GINGERBREAD VILLAGE

One rubs one’s eyes in astonishment when one first sees it—a tiny settlement of even tinier Victorian cottages in the woods on a bluff,  arranged around a village green sloping down to Penobscot Bay. It is crowded, cheerful, festive, even a bit unruly in spots.  In the summer, with porches bursting with flowering plants and wicker rockers, sailboats in the bay and softball games on the green, it is like a stage set ideal of summer life 100 years ago.

One doesn’t come upon it easily.  It is hidden off tourist Rte.1 midway between the groomed nautical splendors of Camden and the artsy hipness of Belfast, both harbor towns of stately white houses and upscale restaurants and galleries.  It is Bayside in Northport, founded in 1849 as a Methodist campground retreat.  Originally the faithful would pitch tents for their revivals; by 1869, the first cottage was built.  A hotel, the Wesleyan Grove House,  followed in 1875, and by 1879, about 40 of the eventual 300 cottages had been built. In the day  steamboats were the chief mode of transport up and down the coast, and it was a favorite day trip.  Today, there are no stores, and in summer, the loudest sound is likely to be the slamming of an old fashioned wooden screen door.  Nearby, on Temple Heights, a spiritualist camp still survives, with mediums available in summer.  

An early 20th century view, top, of cottages, and the hotel, below.

Passing by last week, I swung off the highway for a quick visual treat.  The sky was glowering, and the late afternoon light was not conducive to photography.  I walked around for a few minutes, but found I wasn’t dressed for the sharp cold wind off Penobscot Bay (we’ve been enjoying a mild, mostly above freezing, winter, and I’ve gotten a bit casual about dressing warmly), and the metal camera even too cold in my hands.  It’s just as well though, for had I taken pictures in the summer,  you’d all be calling your real estate agents.  One can imagine worse fates than a few summer weeks spent in one of these lacy dollhouses overlooking the sea.

Park Row, sloping down to the bay

I love the way the roof was raised on the cottage on the left

The tiniest of all

A gravity defying dormer.  And yes, the name of the cottage is ‘Braking Wind’

As in practically every seaside town in Maine, real estate offices prevail over retail commerce in former storefronts

The same row 100 years apart.  The blue house, above, is on the left in the picture below.  The house between it and the yellow house has disappeared, one of only a very few not to survive.

The community hall, with yacht club offices in the basement

One is reminded of the colorful little houses of Key West.  Or would, if Key West had hills.  And snow. And no bars.  And spruce trees instead of Palms.  And no Drag Queens.  Other than that…

Almost perfect pitch.  I think this cottage was used in Mel Gibson’s ‘Man Without A Face, filmed here and at the former Frederic Law Olmsted’s summer place on Deer Isle (props purchased from the Dilettante’s shop also make appearances).  It is no wonder movies cost so much to make.  In the movie, this house belonged to a young boy who visits Gibson at his house (Felsted).  In the movie the boy merely bicycles over.  In reality, the two houses are fifty miles apart by road, or 20 by water.  $$$.

MRS. WHARTON GOES CANOEING IN NYSD

I forget things.  It’s not age.  I’ve always been this way.   While my head is in the clouds, pondering things like the influence of 16th century urban planning in Italy on modern strip malls in New England and vice versa, I sometimes don’t remember that I was actually supposed to call the plumber.  Last week was no exception.  I forgot to lunch with a delightful friend, and I forgot to send a piece I had written to coincide with Edith Wharton’s birthday to New York Social Diary.  Fortunately, DPC is a most generous and forgiving host, and has published my belated birthday card today.  That piece can be read by clicking HERE.

Edith Wharton strolled here:  The Shore Path at Bar Harbor, near the cottage of her brother Frederic Newbold Jones.

As to the delightful friend who was stood up, she too claims to have forgiven me, but has extracted her revenge by putting me up for auction for benefit of her local library. At the moment, with 11 days to go, I at $83.00.   (I should have sent flowers)

SIX MONTHS AND 100 DEGREES AGO

I awoke at 6:15 this morning.  The sun was rising, the sky a clear brilliant blue, the  temperature minus three–yes minus three— degrees Fahrenheit.  Now, two hours later, it is a balmy minus one.  According to the online weather report, the windchill is -21).  Welcome to little Antarctica.  Is it possible that only six months have passed since the hottest day of last year, and now it is 100 degrees colder?

On that day, with temperatures flirting with the 100 degree mark along the Maine coast, , not a cool breeze to be found.  At the hottest part of the day, I was driving North on I-495 through Massachusetts, heading back to Maine.  At five P.M., after I exited onto 95 to Maine, the New Hampshire toll booths ahead looked like the Gates of Hell, summer traffic, rush hour traffic, and people heading to and from the beach traffic, all backed up on the steaming black pavement.

The Emerson house in York village, dating to the early 18th century, site of the Decorator’s show house,.

Fifteen miles further up 95, edging toward the Maine toll booth, I cracked, and veered off highway at the York exit and headed  for the ocean.  In York Village, a lovely history proud town founded a few seconds after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, I was momentarily distracted by the Olde York Decorator’s show house, held an 18th century house in York Village.  Ever mindful of my readership, I intended to take photographs for the blog, but was firmly (but pleasantly) told that I might not do so.  As with most decorator show houses, the mix was evenly balanced between very good and very bad.  Most compelling to me was not the decor, but an 18th century painted floor treatment that had survived through 200 years of family ownership.

In the neighboring village of York Harbor, which split off from York proper when it became popular as a fashionable summer colony in the late 19th century, I left the air-conditioned discomfort of the car to stroll along the water.  What confronted me was not the expected cooling of the late afternoon ocean breeze, but rather a wall of heat, apparently blowing straight in from Morocco.

The village of York Harbor is anchored by a large colonial revival building, housing a theatre on the second floor above former storefronts.  Built in 1895, it is attributed to architect William H. Dabney, whose also designed ‘Redcote’, a charming small shingle cottage built in 1882.

I had not wandered around York Harbor for years.   Though much has changed in the world, the prevailing tone, architecturally and socially, is still English and aristocratic.  The architecture is a handsome mix of crisp early New England, and shingle and colonial revival styles from the resort days.  The big surprise was that the shops, of the usual sort that service summer colonies—tweeds and tearooms, linens and fancy groceries— had almost completely disappeared, with only a few offices occupying former commercial spaces.

 At 7:30 PM, the light was still strong, the temperatures still in the mid-90’s, and the beach was as busy as it were 2:30 in the afternoon

Beaches are rare in Maine, rocky ledges not so much.  The little beach in York Harbor is bracketed on one side by Stage Neck, looking for all the world like a luminist painting by Kensett in the early evening heat. York Harbor, as painted by Martin Johnson Heade in 1877

As at Newport, a public cliff walk  separates  grand old summer cottages from their ocean frontage.

The principal club, The Reading Room, is in an English picturesque style building, designed by James Purdon in 1905, splendidly located on the cliffs overlooking the harbor.

As at Newport, a public cliff walk  separates  summer cottages from their ocean frontage.  Beyond the reading room, this buttressed wall with its corner turret supports the terraces of the house.above

Do not be deceived by these photographs.  The breeze that evening was not the cool salt tinged ocean breeze one expects, but rather a solid wall of heat from North Africa

The rambling white house is Milbury Meadow, designed by John Russell Pope in a non-classical mood for Harold C. Richard in 1926.  According to John Harris in Moving Rooms, the house contained a 17th century oak paneled drawing room imported from England, since destroyed when fire gutted the interior.

A classic, and almost archetypal Maine cottage, this superb example has escaped the insensitive modernization and ‘upgrade’ fever that has infected so many.

The very English Episcopal chapel was designed in 1906 by Henry J. Hardenburgh, best known as the architect of the Plaza Hotel.  A bench in its lovely sunken garden invites contemplation—of the portapotty at the opposite side of the garden.

For another view of York Harbor, I recommend this post from one of my favorite blogs, Streets of Salem.

HISTORIC INTERIORS: A Country House Near Boston

Blogging is very self-indulgent.  One gets to think out loud about one’s interests, and share the musings with interested readers—who, with their comments, give the blogger new insight into old passions.

I’ve been thinking a great deal this year about the graceful old Federal houses of New England—those first flowerings of design from our young country, that so well reflect the ideals, political and social, of the founders, and that for so long defined the look of most New England towns.  In particular, I determined to write about a group of country houses, those with the newly fashionable oval rooms in particular, built around Boston between 1790 and 1820.   I don’t flatter myself that I have new insight to add to the impressive body of scholarship published about these houses over the last hundred years, but hope that you enjoy my light summaries.

What brings me back to the subject of oval rooms today is a group of late 19th century photographs passed on by a friend—but more about those in a moment…

McIntyre’s drawing for the entrance front of the Vale, which looks backwards to the Palladian tradition of Somerset House, more than to the newly fashionable neo-classicism that characterized the Federal style (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

McIntyre’s drawing of the first floor plan (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952

‘The Vale’, in Waltham, Massachusetts was designed in the 1790’s by the great carver-architect of Salem, Samuel McIntyre, for merchant prince Theodore Lyman.   Lyman began development of his estate in 1793, laying out a park and garden in the informal English style of Capability Brown, with a stream dammed to form an ornamental lake, and glasshouses against a brick wall, in which Camellias and other exotics were grown.

The entrance front in the mid-19th century, showing McIntyre’s completed design.  The Greek Revival entrance portico is an early 19th century addition

The house designed by McIntyre, completed in 1798, was based on designs in English builder’s pattern books, but executed in wood, the plentiful building material of New England, rather than the stone of Old England.  With his typical mastery, McIntyre translated details like quoins and pilasters, meant to be stone, to wood with high effect, yet the scale (the main block was only fifty feet wide), unlike its English prototypes, was domestic, not palatial.  

The Ballroom as it appeared in the early 20th century.

The composition was Palladian, with a separate kitchen wing connected by a hypen, balanced a few years later by a ballroom wing.   The center hall led directly to an oval room centered on the garden front facing the glasshouses, referred to by the family as the ‘Bow Parlor’. 

The Bow Parlor, as it appears today.  The white painted Hepplewhite chairs are part of the original Lyman furnishings

Lyman lived in great style in his new house.  After his death, it passed to his son, and in turn his grandson, Arthur Lyman, treasurer of the Lowell textile mills.   What had been one of the grand houses of the area at the beginning of the century was by now dated and old fashioned, and not suited to the more expansive scale of living made possible by industrial age wealth.  Fond of the old house, Arthur Lyman hired the local firm of Hartwell & Richardson (no relation to H.H. Richardson, about whom more in a minute) to enlarge and remodel the family homestead in 1882.

First floor plan as it appeared before 1883 renovations. Note the long curved interior walk to a privy at top right, forming one side of kitchen courtyard. (Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

The new plan, with interior plumbing, and staircase moved to left of Bow Parlor

Their first design was for a complete transformation of the house, and was not executed.  Evidence is strong that Arthur Lyman had second thoughts about how drastically he wished to alter the old family homestead, and the final design, completed in 1883 sought to save some of the character of McIntyre’s design, even to the extent of re-using the second floor pilasters by McIntyre to frame the new two story bays that pushed out from the entrance front.  Although respectful by the standards of the time, in fact McIntyre’s elegant composition was irrevocably altered and subsumed by the new house.  Inside, mantels were replaced, high wainscots installed, yet the Bow Parlor and the Ballroom both survived untouched, as artifacts of the family’s past splendors.

The rejected proposal for renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Hartwell & Richardson’s accepted design for the renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Interior details in the ‘Colonial’ style for the new staircase and parlor (American Architect & Building News)

Mr. Lyman writes to American Architect explaining his desire to preserve as much as possible of the old house

 Which brings us back to the photographs that my thoughtful friend supplied.   She thought I might recognize them (I’m a bit of an idiot savant at recognizing buildings from minimal evidence—emphasis on the idiot part), and indeed I did.   They are 21 views of the interior of ‘The Vale’ after the Hartwell and Richardson remodeling of 1883.  In the rooms can be seen a mix of 18th and 19th century furnishings accumulated by several generations before a 1930’s ‘restoration’ that sought to do away with many of the Victorian ‘colonial’ flourishes of before.   Like their ancestor before them, that generation of Lymans preserved the Victorian parlor, with its oak woodwork and fire surround of deMorgan tiles.  Today ‘The Vale’ is owned by Historic New England.

Please click on pictures to enlarge

The Bow Parlor.  The French style furniture suite is original to the house

Two views of the new family living room in the location of the old kitchen.  The tiles surrounding the fireplace are by William deMorgan

The ballroom looking toward the cross hall

The cross hall looking from the new staircase toward the ballroom

The second floor landing

The Drawing Room.  Two of the White Hepplewhite chairs can be seen

The cross hall toward family living room

Dressing room, opening to entrance portico roof

Two rooms in the nursery suite.  Ever thrifty, the Lymans retained the 1850’s ingrain carpeting.

The bedroom above the Bow Parlor

Two views of the master bedroom.

A present day view of the master bedroom, after being stripped of its Victorian decorations in the early 20th century (photo uncredited from Historic New England Website.

Present day view of the garden front.  The central bay of the Bow Parlor remains as McIntyre designed it.

 FURTHER READING:

Before we end today’s lesson, it is worth noting that Arthur Lyman’s sister, Lydia,  married Robert Treat Paine, a housing reformer descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. They lived across the street, on property given them by her father.  When they remodeled the existing house on that property, they hired the other Richardson, H.H. himself, as their architect, and their naturally landscaped grounds were a collaboration with Frederick Law Olmstead.  For that house, click HERE

For previous Dilettante posts about Federal country estates in the Boston area, please click HERE,  HERE, and HERE.

For more about The Vale, click HERE for  the Historic New England website

TWO DAYS BEFORE (AS SEEN ONE DAY AFTER)

I’m working on two of my usual sorts of posts, but I’m suffering from the after-effects of a little to much food, candy, wine, and general holiday cheer this morning, so you’ll have to wait.  Overeating was a problem this fall as colder weather set, but I am happy to report that after the last few days, I finally have had enough food.  Way enough.

The local Historical Society’s 1815 house, decorated for its Holiday open house.  The wallpaper is an Adelphi reproduction of an early 19th century paper found in another local house (Click HERE for more).  The ship in the painting, the ‘Ranger’, was built only a few dozen feet from this room.

 At dinner last night, over smoked salmon and crab mousse, friends and I were commenting about the relative lack of Holiday decorations around town this year.   Was it an effect of the poor economy, or was it because our village suffers from a surfeit of ‘Good Taste’, and therefore people are too timid to put on a display that doesn’t involve more than a few white twinkle lights–here the Dilettante confesses that no matter how much ‘Good Taste’ he may suffer from the rest of the year, he does love the occasional over the top  kid-pleasing, crowd-pleasing, awe-inspring Christmas light display.  Nothing says Christmas like electric Santas visible from space.

The local bookstore after the rush.  Earlier, the counter was a frenzy of gift-wrapping .  For those who don’t have a good independent bookstore nearby, I can only say I’m so sorry.

For me, the Christmas shopping season begins not on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but on the 23rd of December.  If only the canned Christmas music that has accompanied my daily errands in stores for the last six weeks would wait that long, the world would be a better place.  

Without, a local restaurant in the former blacksmith shop (click HERE for more) had almost the only bright lights on Main St.  Within, a bartender wearing a Santa hat was ready with two martinis for us.  That’s my idea of a Santa.

At the other end of the Christmas decorating spectrum was the sweet, restrained Charlie Brown tree at the local Library.  Under it were placed donated presents to be taken later to the area homeless shelters.  Beneath the gloss of affluence that veneers our area, shelter occupancy and food pantry demand are at an all time high, even as our accidental Governor, although once homeless himself, continues to demonize the poor.

 In this part of Maine, the biggest Santa this season has been Stephen King.  His output of horror stories belie a very generous man, who has given tens of millions to this region, in the most thoughtful and personal of ways.  Click HERE for that story.

RICHARD RUSSO TAKES ON AMAZON

For all who love books and community, this Op-Ed piece from today’s Times.  Read it, and make certain that your next book purchase isn’t online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/opinion/amazons-jungle-logic.html?_r=1

SOLON MAINE, VIA CHINA AND ROME

Onthe first Sunday in November, the weather was gray and indifferent, not pleasant enough to encourage outside chores, not bad enough to stay inside with a book.   Even as I was contemplating this dilemma, knowing that outdoor chores were really the correct answer, the phone rang.   It was Sidekick, in much the same mood, wondering if I might not be interested in a road trip ‘up’ to the Colby College Art Museum in Waterville (although actually due west a couple of hours, like all trips inland in Maine, it feels ‘up’).  Road trip with a favorite partner in crime or chores?  The decision took about 1.3 seconds.

On the outskirts of China, a Greek Revival farmhouse with beautiful Ionic columns

Further down the road, this handsome whitewashed brick Federal was once the summer home of Ellerton Jette, who was the chairman of the Hathaway Shirt Company, whose long defunct factory was once Waterville’s major employer.  Here was housed much of the collection of American art that Jette later donated to  the Colby Art Museum.

For those too young to remember, ‘The Man in The Hathaway Shirt’ was one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time.  Hathaway was a small regional manufacturer when Ellerton Jette went to David Ogilvy, then arguably the most powerful man in advertising, with a tiny budget and convinced him to take on the Hathaway account.  The rest is history.  When the Dilettante was little, Dunham’s of Waterville, with its rows of pastel oxford button downs was where we all got supplied with our Hathaway shirts and Bass Weejun loafers.

Not quite two hours later, after a drive through China, we arrived at Colby. The  campus is a handsome one, created in the 1930’s.  It is a classic of its era, the creation of one Dr. Bixler, then the ambitious president of what the then small regional college.  Sitting on  Mayflower Hill, its Georgian buildings and quadrangles were inspired by the great early Universities, including Harvard and the University of Virginia.

The original 19th century Colby College Campu

The centerpiece is the Miller Library, a  Colonial Revival building with a whiff of Independence Hall in its architecture.  191 feet high, it was, until the 1970s the tallest building in Maine.  (Since you ask, the current tallest building is an apartment building in Portland.  At 203 feet, it ranks 46th or 47th—depending on how you interpret the Wikipedia information—among each State’s tallest buildings.  Only Vermont, North Dakota, and Wyoming rank higher, I mean, lower.)

The Miller Library on the ‘new’ campus at Colby College, for years the tallest building in Maine.

We parked and strode to the museum entrance,  only to be confronted with a chain link fence with a sign that said ‘Closed for Renovation until November 8th’.  We had checked the schedule online before leaving home, and on the museum’s schedule page found no evidence that the museum was anything but open.  As it turned out, the closure was mentioned on the home page, but we had googled ‘schedule’, thus by-passing that page.  You’d think those smart people at the museum would have troubled to mention it on their schedule page also, wouldn’t you?  Thank-you.  So would I.  Especially on the schedulepage.  Really.

The museum was closed to prepare for the construction of the new Lunder Pavilion, to house a collection of artworks donated by the Lunder family, heirs to the Dexter Shoe fortune.  While I find it a handsome design, I question the agressive way in which it breaks scale with the surrounding buildings.

Colby’s collection is well worth the visit.  Among the works we didn’t see that day are:

John Singleton Copley Mrs. Metcalf Bowler (Anne Fairchild), 1758-1759 Oil on canvas Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ellerton M. Jetté

Winslow Homer The Trapper, 1870 Oil on canvas Gift of Mrs. Harold T. Pulsifer

John Marin Stonington, Maine, 1923 Watercolor and charcoal on paper 21 3/4 in. x 26 1/4 in. Gift of John Marin, Jr. and Norma B. Marin

Fairfield Porter Stephen and Kathy, 1963 Oil on canvas Museum purchase from the Jere Abbott Acquisitions Fund

Regrouping, we decided to save the day by going through Rome—and then continuing on to South Solon and visit the South Solon meeting house, with its amazing frescoed walls, for our dose of art.

In Norridgewock, on the banks of the Kennebec, this 18th century tavern hangs on, barely….

Hungry, we stopped for lunch in Skowhegan, an old mill town on the Kennebec,  where a few years ago HBO filmed ‘Empire Falls’, based on the novel of the same name by Richard Russo, about…an old mill town.  The first time I went to Skowhegan, decades ago, the last log drive was taking place on the Kennebec—millions of logs being floated downriver for processing.  Not environmentally sound, but a stirring sight nevertheless.

The last log drive on the Kennebec.  In places, one sees the Kennebec as it appeared 240 years earlier, when Benedict Arnold led his troops upriver to Quebec during the American Revolution

The ‘Empire Grill’,  the old diner from the movie, had closed, and a sports bar offered no sustenance.  On the strip heading out of town, we found a family restaurant, in what appeared to be a converted Pizza Hut—the architecture is unmistakeable.  Perhaps here I should mention that a friend refers to the road out of Skowhegan as ‘the driveway to Quebec’, and one definitely senses the French Canadian influence in the area culture.

For these two hungry tourists, the defining moment was when we spotted Poutine on the menu.   Somehow, in a lifetime of trying all foods bad for me, this one had eluded me, a Canadian logger favorite of French Fries covered with brown gravy (ever the effete elitist, I was about to type ‘sauce’, but in fact, it was gravy) and melted cheese curd, and in our case, crumbled bacon.  Appalling in concept, delicious in execution.

Poutine.  Okay, so it wasn’t Lutece, but trust me, we licked the plate clean.

We reached Solon in the mid-afternoon bellies full, arteries clogged (did I mention that we also had the restaurant’s home-made meatloaf sandwich, well prepared and delicious—comfort food on a crisp fall day,on the largest slices of bread I have ever, ever, ever seen?  It was a sandwich for Brobdinagians).  Solon is an old town, its streets lined with handsome buildings that have see better days.  In this part of Maine, the way of life is often hard, employment scarce, and the smug pleasures of the coast, romanticized and ordered to the satisfaction of the well to do, are far behind.

Up in the middle of nowhere:  the Solon hotel anchors the town.  A friend said ‘Oh yeah, the Solon hotel.  R.E.M. played there’.  One learns to expect the unexpected in rural Maine.

As in most of early 19th century Maine villages in more prosperous times, the evidence of talented builders using Asher Benjamin’s pattern books for inspiration can be found.  This lovely little Greek Revival doorway, complete with triglyphs and metopes (however oddly spaced in the apex of the pediment) can be found on a Cape on Solon’s Main Street.  In this part of Maine, tin roofs are the norm

Across the street, this oddly shallow 19th century house, not even 12 feet deep,  is irresistable.

The road to South Solon

A handful of early 19th century farmhouses survive on this high ridge–this example has escaped modernization, and has yet another lovely pattern book door surround.   It sometimes seems that the early builders could do no wrong.

At the meeting house, we spent a happy hour marveling at the 1950’s frescoes in the late afternoon fall light.  While there, we were charmed by the appearance of a young man who had grown up in the neighborhood and had brought his son to see the murals and the pew where his father had sat when he was a boy.   For a full account of the Meeting House and its frescoes, please click HERE

We decided to go home by way of Athens, and mapped out our trip, only to find that the road petered out to a single dirt lane.   With the light waning, we decided this was not the day to be lost driving about the woods of Maine, and turned around and head down to I-95.   All was not lost, though, for we were rewarded on that back road by this view of Saddleback Mountain and the Rangeley hills an hour distant.

Leaving the Meeting House, a rainbow illuminated a sky that echoed that of the frescoes within

The view from a field near Athens.

(Skowhegan was also the home town of Maine’s estimable Senator, Margaret Chase Smith. In this season of really silly presidential hopefuls, here story is worth recounting.  Click HERE for the Dilettante on Mrs. Chase)

ELSIE GOES REGENCY

From Elsie deWolfe, who gave us such deathless design advice as “I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint”, came this design for a house in the ‘Modern Regency’ style in 1926.  It was published in Arts & Decoration, and appears to have been a promotional gimmick, much like the “House of Tomorrow” or “Idea House” spreads that one reads in today’s magazines, with lots of cross-promotional ads. Whatever the intent, it presages the style so beloved of Hollywood moguls for the next 2 decades.

One suspects that the future Lady Mendl did not actually do the architectural design, nor the professional looking sketches–or maybe she did, for the plan is very eccentric. 

Beyond that, I know nothing more about it.  You heard it here.

LATE AFTERNOON, ASHINTULLY, OCTOBER 2009

I intended to visit Ashintully this fall, but schedule, weather, and a bad cold all played against me.  Well, procrastination was  involved also, but the point is, I didn’t get there.

I‘m a road trip kinda guy—I’ve never met a road I didn’t like. A car, a road, I’m there. Some are better than others, but all offer something to think about.  I remember watching the landscape of urban industrial New Jersey flash by from the back of a town car on the way to the Newark Airport from Manhattan one day years ago.  It was a grey day, the driver was listening to a classical station.  The bleak industrial landscape reminded of Charles Sheeler paintings, and of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of a similar landscape on Gatsby and Daisy’s fateful drive.  Suddenly, in that unlikeliest of surroundings, I saw a palace fit for a czar rising on a hill to the left.  At second glance, it proved to be a just a high school, but its proportions, classical details, and pastel painted stucco surface would have been at home on the banks of the Neva.  In the time it took to travel a thousand feet, Daisy Buchanan had been replaced by Natasha Rostova.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Main Road in Tyringham, Massachusetts, one of those beautiful winding lanes that the Berkshires do so well,  taking one through hill and dale, past farms and little hamlets of toy buildings.  Ethan From is long forgotten in this 21st century version, hardscrabble farms replaced with weekend houses.  I’m sorry that I was rushing to my destination.  It was the last hour of the last visiting day of the season, and I didn’t dare take time to stop, not even to photograph perfect Federal farmhouses, not even to photograph the surprising cottage at Santarella (speaking of Hansel & Gretel), the former studio of Henry Hudson Kitson, sculptor of the Lexington Minute Man statue.  Fortunately, one can remedy this with the aid of Wikipedia Commons:

According to the Santarella website, the ‘thatched’ roof is actually composed of 80 tons of asphalt shingles.  But, I digress—This post is really about Ashintully, which I first read about decades, centuries, ago in an article in Horticulture.  I’d ever since wanted to see it, and finally I managed to be in the Berkshires on a visiting day, and racing from the other garden wonder of the region, Naumkeag, I arrived 45 minutes before closing.

The Ashintully estate was created by Egyptologist and politician Robb de Peyster Tytus (An Egyptologist! Hard to believe that nowadays one need only to own a pizza chain to become a politician), who combined three farms in the Tyringham valley to create a 1,000 acre estate.  Titus had Hoppin & Koen design a large classical house (with more than a whiff of that high school in New Jersey in its aspect) sited halfway up a mountainside, with spectacular views across the Tyringham Valley and Bartholomew’s Cobble.

Titus died young, of tuberculosis, and in due order, his widow married Canadian publisher John Stewart McLennan.   Their son John McLennan, the noted modern classical composer, inherited Ashintully, and took up residence in a farmhouse at the foot of the hill, on the corner of Sodom Road.  Here he created a garden, both modern and classical, full of surprises and mystery.  I’ve visited many beautiful gardens, but never one more affecting.

These pictures cannot convey the full experience—the gray fall afternoon, the sensation of ever-chaging vistas—one moment formal, the next wild and asymmetrical, the allusions to other times and places, and the sound of the jet of water in the central pool mingled with rustling leaves, and the sesation of fine mist blown  in the air from the fountain as one approached.  It is a complex garden of simple elements.

The stairs to a little mount topped by a finial are mysterious and dramatic, and the effect breathtaking.

The Regency Bridge

 

The Ram’s Head Terrace

A minimalist vista, created with little more than a pair of finials and judicious pruning

The big house, known locally as ‘The Marble Palace’, burned in 1952.   This gate at the end of McLennan’s garden leads to a trail up to the house site.

The dramatic ruins of the gardens of the old house are slowly being reclaimed by nature, but at the end of the trail one is rewarded by the breathtaking sight of the columns of the house breaking the sky, with the valley spread out below—Greek ruins, New England style (and yes, I do realize the columns are a Roman order). 

For a more comprehensive history and description of this amazing garden, with pictures taken in high summer, please click HERE for a link to ‘Great Gardens of the Berkshires’ at Google Books.

And courtesy of the superior search skills of a favored commenter, is a lovely video about the history and making of the garden at Ashintully.   Click HERE. 

THE ROCKEFELLER GATE HOUSES

I first consciously saw these buildings when I was five or six, and my little eyes nearly popped out of my head—veritable fairy tale houses sitting at the edge of the woods in the enchanted landscape of Mt. Desert Island.  Whither Hansel?  Gretel?  Sleeping Beauty, are you there?

Designed in 1930 by Grosvenor Atterbury, they were built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. as protective entrances against motor cars for his great public/private project, the network of carriage roads that traverse Acadia National Park and the Rockefeller estate in Seal Harbor on Mt. Desert Island.  Rockefeller’s vision for the park was one in which the  public could travel and recreate quietly within the wild landscape.  With the gatehouses, beautifully designed and maintained carriage trails and their ornamental bridges, the effect is often less of nature unspoiled than of a very sensitively landscaped country estate amidst spectacular surroundings, and very beautiful it is, regardless.

The two structures, with their unlikely evocation of rural France, one at Brown Mountain in Northeast Harbor, and the other at Jordan Pond in Seal (we’ll deal with the Jordan Pond House and its famous popovers another time, class) are far more charming than they have any right to be.  Textures and picturesque details are all at high volume, but in the hands of a master designer like Atterbury, they are always under control, each playing its part in the whole.

 THE JORDAN POND GATE HOUSE

Drawings and b&w photos from Historic American Buildings Survey

The larger of the two gatehouses is at Brown Mountain.  Long used as housing for park staff, it is no longer in use as an entrance, in favor of a new gate a hundred feet away.  

 THE BROWN MOUNTAIN GATE HOUSE

 

Details count:  Naturally, masonry repairs have been necessary over the years.  Originally, under Atterbury’s watchful eye, local craftsmen carefully distressed brick, and used dark mortar.  Repairs have been made with smooth modern brick, and wide white mortar joints.  While obviously the work of a good mason, they stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.  Yeah, I know I’m a grump, but details count. (When I’m King, things will be different. Fake plastic shutters will be first to go).  We so need to give the National Parks more money—or is this one of those sometimes misguided but well intentioned edicts from the Department of the Interior in which new work on historic buildings must be identifiable from the old?

Looking at  the new gate, I am reminded of Vincent Scully’s great quote about the new Pennsylvania Station after the demolition of the old one: “We used to enter the city like Gods, now we scurry in like rats”.   And so though luckily the Gate House is in no danger of demolition, one still enters more like a racoon.   When these gate houses were built, Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., Beatrix Farrand and others, as well as Atterbury, were involved in the design of public circulation and space and they chose their materials wisely to integrate with the landscape and designed entrance to the beautiful land beyond as an event.  We so need to give the national parks more money. And who designed those Leaning Tower of Acadia trash cans?

I had originally intended to natter on at length about the story of the Gate Houses (the Dilettante does tend to go on), but in the course of research, I came across a piece in the National Park Traveler by Aimee Beal that covers the story so well that anything I wrote would be tantamount to plagiarism.  For that account, click HERE.

For the Dilettante’s account of another section of the Rockefeller Carriage Roads, click HERE