INTERMISSION: ON THE ROAD TO CASTINE

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

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

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

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 Gray Ward, a Boston banker associated with Baring Brothers, whose interest in Transcendentalism included friendships with such as Emerson and Thoreau.  It was a time when Newport was a gentler place,a summer colony of 'nice' millionaires and high minded intellectuals, and who, like Henry James later regretted the loss of the resort of simple fields and seaside verandas. The architect was John Hubbard Sturgis, who coincidentally was married to Ogden Codman's aunt (and who would remodel  the Codman family home in Lincoln, also later to be done over by Ogden.   

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

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 was inherited by his son, who, after considering his options, decided to demolish the house.  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 A&P heiress Josephine Hartford, then Mrs. Barclay Douglas.  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 Frazier Jelke, an heir to an oleomargarine fortune, who received planning approval to convert it to apartments.. In 1953, the house was then sold to the ubiquitous Louis Chartier, a local real estate investor who had taken advantage of depressed post-war prices to purchase many of Newport's grandest houses and convert them to apartments.  In a 1961 article about the decline of Newport, Time Magazine reported that the dining room alone now held a four room apartment.   In 1986 the house was converted to condominiums, but in recent years, a new owner has reunited the main block as a single-family residence,.

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.