'What God Would Have Done if He'd Only Had the Money'

I'm having a senior moment.  I forget who said the above, and about what building, but the title phrase did come to mind on last Sunday's hike (well, okay, this one was a walk), where I got to combine nature with architecture (and food).  What else does one need?  And if my posts seem a little Mt. Desert Island-centric over the next couple of weeks, it's because my two hikes on the island in June resulted in over 300 photographs.   A digital camera is a dangerous thing in the hands of the chronically over-stimulated.

 A view across little long pond toward boathouse and mountains, Rockefeller estate, Seal Harbor

Mt. Desert Island, one of the most spectacular spots along the entire East Coast, has been particularly blessed with a combination of dramatic natural scenery, a wealthy summer community that is also civic minded and philanthropically enlightened, and their good advisors, including landscape architects Charles Eliot, Beatrix Farrand, Joseph Curtis and Frederick Law Olmstead, all fervent advocates of site friendly, low intervention landscape, and last, but not least, Charles F. Dorr, the founder of what became Acadia National Park.   This tradition continues today, with many of the beauties of the island preserved forever wild yet with ample public access---too much perhaps, as anyone who has strolled the streets of Bar Harbor in August would argue.

Sinously curved stone arms extend from either side of the main gate designed by Grosvenor Atterbury

Across from the main gate are the Atlantic Ocean and the Cranberry Islands.

The 800 pound Gorilla among Island philanthropists for the last 100 years has been the Rockefeller family.  John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife Abby Aldrich first visited the Island in 1908, renting the Sears cottage at Bar Harbor, and three years later purchased a large shingled summer house on 60 acres in Seal Harbor.   They rapidly expanded both their house and their lands, eventually owning about 1200 acres.  Contiguous to the Rockefeller property are lands purchased and donated to Acadia National Park by Junior, as has been much of the estate acreage in recent decades.  Autos were first allowed on Mt. Desert in 1914 after lengthy battles, and Mr. Rockefeller, desiring both a quiet place to ride, and wishing to make the beautiful scenery of the island interior available for public enjoyment, embarked on a program of building carriage roads through his estate and park property, all available for public use.   In this venture, he proceeded with his usual deliberate method, weighing pros and cons, researching materials and construction methods, and getting personally involved with the laying out of the roads, to capture, but not interrupt, special views.  The roads are masterpieces of their type. In this venture, he had the advice of, among others, Beatrix Farrand and the Olmstead Brothers.   For those interested in more about the building of these roads, I recommend the highly interesting Mr. Rockefeller's Roads, by his granddaughter, Anne Rockefeller Roberts.

 The carriage drives are a beautiful example of  nature combined with the subtle hand of the landscaper's art, in this case Beatrix Farrand's, and beautiful maintenance.

The rocks along steeper edges are known locally as 'Rockefeller Teeth'.  Although the plantings appear completely wild, the original roadsides were helped along by Beatrix Farrand with carefully chosen accents of wild native shrubs.  Horse poop ahead attests to the road's continued equestrian use.

Today the carriage roads are widely used for strolls, dog walking, and riding and coaching---it is not unusual to see Martha Stewart, in her best imitation yet of old money ways, riding her coach and team along these trails.

 A couple riding their carriage, as intended, on one of the trails (photo by Stage, Town & Country May 1985

The section of trail I chose was the loop around Little Long Pond, a park-like landscape at the base of the home grounds of the long demolished Rockefeller cottage, The Eyrie.   Here Beatrix Farrand advised on  a combination of sloping meadows punctuated by clumps of trees adjoining the pond, mediating between the steeper slopes of the rocky hillsides, all carefully designed to  frame mountain and ocean scenery.

The discontinued drive up to the main house, The Eyrie, demolished in the early 1960's

Along the way, one passes a boathouse, one of many buildings to survive from the original estate.  This charming building was designed by Mrs. Rockefeller's favorite architect, the very social Duncan Candler, married to a member of another Seal Harbor family.  Candler designed the remodeling of the main house, and also other outbuildings, including wonderful Tudor style Tennis Court/Bowling/Alley Playhouses for both the Seal Harbor and Pocantico estates, as well as an art gallery for the Rockefellers nine story townhouse in New York, now site of the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden.  He was also the architect of Skylands, the Edsel Ford estate now owned by Martha Stewart, on the next hilltop from The Eyrie.

The boathouse is a delightful structure.  From a distance, it appears almost as a Japanese pavilion at the edge of the shore.  Closer up, it is a classic shingle style building, with Colonial Revival detailing. Verandas on either side of the large doors opening into the pond made a pleasant spot for afternoon picnics.  

And since this is, after all, a blog concerned with architecture, some of you will be asking what the demolished house looked like:

I'll post about the house----and its superb Beatrix Farrand garden---another day.  The pair of mountains in the background rise above the shore of Jordan Pond and are known as the Bubbles---although local lore has always been that they were originally known as the Bubbies, the name having been changed for the tourist trade.....

'SKYLANDS' BEFORE MARTHA

I finally got around to cleaning the desk.  Deep in the back of a drawer was a wrinkled file of clippings from the 80's.  Among them was a real estate brochure for Skylands, the Seal Harbor, Maine home of Martha Stewart, a couple of years before she purchased it.

View of Seal Harbor in the late 1920's.  The full bulk of the newly built Skylands can be seen at top left

The stories of Skylands are legion, and since most Martha followers can recite them as if liturgy----the  mile of pink crushed granite drives which are raked up, washed and stored every winter, the forest floors sprayed with buttermilk to encourage a mossy carpet, the superb craftsmanship, the heated drying cabinets for linens---the list goes on, and I won't bore the reader with yet another repetition.

Long story short:  The estate was developed for Edsel Ford, son of Henry.  The architect was Duncan Candler, a well connected society architect whose sister, Edith Candler Stebbins, had married into a leading Seal Harbor summer family.  Candler built up a fair summer practice in Seal Harbor, designing large, restrained and comfortable houses for  such other summer families as the Rockefellers, who occupied the next hill over from the Fords (future post).  Skylands is a severely geometric and horizontal house, gorgeously sited just below the brow of the hill, and appears to grow out of the very pink granite ledges on which it is built.  Despite it' academic qualities, it is as successful an example of a house growing organically from its site as any modernist effort.  The landscaping is by the brilliant Jens Jensen, who had also done the Ford's Michigan estate.  There is no lawn, and the subtle landscape he created, of boulders, and native plants, naturalness achieved at great expense, seems as inevitable as if Mother Nature herself had laid it out---a true example of the Capability Brown axiom "consult the genius of the place."  

Skylands in a 1930's postcard view

Oops.  I said I wouldn't go on, but born pedant that I am, I just can't help it.  Herewith, the pictures (sorry for the wrinkles) from the real estate brochure.   The house was at the time owned by the Leedes, who bought it from the Ford estate in the 1970's.  Though the house was not as lavishly burnished and maintained as in the Ford's day (hot and cold running staff helped), the Leedes' did regularly call in Mrs. Ford's old decorators, the Palm Beach firm of Jessup, Inc. to keep things up.  Although the Fords left their furnishings, they took the art, and the pallid framed pieces do not live up to the architecture. Very Wasp , very understated, slightly boring.  Now, of course, the joint is just plain jaw-dropping.  Everything perfectly maintained, the neglected landscape restored to perfection, and maintained beyond perfection.

Entrance Front

The paneled two story entrance hall leads into this living hall, with a fireplace carved of native pink granite.

The 30 x 50 living room

Dining room.

The superb terrace which overlooks most of creation

Most of creation, as seen from the terrace

Pergola Terrace off Living Room

The Playhouse, with squash court

MAKING WHOOPIE

Did I say I wasn't going to talk much about myself in this blog?  Well, as it turns out, I lied.  You're about to discover one of Maine's darkest secrets.  This post goes out to all those tourists who truly believe that Maine's favorite foods are blueberry pies and lobsters.

A disclaimer:  When no dinner invitations are forthcoming, and I'm forced to dust off the stove,  I'm more likely to seek inspiration from Patricia Wells and Marcella Hazan than Maine favorite Fanny Farmer, or I open the New York Times and see what Mark Bittman is up to.  Or, hey, I order a pizza.  But, I grew up in Maine, and have a sweet tooth, and  lately I've been thinking a lot about Whoopie pies, a treat from my childhood, otherwise definitely an acquired taste, that has gone mainstream (see article from New York Times).

What's a Whoopie Pie, you ask?  Basically, it is two large chocolate cookies with cream filling between them...or maybe they're more like small cakes, or muffin tops, but you get the basic idea.  Or at least that's what Whoopie Pies were until Martha Stewart got involved.--- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

On my way home, I stopped at the local grocery store to pick up some skim milk and fruit (honest!  I mean, the fruit looks so pretty in the glass bowl on the kitchen table).  On the store counter were some Whoopie Pies.  Huge whoopie pies.  Whoopie pies as big as my head, which is very big, containing as it does, all my massive brains.   I didn't buy one (told you I was smart!), but even  without taking a bite, the whoopie pie got me all Proust-ed up, unleashing a flood of memory.  You've been warned, so if you like, you can stop here.  But if you do, you'll miss the recipe at the end of the post.

When I was a little boy, there were no 7-11's, no Big Apples, and I had no idea I'd become a middle age man who started sentences with 'when I was your age...'.   Anyway, there was a little store up the road---I'd go with my father when he went to pick up the newspaper  Tyler's store, couple of gas pumps under leaning porte cochere, Nestle's sign in the window, and a big red chest cooler filled with glass bottles of soda pop chilling in ice water (yes, children, we called it soda pop), NeHi Orange was my drink---sweet rehearsal for the ice cold gin martini that has supplanted it---and I can remember the thrill of accomplishment, getting the crimped metal cap off by hooking it under the bottle opener built into the cooler (is anyone under forty reading this?).   Most of all, I remember the whoopie pies on the counter.    I'd beg, I'd stomp my little foot, I'd be generally embarrassing, but I'd usually get my father to spring for the whoopie.  And I'd be happy.

Less often, my mother, a superb baker, would make a batch.   Two dozen whoopie pies in the house, and only my surprisingly strong little sister to fight for them.  My mother would try rationing them, but I'd sneak into the covered container where they were stored, and poor deluded youth, I'd really convince myself that she'd forget that there were 12 and not 10.   Um, yeah, and did you see that pig fly?   My mother's, whoopies, like her perfect pie crusts, and delicate jam filled cookies with their perfect edges, were beautiful to look at.  And just the slightest, barest hint of crispness at the very edges of the cloud light cookie, just the right sweetness to the filling.  

Time passed.  I grew up.  I saw France.  I forsook whoopie pies for dacquoise and apple pie for tarte aux pommes (are we all insufferable snobs in our 20's, or was it just me?).  Whoopie pies were pretty much off the radar, except when city friends visited and would  be amazed by the sight of whoopies at the local stores (as in What The Hell is That? ) And so things remained, until Martha Stewart bought a house in the area.  For those first couple of summers, she couldn't get enough Maine.  She was everywhere.  For awhile it looked as if she'd have to change the magazine's name to Martha Stewart Maine Living, so full was it with articles about Maine craft, Maine boats, Maine blueberries and Maine picnics.   And then, one day, there it was:  she'd discovered Whoopie Pies.  I've never understood how the nice author of the New York Times article (have you read it yet?  You're going to be quizzed) could possibly have wondered in print how the whoopie pie got out of Maine and into the nation.  The New York Times is supposed to know these things, for Pete's sake.  It was Martha Stewart's fault.  She unleashed the Whoopie on an unsuspecting nation.

 Martha Stewart, got all designer with the whoopie pies.  Suddenly, it wasn't just chocolate whoopies, and their quite delicious off spring, the pumpkin whoopie, It was Ginger whoopies with maple cream, it was whoopies with peanut butter cream, oh hell, it was maple whoopies with ginger cream., lemon cream, you  name it.   Seems to me that somewhere  along the line, there was even a blueberry whoopie. Then some nice artisanal bakers (whatever did food writers do before artisanal entered the vocabulary????) got hold of them, made them in cute seashell shapes, packaged them in cute lobster roll container looking packages, with impossible to open (um, I hear...) plastic wrap, elegantly packaged and shipped all over the world.  I make fun, but in fact the whoopies made by the nice bakers are out of this world.  Click here for their website:

And that brings us to this morning.  Whoopie pies on my mind.  I emailed my mother to ask for her recipe for this post.  Before I got a chance to say why, she was immediately offering to make me a batch.   This is more diabolical than it sounds:   My mother's favorite pastime in old age is telling me how much weight I've gained since I was 20.  Her second favorite pastime is trying to feed me baked goods so she can continue to enjoy her first favorite pastime.   But enough, I can take that up with my analyst.   Herewith is the recipe I promised. I was stunned when my mother emailed it  ('what are you going to do with it?'), because it turns out that a major ingredient is.....Crisco!  It was Maine, it was the fifties....go ahead, make fun, use butter instead.  They won't be any better.  Or at least not as authentic.......

Whoopie Pies
    5 tbs. Crisco
    1 cup sugar
    5 ++ tbs. good cocoa
    1 Cup Milk
    1 Egg
    2 Cups Flour
    1 1/4 tsp. baking soda]
    1 tsp. salt
    Mix together.  Drop by tablespoons full, bake about 12 minutes at 350 degrees.  Makes 1 dozen.
Filling:
    3/4 cup Crisco
    3/4 cup confectioner's sugar
    6 tbs. marshmallow fluff  (hmmm, it really was the 50's)
    1 tsp. vanilla extract.
    Mix together, spread on two cookies, make sandwich.
   
Be nice, and maybe someday I'll post the recipe for old fashioned thin, crisp, brown sugar cookies, a treat recipe from our elderly neighbor when I was a child.  I've never had them anywhere else, and they are astonishing, and they don't use Crisco. Unless you want to.