I digress for a moment, with a picture of the portico on the Dorr House, in an American Federal Version of the Strawberry Hill Gothick style, as applied to a house of American inspiration and otherwise neo-classical detailing.

Portico of the Sullivan Dorr house combines Gothick details with neo-classical detailing on the ceiling cove.

But now I've wandered a bit far from my original points, which were curiousity about the Dearborn house in particular, and in general the beauty with which the architects of the early Republic designed buildings that hark back to England of the 18th century, when her architects in turn were borrowing from 16th century Italy. And the tradition continued---compare for example, Phillip Trammel Shutze's 'Swan House', designed for the Inman family in 1928. It is fascinating to me to consider two designers, working in very different eras and circumstances, the later probably knowing nothing of the earlier house, but dealing with some of the same inspirations that had created the earlier house, arriving at the same design solutions, if on a grander and more sophisticated scale, 125 years later.

Once again, the Dearborn house (Prints & Drawings Department, Boston Public Library, via Flickr)

'Swan House' in Atlanta, designed in 1928 by Philip Trammel Shutze

Postscript: The first comment below mentions the modernist influence. To that end, here is a photo of the house William Welles Bosworth designed for himself in 1928 at Matinecock, Long Island, a sort of Vogue Regency modern take on Schinkel does ancient Rome.

And another Postscript: Thanks to commenter Anonymous, of the Hudson River Anonymouses, for bringing Locust Lawn, one of the purest adaptations of Asher Benjamin's design, to the fore. I remember driving past it years ago, and naturally nearing going off the road (My bumper sticker reads "I brake for unusual Federal houses").

"Locust Lawn", the Josiah Hasbrouck House in Gardiner, New York, 1814.

PICASSO AND PIE DOWN EAST: Mid-Century Arrives in Maine

2011-04-20T19:59:00.005-04:00

I live in a typical little coastal village in eastern Maine — although 'typical' depends on one's perspective. We live here amidst achingly beautiful scenery, made only more beautiful by the clear light refracted from the ocean. We have little white houses, and we have big white houses. We have people and institutions: Lobstermen. Carpenters. Internet tycoons. Media personalities. Doctors. Lawyers. And maybe even Indian Chiefs. Our inhabitants include a woman who has legally changed her name to Jesus A. Christ. There is music, often performed by world famous musicians, as well as Saturday night contra dances at the Town Hall (in an auditorium named for my father, who does not contra dance). A Pentecostal Church, an Episcopal Church, and everything in between. We have an extraordinary library whose shelves hold the works of scores of writers who have lived here. We have boats: Shabby dorys. Fishing boats (fewer every year). Sleek yachts (more every year).

Main Street, as it appeared before Thompson & Heywood---and before Dutch Elm Disease

I could go on, but you get the idea. We may look typical, but we're not. Fashion is usually secondary---We dress in L.L. Bean drag against the harsh realities of our weather, and though the dress at summer parties up here might not make the Sartorialist, at a dinner party you are as likely to be seated next to someone back from a diplomatic mission to Istanbul, or an editor at a renowned literary magazine as that lobsterman — who in turn might be the son of a famous poet, or the carpenter, who might also be a Juilliard trained musician. You might even sit next to me.

We also have artists, and world class cooks. Over the next few months, I'm going to mention a few of each. Today's post is a tale that combines the two.

The Arnold Wolfers House, 1947, by Walter Gropius & TAC

In the 1940s, architect Benjamin Thompson, as a young member of The Architect's Collaborative, was in the area working with Walter Gropius on a project for international affairs specialist Arnold Wolfers (for more about that project, click HERE). Thompson's mother Lynne, a Midwesterner gone New York, was looking for a quiet place to write and came up to have a look, and stayed.

Maine Street after Thompson & Heywood, with Pavilion at center. For the story of the blacksmith shop at right, click HERE

Soon, she and her partner Dorothy Heywood, heiress to the Chester Shoe Company, had purchased a traditional French style manor house along the shore, at happily depressed post-war prices. They had Thompson’s son Ben, not yet the famous architect he would become, remodel the house, until it was no longer traditional or French. Mrs. Heywood had worked for the Betty Parsons gallery, and she and Mrs. Thompson had assembled a fine collection of modern art, including works by Picasso, Rothko, Motherwell, and Klee.

The two women had big ideas, and a desire to do good in the community. Mrs. Heywood invested in Rowantrees Pottery, a well known crafts organization that had been started by Adelaide Pearson during the Depression to boost the local economy. Thinking beyond our borders, Mrs. Heywood opened a Rowantrees showroom in New York, also probably designed by Mrs. Thompson’s architect son.

Thompson & Heywood, as they were known in town, offered to show their collection of modern art at the library as a fundraiser the likes of which the town had never seen. To temper the radical art, home-baked blueberry pies were offered as refreshment, lest the sight of all that modern art offend too many. Mrs. Thompson was an enterprising sort, and decided that it would be jolly if she were to air-freight one of the pies to Picasso ('a rising Spanish artist who is becoming well known') in France, that he might partake of it even as one of his works was being unveiled in little Blue Hill, Maine. History doesn't record if he did so (and trust me, idle curiosity has led me to check the index of more than one Picasso biography), or if the pie, more likely, arrived smashed and runny, but one is amused to ponder Picasso's reaction.

The show was controversial — our little equivalent of the 1913 Armory Show (there tends to be a time lag up here) — and a huge success. So were the pies. Emboldened by their adventure, Thompson and Heywood decided to start a business — the Rowantrees venture in New York had already folded — one that would combine art and food, as their fund raising exhibit had.

Architectural Drawing for the Pavilion, shows the complexity of Cooper Milliken's design (Courtesy Maine Historical Society, Eaton Tarbell Collection)

The pair purchased an old storefront on the village Main street, and added to it one of the most radical buildings of its day in Maine. The effect on the village was electric. People either loved, or (mostly) hated it. The architect was Cooper Milliken of Eaton Tarbell and Associates and The Pavilion, as it was called, gave yet another aesthetic jolt to a village hitherto known best for its simple 19th century white houses. Neither woman cooked, but Thompson learned, and took to it as a duck to water.

The Pavilion under construction. The frame was entirely mortised, Japanese style

At their first opening, all was gala, and even Betty Parsons and Robert Motherwell attended.

Whether they made money, ever, is doubtful, but their restaurant was a critical success, and everyone came, even the New York Times. I remember the place well from childhood — it was like catnip to me, so exotic and unlike anything else in our world.

Interior view under construction

I remember the scent of the exposed wooden rafters, cool slate floors, a wall of glass overlooking the harbor, the wildly distorted slopes of the walls, the smells of good food, the paper shades hanging from the ceiling the big handmade jewelry worn by the owners.

1950 newspaper photo of the recently-opened Pavilion.

Only later did I learn that those shades were by Noguchi, and came from Design Research, the famous home design business started in 1955 by Lynn's architect son, or that the very plates on which one took afternoon tea of lemon cakes were from Denmark. The art was modern, consigned from the Metropolitan Gallery in New York, the sleek home furnishings for sale were consigned from Design Research, and all of it was unlike anything sold up here before.

A letter from Lynne Thompson to her architect, announcing the arrival of new goods (from son Ben Thompson's new Design Research store in Cambridge.

All good things come to an end, and by the 1960s Thompson and Heywood, exhausted, wound down the business, and in their seventies, moved to Cambridge, leaving only one local restaurant, the TA-CO (after Theodore, Alton, Cynthia, and Olive, the owners) with its baked bean Saturdays, the Drugstore lunch counter, and the Barnacle lobster shack as dining venues. All three are still missed by those old enough to remember. As for the Pavilion, the building that many considered 'just too New York', it was demolished in 1966.

The story would end here, except that in 1965, Thompson penned a slender cookbook and memoir of the adventure, a marvelous little slice of mid-century style, Picasso & Pie.

In it she chronicled their times in the restaurant trade, their big adventure in bringing the new to Down East Maine, and most of all their recipes, many now delightedly dated, and adapted for the limited and simple ingredients.

They are based on many sources from old Maine & mid-western favorites to then modern cuisine and range accordingly from simple to sophisticated, and are still delicious. It is impossible for me to be objective — maybe it's a terrible cookbook (I don't think so) — but it's a slice of my childhood preserved, and I love it. Copies often show up on eBay, and to my surprise, one was on Amazon recently for $90.00.

There's much more to this tale, including the amazing building and the Design Research connection, and you can read about it here in an article I wrote for the Portland Magazine. Should it be inexplicably unavailable at the local news stands in Kansas, the article can be accessed online by clicking HERE.

We'll go out with a some recipes from Picasso & Pie (c) 1969, (Price Stern, Sloan, Publishers). Remember, they’re from the fifties. I take no responsibility for reactions from food snobs:

BLUEBERRY AMBROSIA

2.5 quarts water
Thin cut peel of one lemon
Small amount of tangerine rind
Small stick cinnamon
½ cup sugar
4 cups blueberries
2 tbs. cornstarch

Simmer the blueberries, lemon rind and tangerine rind in the 2 ½ quarts of water until the berries are soft.

Strain and put the berries through a sieve or puree them finely in a blender. Return to strained juice. Mix the 2 tablespoons of cornstarch in about 1/2 cup of water and add to mixture.

Simmer 5 minutes.

Chill to iciness and serve with whipped cream which has been sweetened to taste. Dust the cream lightly with cinnamon.

Note: This Ambrosia belongs to the scandinavian Fruit-Soup family and can be made from several varieties of fresh, canned or frozen berries. Naturally the amount of sugar added will depend whether or not the fruit base has been pre-sweetened. Freezes and keeps.

Serves 20 — when served from a punch bowl in small cups. As cold soup, serves. 20.

CHAMPIGNONS FLAMBEES (Burnt Mushrooms)

1 lb. mushroom caps
Salt
6 tbs. butter
1 cup sherry
2 tbs. brandy (or a little more)
¼ cup heavy cream (a little more)

Season carefully, washed and trimmed mushrooms, with plenty of salt.

Saute in a chafing dish in butter until brown.

Pour in Sherry and simmer until nearly dry.

Pour brandy over mushrooms and light.

When flame has gone out, stir in cream.

Serve with a green salad.

Note: If sherry does not cook down fast enough, pour off, and add again after brandy has burned off. Serves four.

COUNTRY WEDDING CAKE

(Recipe from Mrs. Lawrence Pickering, Deer Isle, Maine). To our way of thinking, the best and most satisfactory cake we have ever tasted IN OUR WHOLE LIVES!)

1 ½ cups sugar
¾ cup shortening (1/2 cup better and ½ cup vegetable shortening A MUST1)
3 eggs
2 ¾ cups cake flour
2 ¾ tsp. baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
½ teaspoon lemon extract (more if your extract is old)

Cream shortening.
Add sugar slowly, and beat until light.
Add sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk — starting with flour and ending with flour. (the hard and fast rule here is that you add one-third of your dry or your liquid each time, mixing just enough to moisten before the next addition).

Mix as little as possible.

Bake in a tube pan for about an hour.

Oven set at 350 degrees.

Or, this recipe fills two ½ lb. pans.
Cool on rack, and powder with powdered sugar.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in New York Social Diary (www.newyorksocialdiary.com)

BACK TO DORCHESTER--THE AMERICAN SAPPHO, CHARLES BULFINCH, AND A LITTLE MORE OGDEN CODMAN

2011-04-17T15:58:00.017-04:00

Since writing last week about Hepzibah Swan's French-inspired pavilion in Dorchester, Massachusetts, I've been thinking about curves and ovals in Federal architecture.

The 1772 version of Monticello is outlined in bold.

Although American architecture had started breaking out of the square box as early as 1772, when Thomas Jefferson designed an octagonal bayed pavilion as the first house at Monticello, the movement toward more innovative room shapes did not begin in earnest until after the Revolution.

In 1788, William Hamilton built a house in Philadelphia with the earliest known surviving oval rooms in America, in a complex plan probably derived from an English pattern book. The curve and the octagon did not fully enter the American design vocabulary until 1792, when James Hoban won the competition to design the new President's house in Washington, with its garden room centered on an oval bay fronting three oval rooms, each above the other.


James Hoban's plan for the President's House, the beginning of a vogue for houses with oval bays at center, after the English fashion.

The new fashion traveled quickly through the major cities, but nowhere did it gain foothold than the Boston area, where many country houses, beginning with Charles Bulfinch's Joseph Barrell mansion in Charlestown, in 1792.

Charles Bulfinch's drawing for the Joseph Barrell house in Charlestown, with portico above and oval salon. (For a 1920's adaptation of this design in the Stotesbury cottage at Bar Harbor, click HERE)

These houses were built by the city's new plutocracy, the men and women who had come to prominence during the revolution, and the early years of the Republic. Their portraits were painted by Gilbert Stuart, their houses were often designed by Charles Bulfinch, and they led the stylish aspirations of their day.

The Jonathan Mason house on Beacon Hill, designed by Bulfinch, and likely the first of the hundreds of bow front townhouses that defined domestic building in Boston for the next century. This house survived only a few years after construction, torn down when Beacon Hill was lowered.

Within the next decade, at least a dozen houses with garden facades centered on a curved or octagonal bay were built in the countryside around the city, and in town, the bow front brick town house, first introduced by Bulfinch, became the most enduring architectural symbol of the city.

Perez Morton, by Saint-Memin

Mrs. Perez Morton (1759-1846) by Gilbert Stuart, 1802 (MFA, Boston)

It was against this background that Mr. & Mrs. Perez Morton, he a lawyer, she a descendant of one of Boston's most distinguished families, the Apthorps, built their country house in Dorchester, practically across the street from the Swan's fashionable concoction.

Although under construction at the same time as the Swan house, the Morton house was less fashion forward than the former, its facade centered on pairs of engaged pilasters supporting a traditional pediment.

The Perez Morton house, Dorchester, MA, 1796

The Stable complex

To the side was an extraordinary complex of stables and outbuildings, all adjoining---the ultimate example of the famous New England paradigm of 'big house, little house, back house, and barn', in which all services are connected under cover, from main house to privy to stable to wood house, that one might not have to brave snows and drifts to attend to the various functions of life. In this, the New England houses may be thought to have a direct link to the Italian farm villas.

Morton house, garden facade prior to demolition

At the rear, an octagonal bay projected from the house, containing both an oval salon with a chimney piece imported from France, and an upper veranda, a simpler echo of the upper portico at the Barrell house.

Another portrait of Mrs. Morton by Gilbert Stuart (Worcester Art Museum

The Morton house is sometimes attributed to Charles Bufinch, who was Mrs. Morton's cousin, and he may well have advised, but Mrs. Morton herself wrote that the house was designed to her own 'whimsical plan'. Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton was a woman of considerable talents. Well educated, she wrote verse as a child, and in 1789, at the age of 30, she began contributing to the 'Seat of Muses' in Massachusetts Magazine. Her books of verses came to include Ouâbi: or the Virtues of Nature. An Indian Tale in Four Cantos, 1790, and The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact, 1799, as well as an anti-slavery poem, The African Chief. Mr. Morton, like his exiled neighbor across the street, appears to have had a caddish streak, and had an affair with his sister-in-law, which did not end well.

Stair hall in the Morton house. The placement of the stair in a side hall off a long main hall was less usual in New England than the mid-Atlantic or Southern States.

The interiors of the Morton house featured elaborate Adamesque plasterwork ceilings, a relative rarity in the United States. The slightly awkward oval room featured a coved ceiling, also unusual, and a less sophisticated echo of the Swan's domed circular room across the street. According to early accounts, the friezes over the doors featured swags centered by American eagles and shields, a first floor room in the octagonal bay had Zuber scenic wallpaper, and the 'sky parlor' in the attic monitor was a room about 10 x 16 feet, with corner fireplace with delft tiles, and windows on four sides looking out to the gilded dome of the State House Boston and the harbor and bay beyond, all now gone.

The oval salon in the Morton house. (From Some Old Dorchester Houses, 1890, via Dorchester Athenaeum)

The drawing room was on the second floor, unusual for a New England country house. It is seen here prior to demolition in the late 1800s.

A French window, also unusual in America in the 18th century, opened from drawing room onto the upper veranda. (Some Old Dorchester Houses)

As he did with the Swan's house, Ogden Codman later mined the Perez Morton house for inspiration for one of his designs in Newport, this time for his cousin, Miss Martha Codman. Miss Codman's house, Berkeley Villa, was an amalgam of several iconic American houses around Roxbury and Dorchester. The entrance facade was based on the Crafts house designed by Peter Banner in Roxbury.

Berkeley Villa, Newport Rhode Island, designed by Ogden Codman, 1910 (NYSD)

The Crafts house, Roxbury, Massachussets, 1807, as drawn by Ogden Codman, 1892

Shirley Place, Roxbury, Massachusetts, as it appeared in the 19th century. Notice dormer configuration later adapted at Berkeley Villa. (Boston Public Library, Department of Prints & Drawings)

As Berkeley villa was much larger than its model, and required an attic story for servant's rooms, a steeper roof line was based on Shirley Place, the surviving Royal governor's mansion, also in Roxbury, both drawn by Codman as part of his study of early American houses in the 1890s.

Garden facade of Berkeley Villa, inspired by the Morton House

For the garden facade of Miss Codman's house, the octagonal bay and porch of the Morton house were copied. Charming though the 'authentic' Federal style facade might have been, this house was in Newport, after all, and for the interiors, Codman abandoned the simplicity of late 18th century America in favor of Robert Adam's England, inserting a rotunda stair hall in the center of the house.

Stair Hall at Berkeley Villa (Andy Ryan, New York Times)

In 1928 Miss Codman married Maxim Karolik a Russian opera singer, and together they formed one of the finest collections of American furniture, with which they furnished Berkeley Villa. That collection is now a cornerstone of the American decorative arts collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where of course, also resides the French furniture brought back by James Swan years earlier.

Sofa by Samuel McIntire and painted side chair once belonging to Elias Hasket Derby, both from the collection of M&M Karolik, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

These blog posts are, as much as anything, just me thinking out loud about things that intrigue me, and making connections. I could go on and mention the garden house (click HERE) designed by Fiske Kimball in 1922 in the grounds of Berkeley villa, that copied one designed by McIntire at Elias Hasket Derby's country estate, and that Kimball in turn was the man who first wrote about Thomas Jefferson's architectural life, as author of the seminal book on McIntire, and that Kimball in turn lived for a time, as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Lemon Hill, a house built in 1800, with central bow and oval rooms, or I could just go make lunch.

DANIEL BURNHAM IN MAINE

2011-04-15T13:54:00.001-04:00

Daniel Burnham of Burnham & Root, urban planner, visionary architect, one of the creators of the skyscraper, designed only three buildings in New England---Filene's Department Store in Boston, the Kent Memorial Library in Suffolk, Connecticut, and this shingle style summer cottage in Bar Harbor, designed in 1885 for Miss Violet Whitaker.

'The Moorings', entrance facade

'The Moorings' ocean facade

The cottage, located on Eden Street, did not have a long life. In the early 1900's, It was purchased by the Honarable Mrs. Alfred Anson, formerly Mrs. J.J. Emery, whose own much grander cottage, 'The Turrets' (click Here for more), designed by Bruce Price in 1895, was immediately adjacent to the North. Mrs. Anson had the Whitaker cottage demolished, and in its stone foundation built a sunken garden, with pool and fountain in center, balustrades manufactured by E.E. Soderholtz (click Here for more about Soderholtz). The curved foundation of the stair bay on the entrance front became a niche with curved stone bench. After Mrs. Anson's death in 1953, 'The Turrets' was abandoned for many years, and the garden became overgrown and ruinous. After the estate was purchased as part of the College of the Atlantic campus, the garden was excavated and semi-restored. Unfortunately, in recent years, the foundation became unstable, and rather than being rebuilt to design, has been replaced by terraced retaining walls.

A fuzzy polaroid, taken in 1969, of the abandoned garden built in the foundation of 'The Moorings'

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS--ANNALS OF RESEARCH

2011-04-11T12:49:00.009-04:00

i wonder why 'Mizzentop', a grand Bar Harbor summer cottage built in 1883 for Louisa Hunt, widow of artist William Hunt, was not designed by her brother-in-law, Richard Morris Hunt, but rather by H.L. Putnam of Boston.

A sketch of the newly built 'Mizzentop' by A.W. Brunner, Building 1884.

There is much more to write about Mizzentop, which went on to have a distinguished list of tenants and owners, and when I do, I will tie it to the invention of the reaper, to one of the finest metalworkers of the early 1900's, the Titanic, the decorating firm of Sills and Huniford (no, they did not do interiors of this house, which burned before they were born), and even the TV show Law & Order, but not right now. I was just wondering out loud for the moment. I wish I were closer to the AIA Library, which houses the Hunt papers. One would love to imagine that maybe there is a letter from Hunt to his sister-in-law, regretting that he was unable to take time off from the Vanderbilts, but recommending Mr. Putnam. More likely however, Mr. Putnam was part of Mrs. Hunt's social circle in Boston.

Porte cochere at Mizzentop

Mizzentop

After the Bar Harbor fire of 1947, Mizzentop's ruins were a landmark on Eden St. Now a large hotel occupies the foundations

Another curiousity is that there is a little cottage in Bar Harbor, know as 'Mizzentop Cottage'. It is claimed to be the laundry cottage of Mizzentop, moved from the site to an intown location and converted to residential use in the 1930s. Yet, it is almost identical to the laundry cottage at 'Blair Eyrie', further up the hill from Mizzentop, and in a 1940s real estate ad, the laundry building at Mizzentop is still listed as on site and containing six additional staff bedrooms. As it happens, 'Blair Eyrie' was demolished in, you guessed it, the 1930s, and its laundry house was trucked off to a new location. Research is a constant struggle to separate truth and conflicting, often romantic or apocryphal fiction. Which is why real estate brokers are able to sell so many houses designed by Stanford White years after his death, and why so many families own sideboards made in the 1830s, but with a firm family story of having been given to an ancestor by George Washington, despite his having died years before.

Mizzentop Cottage

The laundry cottage at 'Blair Eyrie', designed by Andrews, Jacques & Rantoul

Blair Eyrie was built at the highest elevation of any cottage in Bar Harbor, with 360 degree views, and never was a laundry building more prettily situated. Below are the stairs that led to garden level from the laundry cottage. Picturesque though these steps are, one does not envy the laundry staff making the trek from the house, down the service drive at left, and then down these steps with full baskets of laundry.

FIGUREHEADS

2011-04-09T00:15:00.006-04:00

Growing up on the coast of Maine, the romance of the sea, and our amazing maritime history were never far from my thoughts. The old seaport of Wiscasset, at the mouth of the Sheepscot River in the mid-coast region of Maine is a town of many architectural wonders that bear witness to that past, when sailing ships built in the region were tied up at the docks between journeys from our small towns to ports around the world.

Photograph by Cervan Robinson, Historic American Buildings Survey

On a side street amongst several larger and grander neighbors, sits this small brick house was built for one Samuel Page in 1837. For the first 109 years of its existence, it was a typical tidy brick house, symmetrical, well proportioned, and plain, the sort of house that was done so well all over New England in the early 19th century. That changed in 1946 when the enchanting porch 19th century entry porch was added by the then owner, Mrs. Cunningham.

Cervan Robinson, HABS

At first glance, this porch appears to be classic cast iron, with a grapevine motif---but look again---it is carved wood. It came from the home of Edbury Hatch, the last of a distinguished tradition of men who carved figureheads and ornaments for the hundreds of ships built in the region in the 19th century. Born in Newcastle, a few miles up the coast from Wiscasset, in 1849, Hatch apprenticed in the carving shop of William Southworth, and later worked for Col. Sampson of Bath. By the 1880s, wooden ship building was drawing to a close, and Hatch, a lifelong bachelor, moved for a time to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he worked as a night watchman. By 1890, he had returned to the family home in Newcastle, where he spent the rest of his life carving fantastical items to ornament the exterior of the house. The Wiscasset porch was from Hatch's front door. Unseen in the photo (and unfortunately no photo is available to me at this moment) are the side panels, described by Jean Lipman as 'a hunting dog stalking unseen prey with a bird, bee and butterfly buzzing overhead' and 'the other a bear foraging for nuts, accompanied by an enormous dragonfly'. The porch was but one of a veritable cornucopia of carved ornament on Hatch's house, including this bas relief of the State of Maine seal.

From American Folk Art in Wood, Metal and Stone, by Jean Lipman

The two side porches from the Hatch house, equally fantastical, with serpents and tassels carved in high relief, were purchased by authors Henry Beston and his wife Elisabeth Coatsworth, who took them to 'Chimney Farm', their house in neighboring Nobleboro.

Another of the porticos from the Hatch house can be seen at Chimney Farm (henrybeston.org)

Hatch died in 1935. Bits of his work still survive on houses around Newcastle, but many are dispersed to private collections, or have been lost to time and the elements.

The following about Hatch appeared in Time magazine for Dec. 13, 1948, and tantalizes the imagination:

'This is to certify that Edbury Hatch has served a regular apprenticeship of more than four years with me in the carving business, that he is honest, temperate and industrious . . . A lack of business is the only reason that I do not employ him.'

Young Edbury Hatch had just picked the wrong trade. When he was a boy in Newcastle, Me., the town had supported ten busy shipyards and every new vessel needed a carved figurehead. But by 1870, when William Southworth discharged Hatch, business was starting to fall off.

Hatch, armed with his letter of recommendation, stuck with it to the last, then got a job as a night watchman in a hotel. For old times' sake, he whittled while he worked. In the 1890s, he got a notion to carve decorations for his own house and barn. He did them for fun until he died in 1935, lavishing on the job all his training and skill, and using his hundred woodworking tools.

Because his house stayed put and never suffered the hazards of the sea, its ebulliently baroque decorations are among the handful of surviving monuments to maritime woodcarving in the U.S.

According to Art Expert Samuel M. Green (who describes them in the current Magazine of Art), they are also some of the best. A Hatch cannon surmounted by two eagles, a near-life-size horse, and a tree full of carved cats have all disappeared, but a wooden treasure remains. Among the highlights: a gutter spout representing a sea monster and reminiscent of medieval gargoyles (though Hatch never saw any); a side entrance adorned with lion heads, snakes and stars.

Chimney Farm, home of two of New England's most revered writers, has been preserved and is now a National Literary Landmark. For an interview with the Beston's daughter Kate, click HERE

Sometimes, when I venture off on these posts, I am stunned anew by what I know so well---that Maine is a rich, strange, and wonderful place.

A ROLLING MANTEL GATHERS NO MOSS

2011-04-07T13:30:00.006-04:00

Moss covered mantel in the DC Design showhouse. Move over Martha.

Before. The Eisenhower administration called, and they want their curtains back.

Photos from Washington Post, Lynda Cutler, Top, John McDonnell, bottom.