DRIVING AROUND: HANCOCK POINT

Mt. Desert Island from Hancock Point (photograph, Ivy Main via Wikimedia Commons)

I'm afraid I've been a bit boring lately.  As the manuscript for the book starts to take shape, my focus has been narrowed to near obsession, on the architecture of the 27 different summer colonies that fan around this section of the coast, from Rockport to Winter Harbor, as I continue to visit archives and individuals in the search for interesting material.  Once a Dilettante who knew a little bit about a great many trivial topics, I now know a great deal, much of it trivia, about one topic.

As the concept of summering, or as it was know then, rusticating, gained momentum in Maine in the 1880's, and as Bar Harbor became one of the most fashionable destinations in the country, a resort boom gripped the lonely shores across Frenchman's Bay from that gilded place. Large tracts of oceanfront land were gobbled up by real estate speculators hoping to repeat the momentum at Mt. Desert.  Land companies were formed, lots were laid out, those dual necessities---steamship wharves and hotels---were built, illustrated brochures were printed, tennis grounds laid out, and the race was on to attract wealthy city dwellers to each Arcadia.  Despite those common characteristics and amenities--including the imagination-defying views across to Mt. Desert perhaps without peer on the Atlantic coast---each of these colonies developed differently, each with its unique character.

Cottages at Hancock Point, c. 1895 (Courtesy Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society)

Today, those little colonies, far closer to Canada than to Kennebunkport, seem remote---as their inhabitants prefer it---but in the day, when steamship and train were the chief modes of travel, one could take a day boat to Bar Harbor--each community had service----go shopping, have lunch, or attend a concert or a ball, and be back home on the opposite shore in time for bed.   

Mt. Desert Ferry Landing, at Hancock Point, The Bluffs hotel in background

Hancock Point was, I think, the earliest of these developments (the others were Sullivan Harbor, Sorrento, Winter Harbor, Grindstone Neck and Petit Manan Point), and  geographically the first encountered as one sails 'down east' up the coast.  It was conveniently adjacent to the train and steamship landing at Hancock Ferry, where later the crack Bar Harbor Express, originating at Grand Central in New York, had its terminus, trailing behind it the private railroad cars of the plutocrats who then would board a ferry for Bar Harbor.  It was laid out in 1883 by Joseph Curtis, a pioneering landscape architect and conservationist who summered in Northeast Harbor.  It was a far smaller development than the others---125 lots as opposed to the ambitious 2,000 proposed for Sullivan Harbor, for example.

This octagonal cottage, with its rustic porch of natural cedar , was built by a  Mr. Johnson in  1887.  In 1914, his daugher Lettie donated it for use as a library, which it purpose it still serves today.

An early farmhouse, converted to summer use after the development of the Point, with a restraint too seldom seen today.

Many of Hancock Point's earliest summer residents were not from far cities, but were lumber merchants and bankers from Bangor.  They were soon joined by college professors such as Charles Homer Haskins, the great Harvard medievalist, and by  quietly well-to-do urbanites who preferred to avoid the flash of Mt. Desert (I've been to maybe a dozen cocktail parties on Hancock Point over the years, and unfailingly, at each one someone has pointed out how 'we' are not 'fancy' like 'them' over on Mt. Desert).  At any rate, Hancock Point, after two World Wars, a great depression, and changes in travel, is a sleepy little place with big views and some very fine smaller summer cottage architecture along its gravel lanes.

A water tower at one of the cottages

This cottage, which sometimes shelters a noted politician, was designed by Fred Savage

The earliest cottages were gingerbread designs, closely sited.  By the end of the 19th century, comfortable but not vast shingle style cottages, on larger lots were the norm.  Landscapes were kept simple, with respect for the natural landscape---very few of the elaborate gardens that characterized some of the summer estates of other resorts were laid out on Hancock Point.

The last built of the pre-Depression summer cottages is also the grandest

A recent guest cottage delightfully references the earliest cottages on the Point

Although the Point layout included a central chapel lot, the current chapel was built around 1900 to designs by the great Maine architect John Calvin Stevens, one of the chief innovators in what we know today as the shingle style.  As with many of the summer colonies, it is one of the finest bits of architecture in the place---and Anglican, of course...

PS.  I was reminded this morning that Hancock Point has another attraction, listed in the National Register of Historic Places---the spot where Nazi spies landed from a U-boat, one of only two places where the Germans breached the US during World War II (Obviously, it was off-season, otherwise the summer folk would never have allowed it)  That story here: 

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.

INTERMISSION: Random Moments of Beauty

I am at last about to make the Big Announcement.  And after that I even have a few new posts---the sort that keep some of you coming back---lined up in the queue.  But for the moment, I'm finishing an article for New York Social Diary, and organizing the drum roll for the B.A.  So, in the meantime, (or is it meanwhile?), I offer a scenic intermission.

Last week up here was nothing short of astonishing.  Summer weather, in the seventies, in Maine, in March.  It was shirtsleeves and shorts weather, yet there were no leaves on the trees, no boats--save a few lobster boats--in the bays and harbors.  No tourists or summer folk on the street, no lines at the Restaurants, no gallery openings.  Nothing but sublime weather.  But appearances can be deceiving.  On another such fluke day in March some thirty years back,  I was deceived by the weather and swam in the ocean, off a beautiful pebble beach. It was, um, bracing.  I'm older and wiser now. Mostly older.

On Thursday, I chanced to find myself on the tip of Naskeag Point in Brooklin.  It is a small peninsula separating Blue Hill Bay from Eggemoggin Reach, one of the country's finest sailing waters.

The very tip of Naskeag point, a pink gravel beach, looking West, give or take

And from the same spot, looking in the other direction, East to Blue Hill bay

The next day, a little later in the afternoon on remote Petit Manan Point, further Down East, in a more spartan Maine.  This part of New England was once part of New France, and the names bestowed by Champlain, before Jamestown or the Mayflower, survive.

Lobster is the big industry on Petit Manan Point.  Here, lobster traps at the ready on a dock.  Left, to the East, is Bois Bubert Island, over the horizon, Portugal. 

And a little while later on the way home, a detour to Grindstone Neck.  This is the view East from Grindstone

And the view West across Frenchman's Bay, with Mt. Desert Island in the distance

Years ago, Mel Gibson filmed a movie up here---Man Without a Face.  A friend went to see it, and mentioned how extraordinary it was to look at the landscapes we see every day, perhaps even take for granted,  on the big screen, and how world class, they really are.  The distance by car between Naskeag and Petit Manan is only slightly over an hour, yet between those two points, I could have taken photographs of a thousand spots of astonishing beauty---many of scenes far more dramatic and spectacular than these.  And I never take them for granted.

To all those who ask how we survive the winters up here, this is your answer.  But remind me next February.

Way Down East: The Two Windswepts

There are two Windswepts.  One is a best selling 1953 novel by Mary Ellen Chase, about a several generations of a family living in a remote house by the sea in Down East Maine.  The other is her summer home, a remote house by the sea in Down East Maine.

Born in Blue Hill in 1887, Chase is considered one of the heirs to the literary tradition of Sarah Orne Jewett, and indeed is one of the best of the Maine novelists.  She puchased Windswept, located near the end of the world between wild blueberry barrens and the ocean on Petit Manan Point at Steuben, Maine in 1940, and there wrote nine of her books.  Built in the 1920's, the simple cottage is classic Maine, low, shingled, with simple shutters, and many small paned windows to let in the light from the sea.  A big living room with fieldstone fireplace anchors two wings, one with kitchen, the other with bedrooms, forming a sheltered courtyard at the entrance.

When Windswept was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the nomination read: 

She is considered by many literary critiques to be second only to Sarah Orne Jewett in her ability to capture the history and particular atmosphere of the coast of Maine and its people.  The isolated cottage provided Ms. Chase with the tranquility and isolation she needed to write, and in turn it also provided the inspiration for the setting of ‘Windswept’ (1941), her best-selling novel about immigration and integration in old settled Maine communities.”

“It is to the credit of the property owners since Ms. Chase that much of her former possessions, including furniture and books, and all the solitary ambiance of Windswept has been retained and preserved since her departure.”

Driftwood on mantel at Windswept 

Chase had to give up Windswept in 1956.  It went through several owners, who cherished the connection,  and the simple aesthetic of the place, before going on the market a couple of years ago.  The new owners did not desire any of Chase's furnishings or mementos, and last week, there was an auction, sparsely attended, and the accumulations of seventy years were sold, including a handwritten notebook about the house, written by Chase for the new owners when she sold the house.  It was a sad reflection of Chase's fallen literary status that even this manuscript failed to excite spirited bidding.  This writer, whose great-grandmother was a friend of Chase's,  purchased a round chair table, probably destined to be my new kitchen table,  and the piece of driftwood from above the living room mantel, where Chase's nephew remembered that she loved to always have a fire going in all weathers, for the pleasant scent.

 Windswept sold for 1.2 million, with 7.5 acres and 1100 feet of shorefront bordered by a preserve.  Imagine the same property in Montauk....

(Below), the final page of Chase's Windswept journal, wishing the new owners the same happiness she had experienced there.