A TEMPLE FOR THE ARTS

Note: this longer-than-usual post first appeared as an article on New York Social Diary, 01.14.2013

Summer Society has always needed its amusements, and Gilded Age Bar Harbor was no exception. Golf came first, as it often does. With the founding of the Kebo Valley Club in 1888, Bar Harbor was in the vanguard of the newly popular sport in America. The new club, with six holes designed by H.C. Leeds, was stated to be "cultivation of athletic sports and furnishing innocent amusement for the public (or at least that segment of the public listed in a new publication called The Social Register) for reasonable compensation." Or at least that segment of the public listed in a new publication called The Social Register, begun only two years earlier. With this, the transformation of Bar Harbor from hotel resort to fashionable summer colony had begun in earnest, and Society was--literally---off and swinging.

The first Kebo Valley clubhouse, designed by Wilson Eyre

The new clubhouse was designed by the Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre in a suitably picturesque style — the marble splendors of Newport were not for Bar Harbor yet. The separation of hotel visitors and the new cottage society, in their large and elaborate villas, was well underway, and by June 1890, The New York Times was able to report:

Fifth Green, Kebo, c. 1915

“Kebo Valley aims to lead in things social, and is certainly in a way a sort of focus, though its claim cannot be said to be generally acknowledged yet. The transient people do not take kindly to it, as it tends to take away from the prestige of social affairs in the village. Nor are the cottage people by any means unanimous in its favor. It is for one thing,a bit away from the centre of things ...”

Horse show at Kebo

Whatever aversion the summer colony may have had to traveling a mile from town soon forgotten, and in addition to golf, Kebo offered tennis, hosted Bar Harbor’s early horse shows, and contained a theater suitable for dances and performances, including the amateur theatricals and tableaux so loved by Society of a simpler time.

The club lawns and verandas also served an all important function as a place to be seen in the afternoon, just as the Swimming Club on the West Street shore provided a morning promenade as the members of the colony swam to music from the Boston Symphony Players.

Society on parade at the second Kebo clubhouse (Maine Historic Preservation Commission)

In 1899, the clubhouse at Kebo burned. A new clubhouse was built, but lacked the performance space of the old, and by 1905 a few leaders of the summer community decided that the time had come to build for the Arts---Music, Theater, Dance--- the same quality of facility as those already already available for the Amusements---Yachting, Golf, Tennis and Alcohol.

The site for the Arts Building was secured on Eagle Lake Road, at the very edge of one of the Kebo Valley Club’s putting green, which doubled as an outdoor amphitheater.

Five prominent members of the summer colony stepped forward with funds Mrs. Henry Dimock, sister of W.C. Whitney, George W. Vanderbilt, George B. Dorr, who would become a founder also of Acadia National Park, Fifth Avenue Hotel heir Henry Lane Eno, and Mrs. Robert Abbe, wife of the pioneer radiologist.

Plan of the Building of Arts

The architect chosen was Guy Lowell, a fashionable country house architect who also designed the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. With the usual logic of a committee, it was decided that a Greek temple under the pine trees would provided the most appropriate setting for the high culture they envisioned for the rocky island. 

The newly completed building of Arts, as published in Architectural Review

This temple was built not of stone, but stucco plastered over wood, “finished to represent Parian marble," and the red Venetian tile roof was supported by “the largest wooden columns ever turned in Maine.” Copies of the Parthenon Friezes, imported from Paris, were mounted on the facade. Inside, the walls and ceiling of the stage adapted the principles of the sounding boards of the great German concert halls, and the natural lighting was provided “from the top after the manner of the ancient Greek shrines.”

The interior of the Building of Arts (Maine Historic Presevation Commission

A proscenium curtain of golden English damask, specially woven for the building and elaborately embroidered, was donated by Mrs. John Inness Kane and George Vanderbilt. The building immediately attracted national attention, an article by Owen Wister in Century Magazine, as well as a large photographic spread in The Architectural Review.

Rendering of the Building of Arts by Jules Guerin, from Century Magazine

The opening concert on June 13, 1907 featured Emma Eames, then one of the world’s leading lyric sopranos. She was followed over the years by many others of the world’s greats including the violinists Kreisler, Zimbalist and Kneisel, singers Alma Gluck and Roger de Bruyn, pianists Paderewski, Schelling, and Iturbe,conductors Damrosch and Stowkowski, and monologists Ruth Draper andCornelia Otis Skinner. Acting troupes such as the Washington Square Players and The Theatre Workshop performed Bar Harbor seasons, as did local stock companies like the Surry Players, sponsored by Mrs. Ethelbert Nevin, whose numbers included the young Henry Fonda.

Matinee at the Building of Arts (Maine Historic Preservation Commission)

High Culture was not the only venue at the Building of Arts, and flower shows, including the Bar Harbor Sweet Pea competition were held there, as well as well as ‘serious’ lectures and art exhibits. 

The Greek Tableau, as published in Architectural Review

And of course, Society has always loved dress up no costume too silly,, and in the early years many amateur tableaux were featured, including a 1909 Greek pageant arranged by the artistic Mrs. Albert Clifford Barney, mother of Natalie (click HERE for more about her) featuring members of the summer colony, including assorted Endicotts, Schieffelins, Gurnees, de Kovens, Pinchots and Welds traipsing about the grounds in diaphanous garb, acting the story of the love of Egeria for the mortal Strephon. At another, in 1915, members of society recreated favorite portraits.

The Greek Pageant (Architectural Review)

The young widow Mrs. John Jacob Astor was a Reynolds beauty in picture hat, a Miss Maull balanced Mrs. Astor as a Gainsborough, Miss Mary Canfield andJohn J. Emery, Jr. were a Watteau Shepard and Shepardess, Mrs. Ernest Schelling reenacted a Polish Farm scene with costumes she’d brought from Poland, and family proud Albert Eugene Gallatin portrayed his own grandfather in a Gilbert Stuart Portrait. It was simpler time.

In those days before Tanglewood and the Pops, the Boston Symphony lay idle in the summer, and members of the orchestra, as the Boston Symphony Players, would spend the summer in Bar Harbor, playing at the Swimming Pool Club during the morning swim, and popular tunes at parties and dances in the evenings (This franchise was to receive serious competition when a young bandleader named Meyer Davis broke onto the Bar Harbor scene and his eventually became the orchestra of choice from Bar Harbor to Palm Beach.)

The Washington Square Players in costume for their performance at the Building of Arts (New York Times)

Meanwhile, golf and art continued to merge at the edge of the Kebo Greens, and the Symphony Players even provided background music for a ladies putting tournament.

For all the glamour of the featured performers, the most extraordinary performance at the Building of Arts there was not seen by the public. In 1916, Meyer Davis was playing for the evening dances at the Malvern Hotel. In her memoirs, Mrs. Davis recounts watching the orchestra through a glass door behind the ballroom stage when she suddenly witnessed a most extraordinary little scene. A compact man, dapper in a pearl gray suit, entered the back of the room, and rather than taking a seat, as she expected, he suddenly, unseen by the others focused on the band, broke into a little gavotte. Entranced, she made inquiries, and to her astonishment, the man proved to be the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Njinsky (in costume for til Eulenspiegel, left)

As World War I raged in Europe that summer, Serge Diaghelev instead sent Nijinsky to spend the summer at the Malvern, where it was hoped the fresh air and relative isolation of Bar Harbor would inspire the dancer to complete his new (and as fate had it, last) ballet, “Till Eulenspiegel.” Rest and isolation were relative concepts with Nijinsky and his wife, after one evening’s round of argument, took a car and drove aimlessly for two hours in the middle of the night, returning at dawn.

Robert Edmund Jones' costume designs for til Eulenspiegel

A fashion columnist ponders Till Eulenspiegel's effect on fashion

There is no record of a public performance by Nijinsky in Bar Harbor that summer, the Building of Arts became his rehearsal space, and there the ballet was choreographed for its opening in New York that winter. He was joined there by set and costume designer Robert Edmond Jones and by Paul Magriel, who wrote that "invitations to the great houses of Bar Harbor showered upon me like gold,” in the hope that the great dancer could be lured along with him, but Nijinsky rarely went out in society, instead rehearsing by day and working on the production designs by evening.

After the 1929 stock market crash, the Building of Arts soldiered on for a time. New patrons were found, impresario Timothee Adamowski continued to book important performers, but the clock was running out. The Surry Players performed Aristophanes’ ‘The Birds’ in the outdoor amphitheater in July of 1935.

The coverage in the New York Times the next day was far more concerned with the quality of the audience than of the play. Notably absent from the impressive listing of names---among them Mrs. Reginald de Koven, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Mrs. J. West Roosevelt, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Mrs. Gerrish Milliken, Mrs. Shepard Fabbri---were the husbands, who may have been back at the office in New York, or more likely, on their yachts or the golf course next to the amphitheater, where one assumes that the occasional cry of ‘fore’ punctuated the Greek chorus

In 1941, as America entered World War II, an exhibit was held at the Building of Arts for benefit of the American British Art Center, featuring Cecil Beaton’s then unpublished series “London’s Honorable Scars,” recent London war posters, and 25 sketches by J.M.W Turner. By the next season, Bar Harbor gas rationing had made remote Bar Harbor difficult of access, and the colony was a virtual ghost town, with many cottages shuttered, as some had been since the Depression.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. had been among those who had quietly made up the Building of Arts deficit for years, and he had now taken stronger action, as the structure was about to be sold by the town for tax liens. Through his agent,Serenus Rodick, whose ancestors had built the largest of Bar Harbor’s early hotels, Rockefeller quietly purchased the building for $500, hoping to secure its future as a center for culture on the island.

By 1944, Rockefeller decided that adequate support was not forthcoming from the community, and he disposed of the building. It was acquired by Consuella de Sides, a pupil of Baba Ram Dass, who intended to make it once again a center of performance. In October 1947, the great forest fire that swept Bar Harbor in that driest of seasons swept across the Kebo Greens, destroying both the clubhouse and the Building of Arts. Bar Harbor’s temple for the high arts had lasted but forty years.

President Taft, not attending a performance at the Building of the Arts.

Kebo Valley Club survives, its golf course the eighth oldest in the country. The ‘Elbow Hole,” where President Taft carded 27 in the shadow of the Building of Arts, where he was not attending a performance, is now the 17th green, and nearby at the edge of the woods the broad steps of the lost temple lead nowhere.

MISS SPENCE DISAPPROVES. Dilettante Writes Again

Before movie stars became the tabloid currency of choice, Society figures were America's chief tabloid obsession.  One of 1911's major tabloid fixations was the marriage of 47 year-old John Jacob Astor IV, recently divorced and one of the richest men in America, to 18 year-old Madeline Force, a Bar Harbor summer resident.  Thousands of columns of newspaper ink were expended on the their courtship.  The marriage was denounced from the pulpits, and from Bar Harbor, the redoubtable Clara B. Spence founder of Miss Spence's School for Girls, (who herself had an opinion or two about the proper raising of a Society girl),  weighed in with a letter to the Editor of The New York Times:

Miss Spence had formerly summered across the bay at Sorrento, but now spent her summers at Bar Harbor with her longtime companion, Miss Charlotte Baker, the assistant principal at Spence, an heiress to the fortune left by her aunt's husband, John Steward Kennedy. Two years later, Spence and Baker, with their four adopted children, would move from a cottage on the Kennedy estate to 'The Willows' a beautiful Regency style cottage designed for Miss Baker by the Boston firm of Andrews Jaques & Rantoul on Eden Street. "The Willows" would eventually pass to Miss Baker's sister, Mrs. Francis Kellogg, and later be sold to Canadian mining tycoon Sir Harry Oakes, but that's another story, which can be found HERE

The Misses Spence & Baker, with adopted daughters Margaret Spence & Ruth Baker (Spence School)

Despite Miss Spence's disapproval, the Astor marriage went ahead, only to be cut short when Col. Astor perished aboard the Titanic in April of 1912.  In August of 1912, three of the survivors, Madeline Astor, Mrs. George Widener, and Mrs. John B.Thayer, were in Bar Harbor as the guests of Mrs. A.J. Cassatt at "Four Acres", the Cassatt estate, which abuttied the property where Miss Baker and Miss Spence's new cottage was rising.  

'The Willows', the Bar Harbor cottage of Miss Baker

The next summer, even as the Misses Baker and Spence were moving into "The Willows", Mrs. Astor was also moving, into a nearby cottage also designed by Andrews, Jaques & Rantoul, a few carefully raked gravel driveways up Eden Street from the famed educators.

La Selva, ocean front in better days

That house was 'La Selva', built in 1903 for Pennsylvania coal baron Andrew Davis.  During Mrs. Astor's occupancy members of the press were frequently seen lurking at the gates in search of news about Mrs. Astor and her new baby, John Jacob Astor VI. 

In 1916, Harper's Bazaar caught Mrs. Astor at Bar Harbor as she was about to be remarried.

A few years later, Mrs. Astor would depart "La Selva" for a more secluded cottage on the George Vanderbilt estate, but "La Selva" would soon attract another colorful tenant, Mrs. Leonard Thomas, formerly Blanche Oelrichs of Newport, known professionally as the playwright, poet, and actress Michael Strange. Sometimes referred to as 'the most beautiful woman in America', Mrs. Thomas was already planning to leave her banker husband to obtain a Paris divorce, that she might run away with her lover, John Barrymore, one of the most famous actors of his day.

La Selva's next tenant was the beautiful Michael Strange (nee Blanche Oelrichs), seen here with her lover and later husband, John Barrymore.

'La Selva' is currently for sale, its condition more than a little reminiscent of 'Grey Gardens'.  I have written its colorful history for 'House of the Month' in the current issue of Portland Monthly.  The article may be read HERE.  More pictures HERE.

La Selva, views of entrance front taken two weeks ago

ANNALS OF RESEARCH: MAKING EVIDENCE LINE UP

As one sifts through material in search of interesting houses for the book, looking for interesting houses  that will interest and delight the reader, one is distracted by many other bits along the way.

For example, I've had this illustration, from American Architect & Building News, on file for years,  Designed by James Brown Lord for one Mrs. S.K. Henning. Not much evidence that it was ever built, but curious, I persevered.  Even in the age of Google, one has trouble finding much about Mrs. Henning.  Her first name was Sarah, neither husband nor source of fortune are mentioned, and her social life seems to have been led mostly  Tuxedo Park-Bar Harbor over a brief few years before and after 1900.  

I pursued a few leads.  I found Mrs. Henning in the Bar Harbor cottage directory as a guest at one of the hotels in 1893.  Then I found this house, built for James Henning in 1895 in Tuxedo Park, James Brown Lord, architect.  Not the same design, but certainly similar.  

At that point, one assumed that perhaps Mrs. Henning was married to James Henning, and that they decided to build in Tuxedo instead?  At any rate, nowhere in available collections did any larger amount of material appear to exist that would fast-track the Henning cottage into the book, and I moved on.

Since then, the old Bar Harbor newspapers have become available digitally, and a few weeks ago, in pursuit of other information, I came across a mention in the Bar Harbor Record of June 1894 which announced that Mrs. J.H. Henning of Louisville, Kentucky and her two children were guests at the St. Sauveur Hotel while their new cottage on Cleftstone Road was being completed.  Hmmm.  But where on Cleftstone Road, and was it the house shown in American Architect?  This of course, is where your completely undisciplined Uncle Dilettante strays off the path he's supposed to be following, and true to form, I wandered off to find more.  A quick search turned up an article about Mrs. Henning's new cottage, describing a house nothing like the one designed by James Brown Lord, which obviously hadn't been built.

A few days later, again while not looking, I ambled across a longer article about the new Henning Cottage, whose architect was Sidney Stratton (the actual subject of that particular search), who shared office space and occasionally worked with, McKim, Mead & White, and designed a house that will be in the book.

The article was accompanied by a crude wood engraving showing the new house, called 'Air Castle', into which Mrs. Henning and children moved on August 01, 1894.  A further search finds the family in residence for the 1895 season, and then they disappear from the face of Bar Harbor, consistent with the 1896 completeion date of the house in Tuxedo Park, completed in 1896.  One has no idea why they departed Bar Harbor so quickly, after having tried it out for a couple of seasons then having built a large cottage only to sell it two years later but there you have it.  On the 1896 Bar Harbor map, the cottage appears, renamed 'Hillhurst' and owned by one Helen Seely (for those of you who protest that the shape pictured is not consistent with the house pictured, let me assure you that on the more accurately delineated 1904 map, it does appear correctly).

And there this post would end, except that a few weeks later, I was flipping through an old Bar Harbor guildebook, with pictures of cottages, when what should appear but the engraving below:

The problem?  In the guidebook, the picture was captioned as 'Cottage at Bar Harbor, designed by Andrews Jaques and Rantoul".  

I'm resisting further research.  I have a book to complete.

P.S., 

Speaking of Tuxedo Park, after finishing research at the wonderful Walsh History Center at Camden Public Library, I wandered around looking at buildings (I still haven't put the final nail in my Camden selections. (Sssh, don't tell the publisher), and while wandering around town, I spotted this new little shingle style cottage, which reminded me of something...(and yes, that picture was taken yesterday March 23, the 3rd day of Spring, or as we call it up here, 'February II, the Nightmare Continues')

But enough about the weather---certainly we've had enough---the reason that the house looked so familiar is that it was clearly inspired by one of the original houses in Tuxedo Park, Bruce Price's Travis Van Buren cottage, below.

THREE LITTLE BUILDINGS

Today class, we're going to consider the importance of thinking small, but in a big way.

Edmund Beaman Gilchrist (1885-1953), was a gentleman architect, Philadelphia born and bred  His  specialty was residential design, although he also created some notable smaller public structures..  He was part of that distinct group practicing in Philadelphia---the firms Mellor, Meigs and Howe,  Duhring, Oakie and Ziegler; and Tilden, Register and Pepper---who were leading the pack in the design of beautiful houses that somehow managed to be picturesque and vernacular, and at the same time, imaginative, modern and new.  These architects were among the most imaginative, and most influential of the era in residential design.

In the first half of the last century, this stretch of the Maine Coast, and Northeast Harbor in particular, was known as 'Philadelphia on the Rocks', and indeed it sometimes seemed in this Dilettante's youth that there was a Philadelphian behind every tree in the summertime.   Thus it was only natural that Gilchrist and his peers would receive many commissions for summer houses in the region.  Collectively those cottages constitute some of the best architecture produced up here during the 1920's and 1930's and five of those houses have been chosen for inclusion in my book.  (For those, the faithful reader will have to wait.  And it will be worth it) .

For my entire life, I've enjoyed looking at--and learning from--Gilchrist's work here in Maine.  Picturesque as his buildings are, they are also at home in their surroundings, precise, elegant, understated,  but never under designed, and not without surprises and mystery, and in that eclectic age, he proved himself an adept player of the game, always creating something fresh from traditional idiom.  Here are three  buildings whose small size belies the vast quality of their design, making mockery of so many of the overblown structures of today.

Eleanor Denniston, like Gilchrist from was from Germantown.  She summered on remote Petit Manan Point, far from the social whirl of Mt. Desert Island.  In 1911, she commissioned Gilchrist to design a chapel for her property at Petit Manan.  It is a simple, almost miniature building, in the English tradition, but nearly reductionist in its design. A tower was built of stones hauled up from the beach, the slab siding was cut from trees on the property, and the interior was left unfinished, dependant entirely on simplicity, light and proportion for effect.  Click HERE for an evocative series of photographs which give a far better idea of this building.

  As one approaches Islesford on Little Cranberry Island off Mt. Desert, if one can take one's eyes off the spectacular scenery for a moment, a little cluster of buildings comes into focus on shore,  Most are vernacular structure of clapboard or shingle--boathouses, sheds, small cottages--but soon one spots this sophisticated little brick building sitting tactfully in their midst, different from them yet, fitting in.  This is the Islesford Museum, built again for a Philadelphian, Dr. William Otis Sawtelle, an Islesford summer resident strongly interested both in local history and cultures, as well as the ancient history of the Mt. Desert region.  He commissioned Gilchrist to design this elegant reductionist structure for his collection in 1927.  It is now the museum for Acadia National Park.  I could happily live there, should the Park ever tire of it..

The view from Little Cranberry Island.  We may not have a Barneys up here, but there are compensations

Outside, it is as reductionist and as imaginative as a Delano & Aldrich design, beautifully detailed, its unusual hooded fanlight echoed by another, this time antique, over a  door within. The brick is handmade, the details no more and no less than are needed for effect.  Inside, a hall connects three rooms on a 'T' plan with brick walls and gray painted floors, a fireplace in each room.  It is spartan, quiet, and cool, and for all its city airs, feels exactly right for its island location.  Sadly, I have no interior photos available.

The spring house at Sieur de Monts

At the other extreme, Bar Harbor in the 1920's was at the height of fashion.  Through much of the early 20th century, the Italian styles were popular there, being thought appropriate to the scenery and as a backdrop for summer gaiety, and many of the large cottages there were veritable replicas of Tuscan villas.  Even new  Lafayette (now Acadia) National Park, designed to keep the landscape forever wild, did not escape.  At the Park's Sieur de Monts Springs, local architect Fred Savage was commissioned to design a protective structure over the spring, based on a design by summer resident Egisto Fabbri, that would not look out of place in the countryside near Florence.

Dr. Abbe's sketch for his museum (National Park Service)

Thus in 1926, when Robert Abbe, a pioneering radiologist who was also an amateur archaeologist made plans to create a small museum for his collection of Stone Age antiquities, it did not seem incongruous that he would commission Edmund Gilchrist to design the museum in the style of a Florentine chapel at Sieur de Monts. (Okay, it is incongruous, an Italian chapel in the middle of the forest, housing ancient Native American artifacts.  But it works.)  Dr. Abbe died before his museum was completed in 1928

Even with Savage's spring house as introduction, it is a surprise to walk up a gentle wooded trail and suddenly be faced this exquisite little echo of the Renaissance in the forest.  Yet, it is a tribute to Gilchrist's skill that the building also seems inevitable and appropriate, even right in its surroundings, against all logic. A critic once wrote of the unexplainable alchemy and mystery of Gilchrist's architecture.  All of those qualities are present in this cool, understated building.

Are those signs flanking the entrance really necessary?  Really?  I've barely forgiven the park for the asphalt path

The domed main room maintains its period museum charm, with original display cases, dioramas, and relief maps created by Dr. Abbe.  These maps were in great demand among his friends and were decorative features of several Bar Harbor cottages.