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.

EARLY SUMMER VILLAGE

Castine, Maine is an indecently pretty place, the very paradigm of a New England village, classic crisp white houses on Elm-lined streets, sloping to a breathtaking harbor at the mouth of the Bagaduce River.   It is a history-proud town,with dozens of charming historical markers noting the sites of important events of the last four hundred years. Though the village has infinite charms, time is short, we all have lawns to mow, and we'll look at just a very few today.

The earthwork ramparts of Fort Madison, built as defense against the British in 1812.  It didn't work, and for a time  after, our peninsula was again part of England.

The rugosa roses are in full force this week, scenting the air and delighting the eye.  One hedge in particular sweeps uphill at a curve on Perkins Street in Castine, leading to the front door of a most unlikely and charming little cottage.

According to the 1896 edition of Augustus Wheeler's history of Castine, this cottage was originally the Witham farmhouse, its first floor one of the few stone buildings in town.  In 1884, Frank Wood, an entrepreneur from Bangor who built a number of picturesque log structures in the neighborhood in an effort to develop a summer colony, built a new cottage atop the stone foundation, using bark covered logs.  His original renovations can be seen below.   A few years later, another renovation gave the cottage its current form.

HOW THE DILETTANTE WATCHES A MOVIE

No matter how engrossed I am by a film,  I will eventually be distracted by the sets.  Such was the case during a recent viewing of 'Giant', the wonderful, wonderful George Stevens production of Edna Ferber's story of Texas rancher Rock Hudson, his refined aristocratic wife Elizabeth Taylor, and their neighbor James Dean.  I'm sure their characters had names, but let's face it:  They were  Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean.  Whenever the camera zoomed in on Taylor or Dean, the edges of the screen practically caught fire.  They really don't make them like they used to.

In this movie, the interior sets are as much characters as the actors, and change along with them.  The set design plot goes something like this::  Rock Hudson, back East on business, visits an associate at his old Maryland homestead---I did not get a screen shot of the exterior, but in Hollywood fashion, the set more resembles one of those Georgian country houses so beloved by the fox-hunting set on Long Island in the early years of the last century.  As he enters the front hall, one finds oneself not in Maryland, but instead suddenly in New England, for the set designer has based his design on one of New England's handsomest 18th century interiors, the hall of the Moffatt-Ladd house in Portsmouth New Hampshire.  There are differences---the door heads are Federal, in the style of Salem's Samuel McIntyre, not Georgian Portsmouth.  But, small quibble.  It is interesting to see all the same

In love, Elizabeth Taylor dances in her parent's hall

The original:  The hall at the Moffatt-Ladd house in Portsmouth NH

Later, we find Rock dining with Elizabeth and her family, partaking of Maryland hospitality.  This room was copied from the drawing room of Arlington House, the Custis-Lee mansion in Virginia.  We're getting closer---after all, Arlington is just the other side of Washington from Maryland

Despite a slight difference in proportion, there is no mitaking the historical source for the dining room set.

Two views of the White Parlor at Arlington house, with its lovely Leghorn marble fireplace surround, and reeded over doors.

In short order, Rock and Liz marry, and go home to the gloomy old house built by Rock's father on the family's Reata ranch, in the middle of Nowhere on the Texas plains.

The newlyweds are greeted in the baronial hall by Rock's less than friendly sister, Mercedes McCambridge.  The Old Dominion gentility of Liz's childhood home has been left far behind.

But not to worry, distraction from the brooding decor arrives in the person of brooding James Dean.

But, that doesn't keep Liz from updating the decoration in the hall to something more closely resembling her genteel youth.

After awhile, everyone in the movie seems to strike oil, and the decorating at Reata really takes off---Liz brings things  up to snuff, chic in monochromatic gray to complement her hair (The years have passed, and she's now the mother of nearly grown Carole Baker).

Rooms b y Frances Elkins

A bedroom designed by Frances Elkins

 The Hall gets yet a sleeker treatment also, but I didn't get a screen grab.  However, at some point, Liz and Rock wind up at a new hotel development built by James Dean, who also struck oil.  The set designer really knew what he or she was up to, for the suites in this hotel would do Dorothy Draper proud.

And there you have it---how a design fan sees a classic movie.

 Baz Luhrman's set designer could take lessons.

OPPOSITE POINTS OF VIEW

In my boyhood, two iconic pictures defined the sense of place and history in our community .  The first was a painting, 'A Morning View of Bluehill Village, 1824' by the Reverend Jonathan Fisher, a Yankee polymath who had come here fresh out of Harvard in 1795 to be the first settled minister of the village.  The other was a late 19th century 'Bird's Eye View' lithograph, published, coincidentally, 100 years after Parson Fisher's arrival.

Fisher's painting is a summary of his life and career in the town.  Although Blue Hill, originally New Andover, was settled in 1762 near the tidal falls at what is now South Blue Hill, the young village at the head of the Bay that Fisher later painted had barely existed before his arrival, but for a couple of houses, and grew and developed in those thirty subsequent years. Fisher's journals carefully record his progress on the painting, including traipsing to the Treworgy farm on the next hill (now known  as Greene's Hill, after later owners), with his homemade camera obscura, to make the first sketches in September 1824, and then note progress on the work until its completion in April 1825.  

Parson Fisher's home-made camera obscura

The village spreads out below the hill, quiet in the morning light.  In the foreground a man (Fisher?) drives a snake from this Eden.  There were probably roosters crowing, maybe hammers and saws working on the boats under construction at the edge of the harbor, but we can't hear those sounds.  All is quiet, frozen in time.  

Detail of the Fisher Farm from A Morning View of Blue Hill

The Fisher House from the same perspective today.

Opposite where he sat surveying the scene, on the top horizon, was Fisher's raison d'etre for choosing this perspective: his own farm, with its tidy orchard, and just downhill to the right, the meeting house where he preached, with the parade ground before it. It is a scrupulously honest picture. In the right middle ground is the Baptist meeting house, to which Fisher, a stern Calvinist, had lost much of his flock when it was founded a few years before. In a village near the Eastern Frontier, far removed from the centers of art, this painting was considered a marvel, and was  revered locally long before it found its way into the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum.  Considered the first true depiction of a Maine coastal scene, it has been published in countless books about American folk art and early 19th century culture.

A late 19th century photograph captures the view originally painted by Fisher

And on the opposite hill, one looks across to the spot (indicated by box) from  which  Fisher painted his view.  The photograph, actually two joined,  is from the series used in the creation of the bird's eye view

The second view was created by an artist using dozens of photographs taken in panoramic perspective, then mechanically re-aligned so as to appear taken from the air--a dozen years before the Wright Brothers would go aloft, and aerial photography become commonplace.  What fascinates and compels me to write about these pictures this morning is that each depicts the view from almost exactly the opposite center of the other--they literally look across to each other. In the bird's eye view, the Treworgy Farm is on the horizon about a third way from the right, and in the Fisher painting, one looks across to the spot that would be directly below the airborne viewer.

Bird's Eye View of Blue Hill, 1896.  For a full-screen version, please click HERE

The village has become quite a different place in the bird's eye view. Fisher's meetinghouse burned in 1842, and was replaced with a new Congregational Church downhill, closer to the center of the village.  The Baptist meeting house has become a church, with a spire echoing that of the Congregationalists.  A main street of stores, with post office and restaurants has grown up at the edge of the harbor.  

The Town Hall, designed by George Clough

A new town hall, designed by the architect son of a local shipbuilder, has just been constructed, Colonial in idea, but its Roman arched frontispiece clearly inspired by the newly popular classical ideas of the great Chicago Exposition of a couple years before.  As with Fisher's painting, a schooner is coming into the harbor, but despite sails, this one has smoke or steam rising from a stack on its deck.  Although Fisher's village still mostly survives, the 20th century is around the corner, and in the foreground is a harbinger of things to come---a big shiny new summer hotel for the newest Maine industry, rusticators.

The hotel, the Blue Hill Inn, was designed by William Ralph Emerson, the Boston architect who practically invented the shingled style of summer architecture favored on the Maine coast, and was the latest marvel of the town, complete with its own electric power plant, and supplanted the boarding houses and modest village hotels of earlier years. The Inn was not a success, and with the removal of a wing, was converted to use as a summer cottage by a new owner, Judge Chauncey Truax of New York, in the early 1900s.  Later, it served as a temporary hospital, and in the early years of the Depression, it went up in flames.

The 21st century is not being kind to the village of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Poor planning, lack of zoning, changing tastes, a little greed, changing economies and myriad other factors are wreaking changes on a scale that is unprecedented in our collective memory.  Change used to be gradual, and somewhat organic (South Street, new home of both roundabout and Dunkin' Donuts, was still a narrow gravel lane as recently as my childhood).  In recent years, the change has come faster, more forcefully, and has been more destructive.  Even as I type this, a rotary is being constructed at the dusty crossroads to the left of the Inn, and a Dunkin Donuts is going up on the inn site, across from the supermarket and Rite Aid drugstore that started the commercial sprawl.  

Bird's eye rendering of the new Dunkin' Donuts

As to the Fisher homestead, it is preserved as a museum, its original orchard replanted a few years ago (for an article about the Fisher Orchard, click HERE.) But, now only a thousand feet from a car wash and a new commerical parking lot with clear development intentions, the Fisher house's integrity and isolation, which lasted for most of the 20th century, is clearly coming to an end as it approaches its 200th anniversary.

On another note, the photograph below, from the George Stevens Academy on-line student paper, 'The Procrastinator', both sums up the local ambivalence about the arrival of Dunkin' Donuts, and on a more personal note, brings the Dilettante up short, for 43 years ago he was the editor of that school's paper, then called 'The Eagle's Nest'.  At that time it was a mimeographed four-sheet (my great contribution was sharper stencil graphics), and the slick advances in technology and content make me feel very, very old indeed.

Photoshop image of Blue Hill Mountain from GSA Procrastinator, credited to William Hilliard

As for Jonathan Fisher, a current exhibit at the Farnsworth Art Museum explores Fisher's ongoing fascination with the natural world in his art and writing, culminating in the book, 'Scripture Animals' (1833).  Click HERE for more.