CAN YOU SAY "BICENQUINQUAGENARY"?

It's all right, neither can I, and the preferred word is Sestercentennial, anyway.

Oh, you want me to tell you what it means?  Sheesh.  Don't you people have Google?  You think I came up with this on my own?  Here:

The preferred term for a 250th anniversary isSestercentennial.  The number 2½ is expressed in Latin as "half-three". The term relates to being halfway from the second integer to the third integer. In Latin this is "Sestertius" which is a contraction of semis (halfway) tertius (third) - hence Sestercentennial.

Other terms that have been used include:

• Semiquincentennial - Probably a modern coined term: semi- (half) × quin (5) × cen(t)- (100) × centennial (250 years).
• Bicenquinquagenary - Used by Princeton University in 1996 and Washington and Lee University in 1999. It is a coined word for an anniversary of 250 years, but the elements of the word literally refer to an anniversary of 10,000 years, as follows: bi- (2) × cen(t)- (100) × quinquagenary (50 years).
• Quarter-millennial - Meaning one fourth of one thousand years.

Now you know.  You're welcome.

Our little village celebrated the 250th anniversary of European settlement this weekend with a town wide party.  Events marked the occasion and included the historic schooner Bowdoin sailing into the harbor as part of a reenactment of the first landing.   I missed the Bowdoin, and to my sorrow I had to miss the re-dedication of the monument to the first settlers south of the village, and the boat parade in the harbor the next day.  I did go through the village in time to catch the dedication of a sculpture 'Spirit of the Sea Wind' in the little waterfront park named for my grandfather.  As regular readers well know, my facade of brittle sophistication crumbles in the presence of such events, and this was no exception.  The day was hot but beautiful, and a children's band played the Star Spangled Banner---not dry Dilettante eye in the house.

There were many other events, but my favorite was the fireworks display over the Harbor on Sunday evening---I am a sucker for bright lights and sparkly displays.   I wandered downhill to the village and as I reached the town square, the fireworks began.  I couldn't find the camera that enjoys taking pictures at night, so had to use one that didn't quite, and the gentle reader will have to mostly use his imagination.  It may not have been Monte Carlo, but on a balmy summer evening, in a sentimental mood, the bursts of light reflected over the millpond and harbor from the Main St. bridge---all pretty perfect.

Big applause to Lynne and the committee

Happy Birthday Village Formerly Known as Township #5.

COMING EVENTS

It's House and Garden Tour season in Down East Maine. This week there are two events worthy of mention for our house and garden loving readers.

THE BLUE HILL HOUSE TOUR

There will be a house tour on Thursday the 26th, sponsored by the Jonathan Fisher House and Blue Hill Historical Society museums in Blue Hill.  Eight houses dating from 1812 to 1948, plus the two museums will be featured.   The emphasis of this year's tour, which coincides with Blue Hill's 250th anniversary (For those who don't know, a 250th is a Sestercentennial) is New England style.  Tickets are $20.00, and may be purchased in advance.  For more details, click HERE

Parker House, Blue Hill

Highlights of the Blue Hill tour include 'Parker House', a handsome 1812 Federal with later Colonial Revival enchancements by Boston architect George Clough, a restoration in progress by a descendant of the early owners, and 'Blueberry Hill', a 1932/1938 New England style summer 'cottage' designed by Rolf Bauhan, a Princeton, New Jersey architect.  Bauhan is best known today for the estate he designed for the Church family at Montauk New York, owned for many years by Andy Warhol. 

'Blueberry Hill'

Playhouse interior at 'Blueberry Hill', from Architectural Forum, October, 1937

The beach front playhouse at 'Blueberry Hill' was featured in Architectural Forum in 1937.  Also featured on the tour will be three classic Shingle style summer cottages, including one with a dipsomaniac ghost, another whose second floor was removed in the downsizing of the 1970's, and carefully replaced and restored, better than ever a few years ago, with a new open stairwell designed by the current owner.

Looking as good as when it was built in 1907 for Pittsburgh newspaper publisher Theodore Nevin, the Carroll cottage actually was missing its second floor for 20 years, carefully replaced by its current owner.

'Elwin Cove' in Blue Hill, built for inventor/manufacturer E.J. Brooks in 1908

Proceeds of the Blue Hill tour support the Jonathan Fisher House and the Blue Hill Historical Society .   At the Fisher House, in addition to their important collection of folk art, may be seen an early orchard restoration, to original plan, in progress, and at the Holt House, a gem of an Asher Benjamin inspired Federal, a highlight is the Adelphi reproduction wallpaper, based on an original

MOUNT DESERT OPEN GARDEN DAY

And over on Mt. Desert Island, the Garden Club of Mount Desert is hosting a tour of six extraordinary gardens on private estates, including those of Rosserne, one of Northeast Harbor's finest shingle style summer houses.  On the beautiful lawn sweeping down to Somes Sound is an ancient apple tree, whose move from Ellsworth to Northeast Harbor famously tied up traffic for an entire day.  Other gardens include those of 'Southerly', a cliffside cottage in Seal Harbor, and a Robert Stern designed house nearby.

'Rosserne', designed by Fred Savage in 1891

Photographs of the gardens are closely guarded and unavailable before the tour, and so to whet your appetite for the tour, visit this slide show of the grounds at Rosserne .  The estate also incorporates the former Haskell estate, whose original landscaping was by Beatrix Farand.

'Southerly'

Proceeds of the Mount Desert Open Garden Days benefit several worthy public gardens, including The Wild Gardens of Acadia , and The Beatrix Farrand Society at Garland Farm, last home and garden of the great designer.

For more details about the Mount Desert Open Garden Day, click HERE

INTERMISSION: MAY INTO JUNE, AND TWO PARADES

Everyone has a favorite time of year.  Mine has just ended, and lovely though the months ahead will be, I'm a bit triste at the parting, always too fast, too soon.   Spring is hard won in eastern Maine, but once arrived, it is sweet and delicate.  Suddenly in mid-May, we burst into bloom, and Dilettantes, usually jaded, forget the cares of the world and burst into song.   Against a backdrop of fresh greens come the blossoms---tulips, apple trees, cherries, and above all, lilacs, making old New England villages young again.  At Memorial day comes a parade and bittersweet remembrance.  The lilacs fade, and as quickly are replaced by fields of lupine, making the whole world seem an impressionist landscape.  The air is sweet, and in the ever longer evenings, those fields are alight with fireflies, blurring the horizon between starry sky and meadow. 

A wild apple tree at the edge of my meadow lights up against a passing storm in May

This year, our little village celebrates its 250th anniversary, and floats in the Memorial Day parade marked local pride at the birthday.   That same week, on Friday, the elementary school children held another parade, a happy ode to Spring.  We're a musical town, somewhat famously so, and even the hardest hearted among us on the street that 1st day of June could fail to be delighted as the school band,  a jazz band, and then two steel drum bands marched up Maine Street.  As they reached the stately old Town Hall, they stopped and sang 'Happy Birthday' to the town.

I may sometimes crave other places, other climes, more sophisticated pleasures, but in those sweet, fleeting weeks leading up to summer, there is no other way I want the world to be.

For Memorial Days past, click HERE and HERE

And thanks to Paul for Memorial Day photos, and Laurie for the School Parade

BED-SITS

This morning, while paging through the 1920 edition of House & Garden's Second Book of Interiors, I passed many handsome rooms, most of which betrayed their time and place---typical Long Island country house drawing rooms, all correctly Georgian, stockbroker Tudor libraries, and Colonial Dining rooms.   Suddenly, the room above jumped out at me, and demanded a closer look.  It was something more unusual, rich, yet looser and more imaginative after the acres of floral cretonne and hooked rugs of most of the book.  Here was something bolder---a bedroom with drawing room pretensions---the furniture well chosen, loose and sparely arranged in the vaulted ceilinged space, long French windows, curtains freely draped, facing each other on two sides.  Old black and white photograph is deceptive.  My first instinct was that the room was likely in traditional Chinese export color schemes---all celadon and rose.   The bold Tibetan tiger rug should have clued me otherwise.  The caption describes something far more dramatic for this room

Okay, that got my attention.  I googled Mr. Thomas---the house was called Huntland (click HERE and HERE for more), and he himself was prominent in the foxhunting world in the land of silver stirrup cups and good English furniture.  How he came to have interiors of such imagination, or who did them for him, eluded me, but clearly he was a guy with some dash.

'Huntlands' the Joseph Thomas house in Middleburg, built 1830, and renovated by Peabody, Wilson & Brown, architects (Country Life in America)

Huntlands, plan of first floor, bedroom on left

The Thomas bedroom room appears to be missing from the history of Chinoiserie interiors  in America in the 20th century, a body which includes the Chinese Room at Beauport, not published by House & Garden until eight years after the Thomas Room.  It is worth noting that Henry Davis Sleeper was one of the ushers at Thomas's wedding to Clara Fargo in 1915---perhaps he had a hand in the Chinese bedroom?

Or Conde Nast's ballroom, decorated by Elsie de Wolfe, with its famous set of Chinese papers from Beaudesert, an Anglesey family house in England.

And of course, the Chinese drawing room of 1930 at Henry DuPont's Winterthur House, whose wallpaper came from the same set as that in the Chinese room in Beauport.  The DuPont room is seen below in a stereoview as it appeared when the family lived there, from the Winterthur Digital Archives.

I was tempted to veer off to Middleburg with more about the Thomas house, but instead decided to contemplate some of the bedroom's spiritual descendants, such as Pauline de Rothschild's Chinoiserie bedroom at Chateau Mouton, as famously photographed by Horst for Vogue, below.  The same

Or Nancy Lancaster's famous bedroom at Haseley Court.   One is tempted to wonder whether Mrs. Lancaster, in her own Virginia foxhunting days as Mrs. Field and later Mrs. Tree, had ever visited Huntlands and seen the glamorous Thomas bedroom.  Certainly her famous bedroom there, despite stylistic differences has much in common.

Last but not least, the longer I looked at the Thomas room, the more familiar the bed became.  And sure enough it is apparently the same bed for which Doris Duke paid $400.00  at a shop called The Flea Market in 1942, sold for many times that ($20,000 to be exact) at the 2004 Christies auction of her effects.  

UPDATE: Perhaps I should have followed through on Joseph B. Thomas after all, for had I thought about it a moment longer---or not been so focused on dramatic bedrooms, the lightbulb would have gone off and I would have realized that he was the same Joseph B. Thomas who, inspired by Fenway Court in his native Boston, developed Beekman Terrace, the first luxury co-op on the East River, complete with gondola landing, and who was married to Wells Fargo heiress and muralist Clara Fargo Thomas, whose house up here is one of the epochal houses of the 1930's, and which I blogged about HERE

AND TODAY IN NYSD:  In 'House' I interview Michael Kathrens, author of  American Splendor, the Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, newly revised by Acanthus Press.  Click HERE

I RISKED MY LIFE TO TAKE THIS PHOTOGRAPH

No, seriously, I really did, although undeniably the bar lowers for what can be considered dangerous risk in late middle age.  No derring-do on ocean sailing boats, no climbing of sheer cliffs.  No, what I did was merely park illegally for five minutes and stand in a narrow traffic island in the middle of speeding commuter traffic (those suburbanites do love to drive their Audis at inappropriate speed in inappropriate locations) on Rte. 9 in Scarborough New York, all in order to photograph this amazing gate, which I've admired for years.  No false modesty about the builder of this Brobdingnagian construction.

I spent three days last week in the Tarrytown region of the Hudson Valley, researching various Maine homes of a certain family who,  after striking it rich in oil, loaded up their truck and moved to the Hills of Pocantico.  The Hudson valley has always been one of my favorite outings, combining as it does world class scenic grandeur, a romantic history and one of the country's great and varied collections of domestic architecture.   Despite the steady march of Dry-Vit and office parks, the Sleepy Hollow neighborhood around Tarrytown and Scarborough in the lower valley still offers much to see, not the least of which is this dramatic gate on Broadway, as the confusing network of routes 9 are often known on their run up the valley.

It is the former entrance to Beechwood, an estate originally dating to the 18th century.  The gates were commissioned in the early 20th century by the estate's then owner, Frank Vanderlip, one of the powers behind First National City Bank.  His architect was Rockefeller family favorite William Welles Bosworth, a Beaux Arts trained designer with a special talent for cold, cerebral evocations of the drama of ancient Rome and Greece.   For the reader who has never passed these gates, it should be mentioned that the scale is imperial.  Although the beautiful Grecian inspired iron gate is kept low to increase the dramatic effect, low in the case is actually around eight feet high at the crest, and the superb columns, rescued from a great demolished 19th century New York building---I once knew which, the answer now eludes me---are well over twenty feet.  Mr. Vanderlip must have felt like an emperor, or more aptly, Croesus, when he arrived home after a hard day of counting piles of money.

Although the gate is abandoned, the estate itself is condominums, and kept in good order, including the Roman gardens and pool added by Vanderlip, also designed by Bosworth.  The house, originally a relatively simple structure built in the 18th century, was repeatedly enlarged through the 19th and 20th centuries, is one of those places where degrees of separation abound.   The estate was purchased in the late 19th century by H. Walter Webb, a vice president of the New York central, whose brother, Seward, married the boss's daughter Lila, whose sister Margaret Vanderbilt Shepard owned the estate across the street by McKim, Mead & White, now the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.  Webb's widow, Leila Griswold, married Edith Wharton's partner in decorating crime, the confirmed bachelor Ogden Codman, whose first big  job had been for Margaret Shepard's and Lila Webb's brother Cornelius in Newport.  And so it goes.  

 The early Vanderlip years in the 20th century were the estate's most most glamorous era.  Intellectually inclined, Narcisse and Frank Vanderlip built a Montessori school and private theater (above) also designed by Bosworth, on the grounds for their and the neighborhood children.  The students later came to include those of John Cheever, who rented a charming studio house on the estate in the mid-20th century (Susan Cheever would return there briefly as a teacher).  

By the 1970's, semi-abandoned, the mansion itself became the setting for Merchant-Ivory's first production, Savages.  As with all their movies, the set is the star, and James Ivory's memory of that shoot (click HERE, pg.7) is worth a read.

Present day views of Beechwood, and the rotunda library and ballroom added by Bosworth, via Zillow

UPDATE 1:  An esteemed and ancient reader with sharp eyes sends THIS LINK to a Gant commercial filmed at Beechwood.  Would that I looked so lean and fit in my seersucker jacket :-(

UPDATE 2:   One of the pleasures of blogging is that if I don't know it, surely a commenter will (thank-goodness).   The columns, whose origin I couldn't remember, were salvaged from the old New York Customs House designed by Isiah Rogers at 55 Wall Street in 1836-42.  After the Customs house removed to Bowling Green, the building was taken over by Vanderlip's National City Bank, remodeled by McKim Mead & White.  Vanderlip had two of the columns, four stories high and turned from single blocks of Quincy granite  Think about what I just wrote.  Single pieces of granite.  Not the pyramids, perhaps, but a fairly huge engineering feat for the time..   No less amazing is that two stories of the columns' height is buried below ground in their current location.