Here I am in du Pont country, a swankily rural district barely 6 miles from downtown Wilmington, Delaware. I'm about to enter a sort of Disneyland for the serious-minded called "Hagley." Its 200 acres of historic reconstructions, research facilities and informative ruins, will leave you knowing more about the du Pont family and the manufacture of gunpowder than anyone you know. I confess I had no inkling that gunpowder, of all things, was the foundation of the du Pont fortune.

"Hagley" is not the name of today's Big Old House. The first du Pont powder mill, the supporting structures that surrounded it, and the home of the family that owned and ran it were individual components of an early 19th century residential/industrial complex collectively called "Eleutherian Mills." This dreamy sounding moniker derives from the name of its builder, Eleuthere Irenee du Pont (1771-1834), who was no dreamy kind of a guy. To the contrary, du Pont was a highly cultured, highly educated, highly practical, no-nonsense Frenchman who, together with his extended family, escaped the Terror of revolutionary France, survived an 85-day transatlantic voyage, dove into the wilderness of the newborn United States, and not only made a living, but founded a family fortune. The big house at Eleutherian Mills, completed in 1802, is the ancestral home of the American du Ponts. We're discounting the French commune of Nemours, where the original du Ponts (and, interestingly, aerialist Philippe Petit) were born. The fine allee in the image below, grassed over and abandoned in favor of a more functional (if less attractive) modern road, marks the original approach to the house.

The old drive ran arrow-strait from the gate to a circle in front of the house. Nowadays, a paved approach scuttles in from the left (or north). Since 60,000 visitors troop through Eleutherian Mills every year, I suppose aesthetics had little hope of trumping practicality. What hasn't been trumped, happily, is the exceedingly refined Georgian architecture. Eleuthere du Pont is said to have designed the house himself, and in an era bereft of professional architects - at least in America - this seems a credible assertion.

This house was built at the same time - and practically in the same place - as the family's gunpowder mill. Black powder, in the (perhaps P.I.) words of the Hagley library, "helped blaze the way for each new frontier as our empire swept westward. It helped fight America's wars. It is the progenitor of one of the world's largest corporations." In the custom of the 18th century, du Pont, his father, his wife and three children, all lived together and literally on top of the family business. Their house was sited on a bluff directly above their gunpowder mill, spread in full view along the shoreline of the Brandywine Creek. The image below shows the west or entrance facade of the house (facing away from the river and the mill), probably almost as it looked when built. A wing, barely visible on the right (south) side, was either part of the original plan or added very shortly after. OK, not everybody cares about that sort of thing, but I do. Much more interesting is the exotic front porch, which, with its flared eaves and fussy New Orleans ironwork, looks like an unexpected mixture of A.J.Downing and the Vieux Carre.

Here's the house after an 1850 enlargement. The exotic porch in this image is much more visible. I read in Hagley Library literature, under the heading "Surprising library finds," that Eleuthere's father, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, was "instrumental in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase in 1803." Well, if he was down there, maybe he not only saw porches like this, but brought one back. This is sheer guesswork, obviously, but I like the feel of it. The biggest change in 1850 was the new north wing (on the left), which balanced the older wing on the south.

Here's the house at Eleutherian Mills today, showing the results of a fashionable makeover completed in 1923. The New Orleans porch has been banished to the other side of the house (we'll see it in a moment), and replaced by a more scholarly front door. The cornice has also been altered, and frankly improved. During the '20s, quite a few people with taste and resources were either renovating Colonial period houses or building good copies. Colonial Williamsburg was, after all, a product of the same period, one whose zeitgeist was that of scaled down good taste. How convenient that Senator Henry Algernon du Pont (1838-1926) was able in 1921 to buy Eleutherian Mills, renovate the house, and make a gift of it to his daughter, Mrs. Louise Evelina du Pont Crowninshield. Mrs. Crowninshield was in her mid-40s at the time, and she and her husband occupied the house for only a short period of each year.

Below is a view of the north wing, added in 1850. Mrs. Crowninshield installed the plaque that commemorates the dates of construction and rebuilding. The house is made of stone - according to family legend, one enormous stone blasted into a million pieces - and covered with a stucco skin.


A piazza on the east facade overlooks the river and the mill. What's that on top of it? Why, it's the old front porch, evidently too historic (or perhaps too loved) to be thrown under the fashion bus of 1923.





The view from the piazza, of waterfall and mill foundations, shows just how close to the family all that gunpowder was. The first time it exploded was in 1807. Mr. du Pont was at his desk, back to the window one hopes, when the window blew out and landed on his head. A series of explosions enlivened family life at Eleutherian Mills for another 80-or-so years, until one in 1890 was so bad they finally abandoned the place. The damaged house was patched together in 1893 and became a workers' clubhouse. I'm not sure whether Hagley's farm manager had moved in or not by 1916, when another giant blast killed 30 men. Then in 1920, 75,000 lbs of powder went up again, in a fulmination that practically leveled the nearby home of one Judge Edward G. Bradford, and rattled windows in downtown Wilmington. This time, five were killed. In 1921 the mill was closed, which was when Sen. du Pont bought the entire complex, including the house.

There's not much to say about the south elevation, except that it's the kitchen/service courtyard. The door leads to the kitchen; the servants' hall is to the left of it.

Time to go indoors; my Hagley guide, Louise, first; then me. You may wonder, as did I, why, if the house and the mill were named Eleutherian, the place today is called Hagley. That name was attached to an adjoining property owned by one Rumford Dawes and acquired by Eleuthere du Pont early on in the gunpowder business. Hagley Hall is the name of a big English country house in Worcestershire, famous for its 18th century landscape. Why did Dawes call his property Hagley? I haven't the remotest idea. Why is the property on which the du Pont house sits today also called Hagley? Haven't a clue.


Here is Louise du Pont Crowninshield (1877-1958) and her new husband, Francis Boardman Crowninshield (1869-1950), on their wedding day in June of 1900, at Christ Church in nearby Montchanin, Del. The bridegroom is not to be confused with Francis Welsh Crowninshield (1872-1947) the elegant editor of Vanity Fair. I'm not sure I can confidently define "second cousins," but I think that's what these guys were, as they shared the same grandfather. While Frank of Vanity Fair charmed and amused the haute monde of New York, Frank of Boston and Delaware rode with TR's Rough Riders in Cuba and won yachting cups on both sides of the Atlantic. The latter Frank and his wife were, God bless 'em, active throughout their lives in historic preservation.

The interiors of the du Pont house are restrained, elegant, perfectly maintained, and a bit chilly for my taste. The house speaks with the upper class accent of the 1920s, which would be OK but for the fact that the foundation which owns it has decided to interpret it not as a private house, but as a museum containing a somewhat random collection of 19th century furniture and decorative arts. I suspect that someone in the late 1950s, when the building was first opened to the public, decided that it was somehow unseemly to allow strangers in a du Pont family home. Ergo, for all its physical perfection, Eleutherian Mills purposely doesn't look like anybody has ever lived here. I think that's a mistake, but I'm not the one running the place.


The morning room, located immediately to the left of the front door, is full of good antiques, family portraits and rare dishes. I'll bet Mrs. Crowninshield had some great chintz covered furniture in here.



Beyond the morning room, in the "new" north wing, is the dining room, notable for its superb block printed scenic wallpaper. I can see people living here.


This door at the east end of the dining room leads to a divine period serving pantry, precisely the sort of thing I love to see in a big old house. It's connected by dumbwaiter to a prep pantry on the floor below.



We're going to pass the main stair (imported from another house) and step out onto the former front porch, stacked since 1923 on top of the eastern piazza. The original front door surround was moved here at the same time.






The drawing room extends east and west along the south side of the center hall. It was clearly a pair of double parlors when the house was built. The present-day pair of doors and fireplaces would originally have been separated by a columned screen, or maybe double doors, or perhaps (especially after 1850) sliding doors. Today's furnishings - good antiques, awkwardly placed - give little sense of what a room like this would feel like to people who actually lived here.




I expect this attractive paneled room, located in the south wing off the drawing room, was the Crowninshields' library. I didn't see any bookcases, but probably they weren't built in. Of course, I might be wrong, but I don't think so.

Upstairs on the second floor are four bedrooms, I think. The north wing turned out to be unexpectedly off limits.


Mrs. Crowninshield's bedroom overlooks the drive on the southwest corner of the bedroom floor. I doubt the crib or the hobby horse would have been much to her taste. The adjacent bathroom, no doubt a nifty 1920s number, has been replaced by a 19th century nursery, or approximation thereof.



Mr. Crowninshield's bedroom, which connects with that of his wife, has been disguised as a high Victorian library. It reflects the taste, so we are told, of an adventurous du Pont admiral whose photo hangs on the wall. I'll grant that this infusion - or perhaps intrusion - of Victoriana speaks to the history of the house, but it has nothing to do with the house as a place where people lived.




This little room, connected to both Mr. C's bedroom and the back stairs, appears to have been a sort of private living room or boudoir, where occasional breakfasts were taken. The curious colored glass lever on the wall is a servants' call.



The northwest bedroom, called the blue room, contains a melange of period furniture, some of which belonged to Eleuthere du Pont himself. The door beside the fireplace leads to an intact bathroom, unfortunately also off limits.


More unfortunate was my inability to see anything at all on the 3rd floor. Service areas and maids' rooms are important architectural and social components of a big old house. Given the long history of Eleutherian Mills and its various alterations, these I wanted to see.


If the stairs up were verboten, those to the basement were not. Actually, the basement is below grade only on the west or entrance facade. The other three sides are all above ground. These stone floors and stucco walls could as easily be in southern California as mid-Atlantic Delaware.


A hall from the foot of the stairs leads north to a stylish breakfast or family dining room. We're in the north wing now, directly under the formal dining room.



Parallel to the main basement hall is a service corridor connecting the prep pantry at its northern end with the kitchen at the south. A dumbwaiter brings food from here to the serving pantry next to the dining room upstairs.




I have one of these old chestnuts, a vintage Monel sink, in my old house in Millbrook. Monel is an alloy of nickel and copper, with a soupcon of iron and a few other traces, that was once highly popular in mansion kitchens. Its popularity stemmed from a subtly forgiving surface which made it less likely for butter fingered scullery girls to break expensive dishes. Monel is sometimes confused with German silver, a harder nickel alloy containing zinc, which is frequently used for silver-plated cutlery. One of the problems with Monel is its tendency to stain if you so much as give it a hard look. Plus which, it scratches. My Monel sink has a gloriously soft glow, the result of many years of careful polishing with a non-abrasive cleaner. It looks like somebody used Ajax on this one.

The kitchen, located directly under the drawing room, was recently opened to the public and, not surprisingly, it has become one of the most popular parts of the public tours. Those hard ceramic sinks were designed for washing indestructible pots and pans. I've got the identical pair in my kitchen at home, although my wooden drain boards have, as they say, grown legs. I used to have a stove like that too, until the oven door fell off so many times that I sent it to an old guy in Rhode Island who called himself "The Stove Doctor" and....well, you don't want to hear the rest.





Mrs. Crowningshield survived her husband by 8 years, dying at a Boston hospital in July of 1958. She was 89 years old. Her "New York Times" obituary noted many philanthropies, a committee membership during the Truman-era redecoration of the White House, a vice chairmanship of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and a summer house called Peaches Point in Marblehead, Mass. The latter turns out to be a spiffy seaside Colonial mansion which, on March 28, 2009, was "Luxlist's estate of the day."

A beautiful garden is on the site of the original, if not quite within its original boundaries.



Besides the du Pont mansion, the 200 acres of the Hagley Museum include a reconstructed power plant, workers' village, machine shop, powder yard, graining mill, rolling mill, etc.,etc.,etc., not to mention a research library, restaurant and museum store. These many structures speak eloquently to a vanished world of gunpowder production on the banks of the Brandywine Creek. The people who lived here and worked in the mills were part of an almost self-sustaining community, one that raised most of its own food. Hence, the big barn, located a literal stone's throw from the mansion. Its current immaculate condition would probably stun farm managers of the past.

Proximity to the house proved handy in the automobile age. Today the barn's bottom level garages contain a few obligatory vintage cars of the sort that ornament many open-to-the-public estates. Who knew there was such a thing as a duPont automobile? Not me. Between 1919 and 1931, however, E. P. du Pont manufactured 600 of them, including the specimen below.



Here's a nice note on which to end, a 1940 publicity shot for du Pont's "Better Things for Better Living...Through Chemistry" campaign. Could she look any happier? Many thanks to the Hagley Museum for their patience and kind hospitality, and to the Collections of the Hagley Museum and Library for use of the vintage images. The link is www.hagley.org.

People give their houses an infinity of odd names. A cursory internet search produces examples like Apple Drop, Beatle Fields, Clover Stump, Dingle Dell, Creeping Snails, Old Wob, Pratty Flowers and Frosty Cottage, the latter an good alternate for my own, what with November approaching.

I suppose there's nothing that unusual about Hathaway, the name attached to a large, Delano & Aldrich designed, Catskill Mountain summer house on the outskirts of Onteora Park, NY. Local legend attributes its construction (or construction of the wall in front of it, depending on the version you hear) to a spoiled wife. Offered the choice of a European tour or a big summer house (or a wall in front of it) the wife chose the tour. She then secretly had the house (or the wall) built while she and her husband were away. Presented upon arrival home with a fait accompli, the indulgent husband described his wife as a woman who always "hath her way." (Get it? 'Hath her way'...'Hathaway?') I've spent enough time around rich people to say with authority that if there's one thing they pay very close attention to, it's their money. I don't know if this story is charming or simply ridiculous. It may contain a kernel of truth somewhere, but one kernel is probably the extent.

V. Everit Macy (1871-1930), seen in the image below, was what my late father would have called "a helluva nice guy." He earned a degree in 1893 from Columbia's School of Architcture, where he studied alongside Chester Aldrich, architect of his future house. Macy himself never practiced professionally. Instead, this amazingly busy and selfless man spent his entire adult life improving the lives of others, mainly in Westchester County. He was commissioner of Charities and Correction, then of Public Welfare, and at the time of his death Commissioner of Parks. Macy also owned the Yonkers Statesman in the north, where he published his progressive opinions, and supported Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes in the south. As Parks Commissioner he was the organizing force behind two of Westchester's most recognizable features, the Hutchinson and Saw Mill River Parkways. It helped that he was rich, far more so than his collateral relatives, the department store Macys. The money came from the family oil business which, thanks to the efforts of Macy's father, was rolled into John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil in the 1870s, to the great benefit of the Macy family.

Mrs. Macy, the former Edith Carpenter, gave her husband two sons, ran his households in Manhattan, Briarcliff Manor and Onteora Park, and spent her obligatory charity efforts on the Girl Scouts of America. From 1919 until her death in 1925, she chaired GSA's Board of Directors. You like Girl Scout cookies? Thank Mrs. Macy; her gift to us all is the annual cookie drive.

The Macys weren't a long-lived group. Everit Macy's father died at age 38; he himself succumbed unexpectedly at age 59 to pneumonia, while visiting the Ingleside Inn in Phoenix, AZ. County leaders, Supreme Court justices and lifelong friends like John D. Rockefeller Jr. joined Macy's sons and their wives for the funeral at Chilmark, the family estate at Briarcliff Manor (or actually Ossining, if you want to split hairs). In 1932 Westchester County named a 200-acre tract in the Town of Greenburgh "V. Everit Macy Park" in his honor. If you live in Westchester and thought that name came from the department store, consider yourself corrected.

Hathaway remained in the family, carefully maintained, through most of the Depression, but in 1938 it was finally put on the market. This was a better year than 1930 to try and sell a big house, but not by much. The Macy estate made a yeoman's effort to sell, as evidenced by the sale promotion literature. However, due to a scarcity of interested buyers, they put it up for auction in 1940.

At the auction, a pair of modest city types named Isadore Malvin and Max Reizen bid $12,500 for house, furniture, outbuildings and almost 600 acres of land - an won. After renting the place out for a season (interestingly, to a doctor who became President Nixon's psychiatrist), Reizen and his brother-in-law Sam Davis opened the Hathaway Lodge. A house containing 8 to 12 bedrooms (depending how you count them) plus another 12 servants' rooms would seem ideally suited for a career as a small Catskill Mountain Resort. From 1941 until the mid-1960s the Hathaway Lodge was a junior version of "Dirty Dancing." It advertised the usual golf, tennis, ping pong, horseback riding, swimming and "Super American-Jewish Cooking."


By the mid-Sixties, Catskill Mountain resorts were in economic freefall. In 1965, Annabeth and Mansfield Showers bought the by then already empty Hathaway Lodge for $39,000, moved in, and reopened it as a bed and breakfast. According to their brochure, "The Hathaway Inn offers Gracious Living for Adults" and "Daily rates without meals begin at eighteen dollars." The Showers converted the carriage house into the Snowdrop Chalet, where $15 bought you two nights in a dorm. For those who slept together, the cost was $19 for the same two-nights in a private Chalet room.

Here's what all the shootin's about, Hathaway, as it appears in the fall of 2013.



Hathaway, in the words of my friend, "New York Times" columnist Christopher Gray, "settles down into the hillside like a Great Dane getting ready for a nap." A big dog, I'd say, and one that's suffered more than a few kicks. Hathaway's not-so-vaguely Arts and Crafts design is a departure from the high style, uber-elegant Georgian Revival flash of so much of Delano and Aldrich's other work (think Knickerbocker or Colony Clubs, or grand Long Island mansions). It was, of course, an early contract, the firm being barely a year old when Macy hired them, probably because he'd gone to school with Aldrich. Hathaway's low to the ground architecture, its general Japanesey air, and unadorned pebbledash stucco exterior is said to be an homage to its owner's desire for Quaker-like simplicity. Personally, I find it hard to credit a man with a 20-room apartment at 845 Park Avenue, a 250-acre estate in Briarcliff Manor, and 12 servants' rooms in his Onteora summer place as being too big on "simplicity."

A sight we see on many a big old house (including my own); a beautiful copper leader "sans" connection to the gutter above which, we may also mention, is missing as well.



Hathaway is in remarkably unaltered condition - with certain exceptions. Prime among these is an awful wooden deck grafted onto the mountain view facade. This looks to be a product of the late Sixties or early Seventies, I can't tell for sure. Fortunately, deck, porch enclosure, and railing above, have simply obscured - as opposed to destroyed - the original architecture.




The Macy family has been in America since the 17th century. They were the original owners (non-Native American, that is) of Nantucket Island. People with pedigrees like that - plus money - could usually go pretty much anywhere in early 20th century American society. Macy had a cousin at Onteora, who may have introduced him to the area. Alternately, Onteora Park's reputation as a center of arts and culture may have made it more attractive than Newport or Saratoga, whose reputations, while impressive, had little to do with art or culture. To build a house with all those bedrooms suggests a serious commitment to enjoy the place with friends.


Another bane of big old houses - the aluminum storm door.



A good place for firewood, although it didn't live here in Macy's day.



The heart of the house is an enormous living hall, which you can can see on the plan at the end of this post. When first built, Hathaway was filled with Gustav Stickley furniture appropriate to the Arts and Crafts motif. With the exception of very few items, everything was stolen in 1990. Perhaps the table in the image below, which was placed here in 1906 when the house was completed, wasn't Arts and Craftsy enough to warrant a place on the bandits' van.

Hathaway's entire interior is paneled floor to ceiling in American chestnut, a breathtaking tour de force, even if most people have to be told what it is.






At the west end of the living hall is the library. At one point, this room was converted to a bar, in the process of which some of its original bookcases were removed. What hasn't been removed is the extraordinary overmantel frieze, a sort of Elgin Marbles comes to the Catskills affair looming over the Greene and Greene-looking fireplace. Equally remarkable is the central chandelier, minus an original glass bowl but orbited to this day by matching electrified outriggers. I have the identical Victorian sofa in my house and having sat - or tried to sit - on it for almost 40 years, understand well why no thief in his right mind would try to take it.





The door to the left of the fireplace leads to a small study, seen in the second image below, which has evidently doubled as bedroom.


The rest of the western end of this floor is a short series of bathrooms and bedrooms that circle back to the big hall.





The wagon wheel chandelier hung over the last bar, which occupied this former bedroom. The living hall is through the open door, and the window in the distance overlooks the porch.

Balancing the library on the east is the dining room on the west. Talk about "Dirty Dancing," how cool is that sign? Like most of what we've seen so far, it wouldn't take much to restore the dining room to original condition - save for the fireplace, where what appears to be a new heating flue has been shoe-horned into the original opening.



Next to the dining room is the former serving pantry, connected in the past by dumbwaiter to the kitchen below. It has been combined with an adjoining maid's room - one of six on the main floor - to create a new upstairs kitchen



What was once a pressing room, flower room, and the five other maids' rooms have been combined (none too gently) into an awkward apartment.

My hostess, Iliana Moore (that was Iliana's arm holding the storm door, and this is the back of her head) is leading us to the basement, which is only excavated under the service wing. It contained the original kitchen, servants' hall, wood storage, wine cellar and, according to the 1938 sale brochure, a shoe shine room.

This is why I love writing this column. What may look like a dog's dinner to some is to me a dazzling discovery. Put the pieces of the puzzle together (they're all here), fix everything up (entirely doable), and you'll have the sort of antique mansion kitchen of which big old house dreams are made. Cabinet work? All here, right down to the dishes on the shelves. Vintage ice box? Antique stove hood? (Admittedly the stove itself is a replacement, but still fits in). Celotex on the walls and windows? Rip it off and let that dazzling southern sunlight stream back in. And how about those fantastic tables, one of which probably came from the servants' hall? Or the electric refrigerator, apparently with all its original pieces. Too much fun.





Time to go back upstairs, and detour quickly onto the porch.

The glass enclosure, the odd partitions and the deck outside are of course all new. I'm inclined to think the treillage on the walls, or at least some of it, is original. The view, like the rest of the place, is easily restorable.





Let's have a look at the second floor.




At the foot of the bedroom corridor in the image below is what appears to be a 3-room, 2-bath owners' suite, located at the western end of the house. Mrs. Macy's bedroom would normally be the larger of the bedrooms, with the better view, bigger bathroom, and adjoining boudoir. Her husband's presumably overlooked the drive, had its own smaller bath, and was attached to his wife's rooms by a small internal hall.









I'll tell you the truth; when I first saw it, I thought it was pine.




Outside the owners' suite, ranged along both side of the bedroom corridor, are six additional bedrooms - all paneled in chestnut, most with fireplaces and/or approximations or substitutions, and interspersed with not very elaborate old bathrooms that probably only myself and 8 or 9 other people in America could actually love.










Down a few steps at the eastern end of the family wing are a sewing room, 6 more second floor maids' cubicles, one bath, and a service stair that connects to the floor below. In this part of the house, chestnut is limited to doors alone.





Let's head back to the main part of the house...

...and take a quick peek in the attic, where generations of probably fascinating junk is piled practically to the rafters. It would be fun to spend a few days up here, but I gotta get back to Millbrook and write this all up.





Here's an evocative image from the original sale brochure, showing the carriage house in better days. This is the building that became the Snowdrop Chalet. According to the brochure, "It has space for seven cars, stalls for three hunters, and on the second floor is an apartment with five bedrooms."

I'm afraid it looks just as bad inside.


Mrs. Showers died in 2003 at the age of 91. In 2005, Hathaway was purchased by the Hunter Foundation, which has restoration plans in mind, if not as yet fully articulated. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.

He is confident without arrogance, elegant without pretension, at ease as a matter of course. He gazes at us levelly from across the years, his intellect tempered by tact, and curiosity leavened with humor. His name was Oakes Ames (1874-1950) and he was all of those things to the wife of 50 years who painted this picture. How lucky to have a life partner who would see you this way. Had he been a painter, he would have painted her the same.

Blanche Ames' subject looks to be of a man in his mid- to late 40s, in which case he would already have been the father of her 4 children. The photo below is of Blanche as a debutante in the late 1890s. Whereas Oakes spent a lifetime within the cloistered world of botany and academe - he was a Harvard professor and world famous authority on orchids - Blanche became Massachusetts' first public advocate for birth control and a determined supporter of women's suffrage. She was additionally an artist, cartoonist, amateur engineer, agrarian experimenter, and a deeply political Republican, although she'd probably be a Democrat today.

This is not the first view of the Ameses' North Easton house, called Borderland, that today's visitor gets. An entrance to the property further north on Massapoag Ave. leads to the public car park, but if you came here in the old days, this is what you'd see first, the south or garden facade with garage and service wing on the left (or west). It is unusual for a house of this vintage (occupied by the family in 1911; completed in 1912) to have an attached garage at all, and odder yet for the principal approach to the house to go right past it. As a Tuxedo friend of mine once remarked, "Is this a house for cars, or for people?" It was Blanche who designed the place and she evidently didn't care.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Ames came from rich and distinguished families. He was a son of the former Governor of Massachusetts, grandson of the builder of the Union Pacific Railroad, and an Ames of the Oliver Ames and Sons shovel fortune. She was the daughter of a distinguished Civil War general named Adelbert Ames, and also, unfortunately, a granddaughter of Major General Benjamin Butler, the so-called "butcher of New Orleans." There's a long story there, about which more later. Interestingly, Oakes and Blanche were born with the same last name, Ames. Unlike Franklin and Eleanor, they were not related.

Mr. & Mrs. Ames hired an architect who, doubtless impressed by the Georgian Revivial splendors of the nearby Lothrop Ames house, presented them with plans for one fantastical chateau after another. None would do. The Ameses shared that upper class instinct for impact short of showiness to which so many of us aspire. Blanche decided the only way to get exactly what she wanted was to design it herself, which she did, with admittedly mixed results. These views show the north or entry facade. The wing on the left (or east) is entirely occupied by a two-story library which balances the service wing on the west.

In the image below, we've circled around to the south or garden facade. The library wing is on the right. Green latticework screens an adjacent porch.


Borderland is a house that, design-wise, makes no excuses to anybody. Its steel frame, stone and reinforced concrete construction could probably take a direct hit from anything short of nuclear weaponry. It is not really symmetrical, but comely in its way. The bell on the roof, by the way, speaks to that accumulation of picturesque detritus that fills up so many big old houses - at least until it's all auctioned off. This bell hails from a ruined Cuban sugar plantation, a souvenir of one of Oakes Ames' orchid expeditions. Until the State of Massachusetts ripped it off - a decision of which I very much disapprove - Borderland was covered with ivy.



Well, it's not covered anymore, which gives the old place an unfortunate severity much at odds with the charming bohemians who built and lived in it - in Mrs. Ames' case for 57 years.





The main hall - indeed the entire house - brims with the sort of nifty stuff cultured people of means accumulate during decades of foreign travel. Borderland is additionally filled with paintings, many of them by the prolific Mrs. Ames herself. The woman in the big hat on the wall to the right of the grandfather clock is the Ameses' eldest daughter Pauline, mother of the late, uber-sporty George Plimpton.

Borderland's stair rail is your basic big old mansion number, with vaguely English overtones. What's not usual in these interiors are concrete floors and a total lack of moldings, features no professional architect of the era would have countenanced. The marble bust to the left of the Gothic door in the second image below is Oakes Ames' father. That's what I'm missing in Millbrook, a marble bust of my father.


Behind the Gothic door is the first of many many cool old bathrooms.


I wouldn't have thought it, but Borderland turns out to be surprisingly bright inside. Here's the drawing room, full of comfortable furniture, family portraits, and a grand piano that actually got a great deal of use. Let me say from the outset that I really like this house, despite the fact that it needs moldings and wood floors.


The view below is of the drawing room looking in the other direction. The truncated portrait to the right of the door to the stair hall is of Blanche Ames' father, General Adelbert Ames (1835-1933), winner of a Congressional Medal of Honor and victim of a slander by John F, Kennedy, which we'll get to. For now, we're going through the door on the left...

...through a small reception room with adjoining enclosed porch that overlooks the south lawn. This porch is one of Borderland's many small pleasures. The unselfconscious clutter of cans and specially loved plants is precisely the sort of thing you see in houses where people still live.


The main floor of the central block is anchored on the east by the drawing room, and on the west by this very inviting dining room. To be honest, the furniture accounts for most of the charm, especially the beautiful Persian rug, the wall sconces bought from a family member redecorating his house, the chairs Mrs. Ames picked up at an auction and the bizarrely endearing chandelier, containing a replica of the Santa Maria.


Adjoining the dining room is a typical serving pantry which, like almost all of this house, is in absolutely untouched original condition.



What, you may ask, is this curious looking bay window on the pantry wall?

It's not a window at all, but a modified "lazy susan" which allowed cooked food to be passed from kitchen to pantry. It is without a doubt a most interesting antique, although a simple opening in the wall would have been more practical and a lot easier to use.

Who cares about practicality, however, in the presence of this amazing old kitchen, in regular use until Mrs. Ames' death in 1969. Of note in the images below: the coal stove, a sort of prototypical Aga; the amazing vintage soapstone sink, purely for washing pots and pans; and the original of but two homages to the 20th century, a ginormous vintage refrigerator.





A door from the kitchen returns us to the awkwardly proportioned main hall, before continuing east past reception and drawing rooms to the library.


I've written about fine houses where books were bought by the yard, primarily for their bindings. That's not the case here. This is the library of rich intellectuals who thrived in the world of the mind. Oakes Ames was the author of a definitive, 7-volume work titled "Orchidicae: Illustrations and Studies of the Family Orchidicae," illustrated by his wife, Blanche Ames Ames. Not exactly bedside reading, I'll admit, but an undoubted contribution to human learning. Ames' orchid herbarium, now at Harvard University, contained 131,000 specimens.

In January of 1915, Blanche Ames hosted a suffrage conference in this room. If it wasn't quite the "Conference of Great Women" at Alva Belmont's Marble House the previous summer, it nonetheless spoke eloquently to commitment.

Borderland is full of furniture from other family houses. Oakes' sister, Evelyn Ames Hall, bought two overscaled torchieres before discovering they wouldn't fit in her house. Ergo, they're here in her brother's.

The room is amazing, but the fireplace is not.

The library's a good place to talk about Mrs. Ames' own book, a 600-page biography of her father titled, "General Adelbert Ames, Broken Oaths and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1835-1933," published in 1964 when she was 86 years old. General Ames' postwar governorship of Mississippi had been described - slanderously, as far as his daughter was concerned - in John F. Kennedy's 1957 Pulitzer Prize winning, "Profiles in Courage.""No state suffered more from carpetbag rule," wrote Kennedy, "than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator, then Governor, was a native of Maine, (and) a son-in-law of the notorious 'Butcher of New Orleans,' Ben Butler." Mrs. Ames was miffed by this, to say the least. She wrote Kennedy a number of letters asking him to delete certain passages, with predictable lack of success. "Profiles in Courage," after all had already been published. General Ames was probably more a victim of white political hooliganism than Mississippi was of carpetbagging, but that is a story for another time.

It looks like bronze, but it's actually a plastic facsimile of Obbatinewat, symbol of the Shawmut Bank, by Blanche's brother Adelbert. For a number of years brother and sister pursued artistic interests in Blanche's studio on the third floor. Adelbert Ames bolted from a promising career at a Boston law firm to live in a converted police wagon in the woods and paint landscapes. The family was appalled, but his sister was totally supportive.


Accessible from the library is the porch we saw from the outside.

Half way to the second floor is a door to the library gallery.



Let's keep going up those cement steps to the bedrooms on 2.


On 2 is an owners' suite with dressing room, 2 bedrooms for the 2 Ames daughters, and a guestroom. The Blue Room is the guestroom, located at the top of the stairs.




Across the hall is the owners' dressing room. The twin sinks in the attached bath scandalized visitors of another era, suggesting as they did that both Ames and his wife used the bathroom at the same time. Except for missing towels and shower curtain, nothing has changed in this room since 1911, including the bathroom scale.







The attached bedroom looks much as you'd expect. I'd guess the room beyond, with vintage wall intercom and no bath, would have been Mr. Ames' study.





George Plimpton's mother, Pauline, lived here as a girl.




Down the hall the way we came is youngest daughter Evelyn's girlhood room.






Let's head up to 3. In case you're wondering, there was indeed an elevator, no longer extant, located between the library and the master bathroom.





Borderland is in mint condition (discounting ivy vandalism) and has been throughout its history. Recent repairs on the 3rd floor have led to a lot of furniture reshuffling, obvious in Mrs. Ames' north facing studio. She taught her wayward brother painting in this room and compiled with him a file of 3000 identifiable colors. People study the successors to that file in paint stores every day.

Chips from the color file still hang on the wall of her workshop, located across the hall from the studio. What looks to be an ancient camera is actually a pictograph, used to project photographs onto a blank canvas as a guide for a future painting. Did Blanche Ames stop with family planning, suffrage, botanical illustration, cartooning and portraiture? No, she also developed a disease resistant turkey on her North Easton estate, and patented an environmentally improved (don't ask me how) toilet.



The hall beyond the workroom leads to four more bedrooms and baths. The Ames boys, Oliver and Amyas, lived up here and shared the floor with a pair of guestrooms.







Let's go downstairs, all the way to the basement.



My host, park supervisor Ellenor Simmons, is explaining how this dull and cluttered looking basement room once housed Professor Ames' famous collection of orchids. I had a sudden vision of the professor laboring with love in the basement, while his wife did the same on 3.

The west wing, with garage on 1 and quarters for 8 servants on 2, connects internally with the house. Since it's now the caretaker's apartment, it was off my tour - except for the garage.




The name Borderland stems from the estate's location, straddling a border between the towns of Sharon and Easton. In 1971, Ames heirs gave it to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which opened it as a state park. Borderland encompasses almost 1800 acres where the public can hike, fish, canoe, ice skate and sled, much as the former owners did. My compliments to Massachusetts DCR for its extremely sensitive stewardship of the mansion. If they would just let the ivy grow back, I'd call them perfect.

Here I am, figuratively driving out of Borderland. There never were grand gates; the house is just out of sight at the end of the drive; I'm standing in the middle of the road to get this shot. Borderland's public entrance is at 259 Massapoag Ave., North Easton, Mass. Tel: 508.238.6566.

"Suppose you were an idiot," Mark Twain once said, "and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself." The subject of next week's "Big Old Houses" is Mr. Clemens' house. Unfortunately, I couldn't photograph and write about it in time for this week.

The astonishing looking Mark Twain house in Hartford, CT was designed by the same man who designed the astonishing looking "Millbrook Farms," seen in the vintage images above and below. Millbrook Farms, in Dutchess County NY, belonged to George Hunter Brown, the man who brought the railroad to my hometown of Millbrook in 1869. Well, it wasn't called Millbrook then. The station's location, equidistant between a pair of competitive pre-revolutionary settlements named Hart's and Mechanic, represented a sort of Compromise of Solomon. These hamlets began to wither almost as soon as the trains began to run. Meanwhile the new station and the growing village surrounding it flourished. New station and new village were both named Millbrook, in honor of Mr. Brown's nearby estate.

"Millbrook Farms" was demolished over 70 years ago and the site has reverted to a wild woodland. To get you in the mood for next week's post on the Mark Twain house, however, I'm lifting a few paragraphs about Millbrook Farms from my book, "Old Houses in Millbrook," published in 2012 by The Millbrook Independent.

Millbrook Farms was designed by a celebrated Victorian architect named Edward Tuckerman Potter (1831-1904). Potter is considered by some to have been among the era's most experimental designers. Certainly he was a man with an eye for the complicated. His comissions ran the gamut from the famous Nott Memorial, which looks like nothing so much as a great stone nipple extruding from the campus of Union College in Schenectady, NY, to the bewilderingly complex Stick Style manse of Mark Twain in Hartford, CT., to the George H. Brown house in Millbrook, NY. The latter was described by a breathless writer in "The New York Times" as "wide stretching in massive splendor, the likes of which is seldom seen on this side of the Atlantic," a judgement which, in its latter part anyway, is inarguably true.

In 1877, scarcely ten years after its construction, financial fallout from the Panic of 1873 forced Brown's eviction from Millbrook Farms...(By 1899) the estate's 335 acres - including house, barns, cottages, manager's house, mill, carriage house and 2 picturesque gatehouses - were transferred to...(Edwin Thorne)...subject to assumption of an existing $20,000 mortgage from Equitable Life.

The Thorncrest estate, as Millbrook Farms would now be called, continued to be much admired. A 1904 issue of "The Millbrook Mirror" doubted there existed anywhere "in this section of the country a more complete or beautiful country seat." Thorncrest's greenhouses had made the estate's horticultural successes "noted throughout the hemisphere." Its farm raised "the most costly cattle in the world," animals that had won "fame and respect throughout the Universe." Its owner, Samuel Thorne, was "revered in Millbrook," certainy by the author of this article.

The main house at Thorncrest was a vaguely chateau-esque confection whose Loire-Valley-on-Steroids roofline looks as if it might have begun leaking within weeks of completion. Topped with a forest of chimneys and ornamented with a plethora of pedimented dormers, the house could only have stunned approaching guests. The focus of the main facade was a pair of engaged octagonal pavilions topped with conical peaks, flanking an enormous porte cochere. An open piazza extended to the west, no doubt enjoying superb Catskill Mountain views, while a ballroom wing almost as long as the house itself extended to the east.

The Brown-Thorne house had a "big-ness" typical of many American structures built in the post-Civil War period. You can see the same scale in the Seventh Regiment Armory or the Tweed Courthouse in New York, or, closer to Millbrook, in the original buildings of Vassar College. The window shutters visible in these photos are still stored on the second floor of Thorncrest's extant but sadly deteriorated carriage house. They must be ten feet high.

According to local legend, during the pre-demolition auction of Thorncrest's contents, thousands of leather bound books, stacked ceiling high in the dark paneled library, didn't garner a single bid. Rather than pay a trucker to haul them away, they were left on the shelves and bulldozed into the foundation when the house was demolished.

Many want to be amused, but few are very amusing. An exception was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), whom the world knew as Mark Twain. He was a funny guy whose big life ended in hard times. What we remember about him, fortunately, are hilarious passages in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn," and comments like: "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way," or "Only one thing is impossible for God; to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."

Clemens was one of 7 children (4 survived) born to middle class people in the slave state of Missouri. He was 12 when, after his father's death, he took a job as a printer's assistant. Soon he became a typesetter for the "Hannibal Journal," a job with fateful consequences. Steaming downriver to New Orleans at the age of 22, Clemens met a steamboat pilot named Horace Bixby who dazzled him with tales of romance and adventure and urged him to become a pilot himself. After two years and two thousand miles of traveling up and down the Mississippi, Clemens earned his license and worked until the war broke out in 1861. Thirteen years later, young Clemens had become the rich and famous author Mark Twain, had married an heiress, started a family, and moved into a fine house in the fashionable Nook Farm district of elegant Hartford, CT.

It's not really clear, at least not to me, why in 1871 the Clemens family moved from Buffalo to Hartford - or what, for that matter, they were doing in either of those places. But move they did, to a select Victorian-era subdivision named after a crook (or 'nook') in the meandering riverlet known as the Park. Once hushed and leafy, with naught but the sound of waving crops, singing birds and murmuring waters, Nook Farm today is buried under urban avenues and early 20th century subdivisions. The river that gave it its name has virtually disappeared, a prisoner of underground tunnels. The Clemens house and a handful of others like it have survived, unexpectedly, around the intersection of Farmington Avenue and Forest Street.

Would I call it beautiful? Well, maybe not. It is an evocative artifact of an unabashed period in American history, and of the life of a man who enriched our culture. At first, Mr. & Mrs. Clemens rented from Nook Farm friends. Mark Twain spent a lot of time on the road and much of the planning for the new house fell to his wife, Olivia. You can't blame her for the design, however. The culprit was Edward Tuckerman Potter (1831-1904), a fashionable architect recommended by Nook Farm neighbors. The Mark Twain House's descriptive literature casts a wide net in pursuit of a stylistic label. Do I personally see "elements of Northern-French domestic architecture," or anything I'd call "Picturesque Gothic?" That would be a no. How about the so-called "Stick Style?" This was a Victorian era rage, at least for a while. Most Stick houses are wood, but I can see a bit of stick in the gable ends here.

Potter was famous for churches, less so for houses, but I think it's unfair to judge this building on the basis of aesthetics. It is an ebullient statement from an ebullient period and mirrors the tastes of a big man with a lot of big things to say. It is fantastic and wonderful and, OK, kind of ugly, but thank God it's still here!


The house sits on a small bluff and, while you wouldn't guess it today, once enjoyed a distant view. The image below shows the western, or view facade. The scaled down wing to the left contains a kitchen on the main floor and servants' rooms above. The curved wall marks the serving pantry, connecting the service wing with the main body of the house. The left end of the building is perpendicular to Farmington Ave. Approximately 3 acres remain with the house today, which is about a third of the estate at its height in the 1880s.

Save for missing awnings and migrating trees, the house looks little changed from the Mark Twain period. In truth, it's been through the "wringer," which fact isn't obvious due to all the love and appreciation that's been lavished on it for the last half century.





Indoors, the place looks dark and cool - ironic, since the family usually spent hot summer months with Mrs. Clemens' family in Elmira, NY. I suppose these interiors could as easily look dark and warm. 19th century America was, after all, famous for its overheated houses.


What appear to be tens of thousands of little mother-of-pearl insets are just paint. The polychrome highlights on the exterior brickwork are painted on too.


That's not a mirror over the hall fireplace, but a window in between the hall and the drawing room.


We're looking through the overmantel window at the drawing room chandelier, the only fixture that survives from the period of construction.




Architect Potter wasn't one to shy away from making things complicated. Witness the door in the image below, connecting the main hall to the dining room.



The view below looks south from the dining room to the library (we'll get there shortly).

The next view looks north to a fireplace with another window on top of it. This one actually looks outside, to Farmington Ave. These showy fireplaces necessitated tortuously re-routed flue lines, not all of which drew so well. The screen to the left of the fireplace partially obscures 2 doors. The one on the left (a bit hard to see) leads to a reconstructed serving pantry whose curved wall we saw from outdoors.

At one point in the aforementioned "wringer," real estate speculators converted house and adjacent carriage barn into a complex of 11 rental apartments. In the process, the entire main house kitchen and pantry complex was gutted. The reconstruction you see in the images below reflects a lot of love and scholarship, but nothing actually works. I don't recall ever seeing a sink made of varnished wood and missing a drain, but this is, after all, a stage set.



The view below shows the inside of that curved wall. Beautiful as all this furniture quality millwork is, I'll bet the original cabinetry was clear pine smothered in dark varnish.

This peculiar little room is wedged between the serving pantry, visible on the other side of the pass-through, and the reconstructed kitchen. Beyond the kitchen itself, located at the northerly end of the house, are several more reconstructed pantries and a small servant hall.



Let's recross the kitchen heading south, take the service corridor to the dining room, and....


...continue to the library. At first blush, it looks as though nothing has changed in a hundred years. A careful comparison of modern and vintage images reveals just the opposite.



The conservatory at the library's south end looks packed, but not as packed as it used to be. These views bring to mind my fraternity brother, Jeff, who used to joke about the "American Perimeter" style of interior design, one that required every running inch of a room's perimeter to be occupied by something. The marble women in these views spent the entire Victorian period clutching their breasts in an infinity of poses.


The view below looks north across the library to the window above the dining room fireplace.


Many old houses have a guest room on the main floor. This one is actually a small suite consisting of bedroom, private bath and dressing room all shoe-horned between the main hall and the library. It is currently undergoing a painstaking, scholarly and deluxe restoration. Worth noting is the presence of multiple bathrooms in a house for which planning began in 1871.







Time to go upstairs, where you may marvel, as I did, at all that painting and stenciling.


Five family bedrooms, interspersed with three full baths (only one is intact) form a sort of necklace around the second floor landing. Clemens' and his wife's bedroom, located above the drawing room, is comfy and modest. Mark Twain rigged a gas line (the one you see is a recreation) from the ceiling gasolier to a bedside reading lamp.



Really! (Call the fire department!)

Pictures of the Clemens children hang on the bedroom wall. The door to the master bath, eliminated during insertion of a new back stair, opens onto the lathe side of a wall.


The remainder of the east side of the second floor is occupied by a former sewing room, pressed into service as a bedroom as more children came along, plus another bath.






This bathroom is also connected to a third bedroom, called the nursery.





The west side of the 2nd floor is occupied by two more bedrooms, the one below being at various times a schoolroom and writing room.




Another bathroom, now used for storage, originally connected family bedrooms 4 and 5.





Back into the gorgeous gloom of the hall we go, en route to the landing on 3. At the south end of that landing is an entrance to an open porch.




Would you just look at the corner of this porch. My, but there's a lot going on here. Instead of returning to the hall, we'll take the door below to the billiard room.

The door from the porch is in the corner to the left of that south facing, Palladian-ish window.


When he was in Hartford, this is where the great man did most of his writing, at a desk in the remotest possible corner of a house full of children. Mark Twain made Sam Clemens rich, but a very bad investment ruined him. Clemens' youthful experience setting type made him a convert to a man named James W. Paige, inventor of something called the Paige Compositor. Had this invention actually worked, it would have revolutionized typesetting and made a fortune for Paige and Clemens alike. Alas, it didn't, and forced Clemens instead to close his Hartford house in 1891, let the staff go, and move with his family to Europe, where everything (at least back then) was cheaper. In 1894, having lost over $300,000 of his own late Victorian era dollars, plus the majority of his wife's inheritance, Samuel Clemens filed for bankruptcy. He was 59 years old.

This window, located by Clemens' desk, is one of two in the billiard room that commemorate the house's construction date, 1874. After the family left, the house was closed for twelve years. In 1903, when it became obvious to Clemens that he could never afford to occupy it again, he sold it to Richard M. Bissell, whose family lived here for about the same length of time as the Clemenses. Over these latter years the neighborhood began to urbanize, and in 1919 the Bissells moved out and rented the house to the Kingswood School for Boys.


In 1920, the building was sold to developers who announced plans to demolish it as soon as Kingswood's lease expired. These developers had four other apartment projects on deck in the neighborhood, however, which may have been the reason they decided to renovate instead.

The butler lived on the third floor, in the room below.

Here's the entrance to that stairway which obliterated the master bathroom on 2. We'll take it from the 3rd floor of the family wing to the 2nd floor of the kitchen wing, where half a dozen maids' cubicles and one bathroom are crammed on two levels above the kitchen.






It's far grander to take the main stair down.





By the time he sold his Hartford house in 1903, by virtue of a heavy schedule of lecturing and writing, plus kind advice from Standard Oil's H.H. Rogers, Clemens had paid off all his debts. He still battled depression, however, which wasn't helped a year later by the death of his wife of 34 years. Clemens used to joke that he'd come into the world with Halley's Comet and expected to leave when the comet came back. This he did, on April 21, 1910, a day after the comet brushed past Earth.

Local residents struggled for years to save Mark Twain's mansion and carriage house, succeeding finally in 1929. The Mark Twain Memorial Commission operated the house as a public library until 1956, after which it became a house museum. "National Geographic" calls the Mark Twain House one of the "Ten Best Historic Homes" in the world. I'll second that. The link is www.marktwainhouse.org.

My last post, "A Gentleman Abandons the Bronx," illustrated indictable shutter abuse. Ignorance of aesthetic law is no excuse.

A very good looking house is nearing completion a short distance from me in Millbrook. Architect Peter Pennoyer demonstrates how hinged and operable shutters significantly influence the play of light and shadow on the facade. The impact is subtle, but huge.

When it comes to shutters, one size does not fit all. This would seem too obvious to say, although on this subject some people appear to be in the weeds.


Speaking of the obvious, there are also windows on which shutters would look perfectly ridiculous. So for heaven's sake, don't tack 'em up.

If the shutter won't cover an entire window - a legitimate situation with some multiple sashes - then it should be obviously able to cover a specific section.

There is no excuse for screw-on shutters. Period.

The photograph above is of Long Island debutante Barbara Bailey, daughter of Frank and Marie Louise Bailey of Locust Valley. I'd guess it was taken sometime between Miss Bailey's 1925 debut at Sherry's and her 1930 marriage to John Vanneck, described by the Times as "one of the wealthiest young men in America." The wedding, a quiet affair in the wake of crashing markets, took place at Munnysunk, the Bailey country estate just north of the intersection of Feeks and Coot, my absolute favorite road names on the North Shore.

The bride's father, Frank Bailey (1865-1953) was your basic Horatio Alger type - son of an underpaid upstate doctor, started as a $10 a week clerk for the Title Guaranty and Trust Company, and rose to become the company's president. Frank Bailey was the "builder of Brooklyn." His $700 million dollars worth of financing deals built the neighborhoods of Brownsville, Bensonhurst, Borough Park and Long Beach. His life's passion, however, was horticulture. "While dad was inside killing the patients," he once joked, "I was outside inspecting the shrubbery."

My car is in the shop - a depressingly familiar scenario, to anyone who owns one like mine - so I have arrived at the Bayville Road gate to Munnysunk in an unfamiliar Chrysler from Budget. The former Bailey estate, now the Bailey Arboretum, has belonged since 1968 to Nassau County. I think technically we're in Lattingtown, but emotionally I'd call this Locust Valley. For all the depredations suffered by postwar Long Island, this particular patch remains spacious and swanky.

Munnysunk's original gate, as is so often the case with old places converted to institutional use, has been closed. Today's visitor is consequently robbed of the intended anticipation and surprise of winding through dark woods before coming suddenly on the house.


Happily, the house is still here, and in pretty good shape. It plays an admitted second fiddle to the arboretum, whose 42 manicured acres boast 600 different varieties of trees (some quite rare), beautiful lawns, woodland walks, and an abundance of public programs and special events. "Big Old Houses," however, is focussed on the house.


I quite like Munnysunk, whose name, incidentally, is a punnish joke on maintenance costs. The Baileys were rich, but never profligate. In 1911, instead of building the chateau he could have afforded, Bailey bought an old Long Island farmhouse and simply enlarged it. The front door in the image below was the entrance to what appears to have been an upscale, 5-bay center hall colonial built, judging from the detail around the door, about 200 years ago. Bailey hired H. Craig Severance (1879-1941), an architect principally remembered for Manhattan skyscrapers, to double its size. This he did in a clever manner that embodies rural Long Island charm with invented Edwardian detail. Munnysunk is a far cry from Severance's 40 Wall Street, now a Trump development, or his Taft Hotel on West 51st Street. I've never seen sliding shutters like these. My early house expert in Millbrook, David Greenwood, says they are a product of Severance's imagination - an example of "comfortable," as opposed to "colonial," revival.



In its heydey, the garden at Munnysunk, which little Barbara surveys below on a sunny long ago Long Island afternoon, contained 500 labelled perennials, famous collections of roses and chrysanthemums, and a staff of 45. Bailey himself was a hands-on horticulturist, Chairman of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, inveterate winter reader of seed catalogues, and summer recipient of rare plants from arboretums around the country, not to mention the Bureau of Rare Plants in Washington, D.C. Nowadays, one full time caretaker, helped by the occasional day laborer, maintains the whole place.



The noble tree below, which looks like something out of chapter by Tolkien, is a Dawn Redwood, one of the Arboretum's particularly rare specimens.

Here's Frank Bailey, pointing to one of his prizes. That's Bayville Road behind him, not a tennis court.

Here I am, 80 years later. Things haven't really changed.

The north side of the house has a very similar porch to the main entrance on the south. The matching north and south door surrounds, according to my friend Greenwood, suggest the original house, buried in the Severance alterations, dated from the 1820s.


Having done our due diligence on the exterior, it's time to return to the front, admire the contrast between the old bell and the new computerized control panel, and have a look inside.


Well, first a few words about Louise Bailey (1877-1964), the granddaughter of Edward A Lambert, Mayor of Brooklyn from 1853-54, and Frank Bailey's 3rd wife, the first two having died early and unexpectedly. Louise was Bailey's secretary at Title Guarantee when they married in 1905. She gave him 2 children, a boy who died at the horrible young age of 22, and Barbara who married John Vanneck. Mrs. Bailey reportedly yearned to give her country place a native American name, and her husband compromised with Munnysunk.





Frank Bailey left a $50 million dollar estate when he died in 1953. Munnysunk might not have been showy, but it had to have been comfortably and luxuriously furnished - at least until Mrs. Bailey's death in 1964. Not a stick remains, alas, nor could I find a single vintage interior photo. The house gradually ran down until 1993 when, for better or worse, it was drafted into service as a decorator showhouse. Between the decorators and (belatedly) Nassau County the downward structural slide has been arrested. Furniture-wise, however, the only thing on the main floor these days is a distracting clutter of caterers chairs and tables for the many weddings and functions for which the house is rented. One must imagine the wonderful big rooms filled with chintz covered sofas, silk lamps, old tables, paintings on the walls, and orientals on the floor.



The enclosed porch off the drawing room is the nicest room in the house. It's big, bright, has a nifty fireplace (complete with Bailey era screen and firedogs) and fine views over the lawns and gardens. The simple treillage on the walls dates from the showhouse - not well made, perhaps, but good looking.



A stair at the north end of the porch leads down to the basement. I imagine Bailey managed his Locust Valley horticultural empire from the room below, which is now the Arboretum office.



Let's cut back along the north side of the house, cross the drawing room, and peek into a old powder room located underneath the stair.



A pair of ADA compliant bathrooms occupies the footprint of a former serving pantry. Its original door opened into the dining room, seen through the opening at left in the image below.

I think Disraeli once said something like, "One becomes so accustomed to fine wines, it's good to have an indifferent one from time to time." I've trekked through so many palaces in the last two years that it's refreshing to be in an old house whose graciousness stems simply from good proportions, an abundance of light and pleasantly unpretentious detail. I'm sure a very fine dining table and chairs once graced this room. How delicious is that window in the swing door?




I'm sure the old kitchen was lovable, which ain't the case now. Original cabinetry survives in a small pantry. The skylight, center island, and hard-on-the-feet stone floor are showhouse additions.




The servant hall next door has a showhouse skylight too. But for the encouragement of Margaret Stacey, my good natured guide, I wouldn't have discovered this house.


The corridor on the right leads to the dining room; the closed door on the left opens to the back stair.

Neither decorators nor Nassau County officials appear to have been downstairs in the old laundry room at any time in the last century. Naturally, I wasn't going to miss it.




Let's go back to the dining room, turn left into the hall, and climb the stairs to the second floor.



Of the 6 second floor bedrooms, the most interesting is located at the western end of the hall. It has a step-up door to a wonderful terrace (intruded upon by the kitchen wing skylights), and a fab old bathroom with an unusual toilet flush.










The former master bedroom is located at the eastern end of the 2nd floor, part of the Severance addition situated above the enclosed porch. What is it about old house "improvements" that so often rob their victims of original charm? Here's a space with good proportions and windows on 3 sides, that has unintentionally been made to look like the principal's office in a small public school. When I searched for the master bathroom, I learned the story of the "marble bath."


The "marble bath" used to be here. The ceiling in the drawing room below was beginning to sag, so the county ripped out the marble paneling and the giant fixtures and sent everything to the dump. In point of fact, I have seen entire brownstone apartments hung by iron rods anchored in the floor above. However, creative preservation solutions depend on an appreciation of what is to be preserved, which, clearly, wasn't the case here.

Fortunately additional old bathrooms still survive. Why do I love those wall sconces? Probably because no decorator in his or her right mind would include them in a showhouse.



The sliver of door visible at the west end of the second floor landing leads to the back stair, which descends to the kitchen and rises to servants' rooms on 3.



With the exception of one room at the top of the stairs, the '93 showhouse despaired of the 3rd floor and partitioned it off.

One can see why. I have lived in several houses whose upper floors were lined with decaying maids' rooms. I live in one now. Perhaps it is the "romance of ruins," but I rather like having them up there.





We're done with Munnysunk, so let's clear out of here and take a fast look at the stable.





I wouldn't describe Long Island as being full of old millionaires' stables, but happily a lot of them are left. The Arboretum rents this one to The Volunteers for Wildlife, whose headquarters moved recently from the former Marshall Field estate on Lloyd Neck.


Considering Munnysunk's horticultural scope, the greenhouse is surprisingly compact. A second glazed hothouse, similarly sized and now demolished, formerly stood at right angles to the utility building.

Frank Bailey never forgot the $400 scholarship he got from Union College in Schenectady, which enabled him to go to college. For 51 years, he volunteered as Union's treasurer, built and donated Bailey Hall for the Department of Arts, endowed a chair in ancient languages, and eventually left the college $1.5 million in his will. The total of his gifts over the period of his life approached three million dollars - and that was, as they say, when a million bucks was a million bucks. The Arboretum is open daily, admission is free, the property is gorgeous, and the old house is a good place to get married. The link is www.baileyarboretum.org.

Here's Theodate Riddle (1867-1966) on the right, with her prize Guernsey Anesthesia Faithlow. I know; they sound like characters from the "Hunger Games." When born, Theo, as friends and family called her, was named Effie, buit at age 19, she informed the world that henceforth she would answer to the name "Theodate" and none other. This was typical; she was a strong willed girl. Theodate means "God's Gift" and belonged to one of her grandmothers.

Serious farming, in Theo's case on an elaborate Connecticut estate, was one of many talents.

Before her marriage to Mr. Riddle, she designed the large Colonial Revival house in the photo below, built for her father's retirement. The house is called Hill-Stead and stands today on 152 of its original 250 acres, adjacent to the extremely attractive village of Farmington, CT. Theo was disinclined to live the life of a boring Cleveland debutante and, encouraged by her rich modern-minded metals millionaire father, she became an architect. Alfred Atmore Pope (1842-1913) provided his daughter with both the leisure to study architecture, and her first major contract, to wit, a 33,000 square foot Connecticut retirement house built between 1898 and 1901. So much for "downsizing." Theo and her parents shared this house until their respective deaths.

The image below shows Mr. & Mrs. Pope and their daughter Theo lunching at Hill-Stead. The butler Ernest Bohlen went to work for the Popes in Cleveland and the age of 32. Theo buried him at the age of 90 in the Pope family plot in Farmington. I should really call Hill-Stead "Miss Pope's House," since John Wallace Riddle (1864-1941) didn't come along until 15 years after it was built. He was 52, she was 49, and the engagement stunned friends and family alike. Prior to the marriage - the first for them both - Theo suffered from serious depression and intimacy issues. According to her memoir, she was born "before I was needed and greatly to my mother's resentment...I have no memory at all of ever sitting in my mother's lap." Well, my mother was a little distant too, but I certainly sat in her lap - now and then anyway. Apropos of her father, Theo wrote, "I was fifteen years old before he realized he was losing his child." He caught himself in time, however, and he and his daughter became close friends - "intellectually" at least.

Alfred Pope died in 1913 and a year later, perhaps in reaction to the loss, Theo adopted a 2-year old orphan named Gordon Brockway. Not your typical single mother, she immediately hired a couple to actually care for the toddler while she proceeded to teach him how to draw. This ambitious plan ended abruptly in 1916 when the child died of polio at age 4. The following year she adopted not one but two orphans, this time each aged 10. They are seen in the image below, a couple of privileged teens at the wheel of a Stutz Bearcat by the front door to Hill-Stead.

According to John Riddle's half-brother, "(I)t seems to me as a rule inadvisable for a very poor man to marry a very rich woman." Riddle may not have been rich, but he was educated (Harvard and Columbia Law), cultured, hardly poor, and a distinguished diplomat who had been ambassador to Russia from 1906 to 1909. What may have been a "marriage blanc" took place at Hill-Stead on May 6, 1916, 60 days after he proposed.

Back in her "Effie" days, Theo had been a student at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, CT. Smitten by the area's rural charm and splendid old houses she decided her parents would be happier spending their "golden years" here than mouldering away in Cleveland. Hill-Stead's original driveway was probably gravel, but other than that, the original approach to the house is unchanged. An awful lot of historic houses compel the public to scuttle in and out on service drives or, worse, horrid new roadways which greatly diminish intended aesthetic impact. I gave Hill-Stead high marks the moment I drove in.


Theo designed this house, but the job was done with professional help. A pair of McKim, Mead and White employees named Egerton Swartout and Walter Wilder converted her layout and perspective drawings into professional plans and elevations. Rutherford Mead had an advisory role of some sort as well, but his firm's work was sufficiently secondary that they charged a discounted commission. As soon as the house was finished, and almost immediately after a visit Theo made to Mount Vernon, the 2-story porch on the west was added.

Theo opened her Manhattan architectural office in 1913, but it wasn't until 1918 that she was admitted to the American Institute of Architects, thereby at last achieving legitimacy in an assertively male-dominated field. Her professional opus was not extensive. She did only a few houses, mostly modest Connecticut dwellings, plus the reconstruction of TR's birthplace on East 22nd St., and one grand mansion in Lattingtown, L.I. She is best remembered for two private Connecticut schools: Westover for girls in Middlebury, her first non-family commission; and the fantastical looking Avon Old Farms for boys, truly a "trip" if you've never seen it, in Avon, which she not only designed, but founded.

This part of suburban Connecticut can hardly be called rural any more, but you wouldn't know that from these views.

Among Hill-Stead's oddities is the location of the front door. It looks for all the world as if it should have been in the middle of the Mr. Vernon porch, but it isn't and it never was. The left end of the house in the image below is a 1906 enlargement designed by McKim, Mead and White, when a second library and a new study for Mr. Pope, the latter with north facing porch, were tacked on to Theo's original composition.


The Hill-Stead Museum's literature aptly describes the house as a "traditional farmhouse...writ large." The barn attached to its eastern end is both an homage to big farms in cold climates, and an explanation of how the place came to measure 33,000 square feet. This was indeed a working farm, but Theo's prized (and odorous) Guernseys lived in another barn located a discrete distance from the mansion.

Theo added the garage (in mint condition) and greenhouse (unexpectedly demolished) in 1907.


An Olmsted protege named Warren Manning advised Theo on the landscape and Beatrix Farrand did the perennial plan for the sunken garden.



My hostess, Hill-Stead's Melanie Bourbeau, is waiting, so let's go inside.


Mrs. Riddle's will stipulated that Hill-Stead and the collection within it (which we'll get to in a minute) be preserved for the public exactly as they were when she lived here. Her wishes have been overwhelmingly respected, so we can't blame anybody else for making us enter this great big old house via a glorified mud room. It's called the "Carriage Porch' on the plan below, and located right next to the kitchen. This arrangement reminds me of "colonial" subdivision houses whose front doors are entirely vestigial because everybody goes in and out through the garage.


I love poring over floor plans. Below are Hill-Stead's first and second floor layouts which, despite a few inaccuracies (notably the outline of the verandah) and omissions (labels for bathrooms and areas not open to the public), will be very interesting to some.


The first thing I saw on entering grand old Hill-Stead was a claustrophobic little corridor connecting the kitchen (behind the camera) to the dining room (straight ahead), and the first room I passed was was the serving pantry. Now, I love old pantries but it made no sense to me, from the standpoint of aesthetics or convenience, to locate one immediately inside what appears to be the front door. As it happens there is another door tucked into the corner of the porch that leads directly into the dining room. I'm told the family used this as the front door, which seems counter-intuitive since it's not on axis with the covered walk. I suppose ushering arriving visitors directly into the dining room makes fractionally more sense than squeezing them into a service corridor - but not much.

Having groused about its zany location, I hasten to note that the pantry itself is an extremely well preserved antique. Note the pass-through to the dining room on the right side of the first image below.



An adjacent prep pantry connected the serving pantry behind the camera to the main kitchen beyond the door ahead. Hill-Stead's main kitchen was undoubtedly a terrific antique until it was replaced by a modern - well, "colonial" style - conference room.

On the other side of the pantry pass-through is a grandly scaled and finely proportioned formal dining room. This is the first main room through which the visitor walks, which also makes no sense.



I'm told the dining table, when extended, can seat 30. The door in the image below leads to the entrance hall which, of course, isn't really an entrance hall at all.


Hill-Stead's woodwork is all "faux bois," which is to say, clear pine (probably) painted to look like hardwood. Inspired by humbler New England precedents, it's quite luxuriously done here.

The room below is the "Entrance Hall" on the plan, but it should really be called the Stair Hall. The door to the Mt. Vernon porch is behind the camera. Virtually nothing has changed in this room since 1901. Note the second image, reproduced from a shelter mag of the era, crediting McKim, Mead and White as architects.


Mrs. Riddle's drawing room furniture and paintings, in the room behind Mel, have been culled slightly. Speaking of paintings, Theo's father Alfred Pope was a noted collector of Impressionist art. Splendid examples hang everywhere at Hill-Stead in precisely the way I wish I could see them everywhere - neither crowded on the walls nor competing with one another, but simply beautifying the rooms in which they're hung. Years ago, my daughter and I visited the Barnes Collection when it was on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. I was disappointed. There was just too much, and not all of it was that good. To me, Albert Barnes seemed more of an accumulator than a collector. By contrast, Alfred Pope's collection is comparatively small but consistently brilliant. A shared love of Monet, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, not to mention Renoir and Pissaro was what finally cemented Theo's friendship with her father.




"Big Old Houses" is not about pictures, but there are wondrous ones everywhere on these walls. The Hill-Stead collection came as a complete surprise to me and I couldn't wait to tell my daughter about it. Putting pictures aside and getting back to the house, the view below shows the so-called Ell, a sort of overgrown alcove on the south side of the drawing room, whose proportions it does nothing to help. Hill-Stead was built by rich people who lived in Victorian splendor on Euclid Avenue in turn-of-the-century Cleveland. Theirs was an aesthetic influenced not just by the lightness of Impressionist art but also by the heavy hand of Victoria.



On the north side of the entrance hall, balancing the drawing room on the south, is the library - which is actually 2 libraries, labelled "First" and "Second" on the floor plan. The vintage and modern images below show how McKim, Mead and White's northern addition was integrated into the original house.



What was originally a porch and Mr. Pope's study were replaced by a spacious McKim, Mead and White-designed second library, seen below looking west and east. A leitmotif at Hill-Stead is big-ness, which makes the main entrance so bewildering.


North of the second library, and down a few steps, is the morning room, built originally as a new study for Mr. Pope. Hill-Stead is a veritable elephants' graveyard of sensational old bathrooms, the first of which adjoins this room.





Let's leave the morning room, cross the second library to the door on the left side of its south wall, and take a look at a ground floor guestroom called the Parlor Bedroom. Billeting guests on the first floor seems very old fashioned to me. How about that bathroom. And oh yes, how about those pictures! In 1907, Theo's friend Henry James described the Hill-Stead collection in "The American Scene" as follows: "...wondrous examples of Manet, Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler, of other rare recent hands, treated us to the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted without warning, between the compressed lips of half conscious inanition..." (Go, Henry).







Radiating off the second floor landing are five family bedrooms, three of them small suites, each with a vintage painted and paneled bath. The portraits of the Riddles on the second floor landing are a contrast to the masterpieces elsewhere. They were done in 1935 by "C.J.Fox," a Manhattan portrait factory that used photographs to crank out likenesses of business and society people.




We'll move around the second floor counter-clockwise, starting in the northeast corner with the Green Room. I apologize ahead of time for all the bathroom pictures; I just couldn't resist.


The Mulberry Room is part of a suite.



After his 1916 marriage, the bedroom and bath on the southwest corner became John Riddle's.




Theo installed a door connecting her bedroom to that of her husband.

She herself took over the big room on the southeast corner which had formerly been shared by her parents. The vintage photo shows Theo's mother in this room. She looks like a woman who'd dandle a little child on her lap, doesn't she? Well, maybe not.





How great is Theo's bathroom? No one was able to give me a definitive explanation of what that miniature tub was, or did.





The mother-in-law stayed in the Ada Brooks Pope Suite, seen below.


A corridor continues east past a linen room before entering a warren of maids' rooms, whose plan has been somewhat altered for office use.




"Big Old Houses" wasn't going to leave without taking a look at the 3rd floor. I found a big modern office, a couple of errant servants' rooms, a long corridor under the southern eaves, and an elevator to the 1st floor.





Mel and I took the stairs.



West of the back stair landing on 1 is the meeting room that replaced the original kitchen. Since a meeting was in progress at the time of my visit, natural delicacy forbade a photo. To the east of the landing is a fully equipped and completely separate service pantry, beyond which is the former servants' hall, now an office.



A corridor from the servant hall leads to the laundry room, not notable for much, save a bit of vintage linoleum in a closet along the way.


In the basement is a wine cellar with fake bottles and real labels.

When they weren't traveling, the Riddles lived together at Hill-Stead and in New York for 25 years. John Riddle dropped dead of a heart attack on Pearl Harbor Day, 1941. He was 77 years old. His architect wife, Theodate Pope Riddle, died in August, 1946, at the age of 79. Her much loved house was opened to the public as the Hill-Stead Museum the following year.

At one point in her earlier life, Theodate Pope was so sunk in depression that she underwent shock therapy. Her greatest shock, however, came in May of 1915 when, with her maid and a traveling companion, she sailed from New York on the Lusitania. Strolling on deck when the torpedo hit, she joined a panicked mob that leaped overboard into cold Atlantic waters filled with screaming struggling people. The ship went down in under 18 minutes, killing 1195 of the 1959 souls on board. Not, however, before one of those panicked souls jumped and landed on Theo. After regaining the surface, then losing consciousness, she woke up in a pile of dead bodies. This was clearly a second chance at life. The following year she married John Riddle and started Avon Old Farms. Hill-Stead is a wonderful place to visit; the link is www.hillstead.org

This house is in the Boston suburb of Waltham. It's called Stonehurst. My house is half way up the Hudson Valley, remote from any suburb. It's called Daheim.

Stonehurst was finished in 1886. Daheim was completed in 1889, not counting additions which continued to be tacked on until the First World War.

Stonehurst was the summer place of a Boston Brahmin named Robert Treat Paine (1835-1910). Daheim was the country estate of Charles F. Dieterich (1836-1927), a penniless immigrant who became America's "Gas King."

The eastern end of Stonehurst is a heady brew of Arts and Crafts, Shingle Style and the Richardsonian Romanesque.

The western end is a stylistically unrelated Second Empire house, dragged to the site in 1884 and attached to the new house under construction.

Here's the old house before it was moved. Mrs. Paine's father, George Lyman, gave it to her and her husband as a wedding present. In fact, he gave houses to several of his married children, creating a family compound on his Waltham estate called the Vale. When Lyman died in 1880, his heirs subdivided the estate and Mr. & Mrs. Paines went to work on something grander and more modern.

Seeing the nearly completed Stonehurst upon arrival home from an 1885 European tour, Mrs. Paine described it as "grave, but interesting." Whether or not you find it beautiful, Stonehurst is a thoroughbred of its type - in conception, plan, detail and execution.

My house also incorporates an older house, in this case a vernacular balloon frame farmhouse as opposed to a Second Empire mini-manse.

Stonehurst's architect was the famous Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), numbero uno in the "recognized trinity..(with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright)...of American architecture." Daheim's architect was James E. Ware (1846-1918), a busy fellow, but not a brilliant one. Richardson was Beaux Arts trained (the second American after R.M. Hunt to be so), and extremely versatile (the New York State Asylum in Buffalo and Capitol in Albany, mansions across the northeast and midwest, and most famously, Trinity Church in downtown Boston). Richardson had a taste for medieval gravitas and Roman arches. He is one of very few architects with a style named after him, to wit, the "Richardsonian Romanesque." Phillips Brooks, Anglican Bishop of Massachusetts, described his death at age 47 as, "the passing of a great mountain from the landscape." The free spending Richardson died broke, incidentally, leaving a wife and 6 children in grim financial straights.

The City of Waltham, owner of Stonehurst since 1974, in concert with the Friends of Stonehurst, are among the most sensitive stewards of historic property that I've ever seen. The house is in brilliant condition, sits on 109 unsullied acres, feels like it's still in the middle of the country, and is in regular use by an appreciative community which, among other things, loves to get married there. Stonehurst's landscape doesn't really figure in this post, but I will note that it was carefully designed by Frederick Law Olmsted himself. His plan, unfortunately, is not readily discernible today.


Here's Robert Treat Paine, painted in 1884 at the age of 49 by Hubert von Herkomer. Stonehurst's builder was everything Daheim's was not. Grandson of an eponymous signer of the Declaration of Independence, pillar of Boston society, philanthropist and social reformer, he was also, as chairman of Trinity Church's building committee, the man who catapulted Richardson into the big leagues by hiring him to design Trinity Church.

Mrs. Paine, nee Lydia Lyman (1837-1897), was the granddaughter of Theodore Lyman, a rich Boston merchant who, in 1793, began developing the 400-acre Waltham estate he called the Vale. The City of Waltham, located 10 miles from the Boston Common, was a late 19th century industrial center which, curiously, also contained great country estates. That these aristocratic preserves should be located within two miles of Waltham's famous factories was anomalous, to say the least, but no more anomalous than their survival to the present day. Stonehurst, the Vale and Gore Place are all still with us, all still in beautiful condition, each on a remarkably spacious site, and all open to the public.

Here is la famille Paine, photographed on the terrace at Stonehurst in 1905. The beautiful ivy of the past has, once again, fallen victim to fanatical modern theories of maintenance. Paterfamilias R.T. Paine, widowered since 1897 and looking older than his 70 years, sits at the center, surrounded by children and grandchildren. Robert Treat Paine Jr., summer occupant of Stonehurst from his father's death in 1910 until his own at the age of 96 in 1961, stands in the back row, second from right. The little boy, fourth from left in the front, is Theodore Lyman Storer, who in 1974 gave Stonehurst and 109 acres to the City of Waltham.

In the image below, we've stepped into a small anteroom just inside the front door, which is out of sight to the left. Straight ahead is the living hall, a popular (if misleadingly labeled, since people rarely 'lived' in it) feature of better quality Shingle Style houses of the 1880s.

De rigeur in a living hall were floor space as vast as the client could afford, a showy staircase and at least one opulent fireplace. Taken together, these elements formed a sort of homage to the medieval halls of aristocratic barons. Of course, the halls back then constituted the baron's entire house (or virtually so) and his entire household (or almost all of it) ate, slept, and did whatever else you do at home right in that one big room. Living halls in 1880s America, while retaining an aristocratic symbolism, were considerably more sanitary not to mention centrally heated.



When Mr. Storer gave Stonehurst to the city, the furiture was all still in it. It's stored today, out of the way of weddings and functions.

High class Victorian interiors, especially from the '80s and '90s, illustrate an odd preoccupation with places to sit. One would think these people couldn't manage 6 steps without having to stop and park it.


To the the east of the hall, through that door on the left in the image below, is the so-called Summer Parlor. The family used Stonehurst six months of each year; the rest of the time the house was closed and the furniture shrouded.






Another place to sit.

Stonehurst's interior and exterior detailing set it apart from lesser houses built during the same period. As I say, you may not like its asymmetrical style or generally dark palette, but it is a showcase of quality craftsmanship and original design.


On the north side of the summer parlor, through the door below on the right, is Mr. Paine's study, with furniture undisturbed.


A door from the study connects to a corridor leading back to the big hall.

En route is a guest bath, looking unchanged from 1886.




The door in the image below leads into the Second Empire house, where a Richardson-designed corridor has replaced the original staircase. The front door to the old house, now located in the dining room, is visible in the distance.

Rooms in the old house were distributed more or less symmetrically on either side of the center hall. The renovated dining room combines a portion of the hall with the former front parlor.





Richardson made what was a library or maybe a study on the other side of the hall into a serving pantry for the new dining room. The pantry sink makes a compelling argument for stone or metal countertops.



Note the very un-pantry-like fireplace in the imge below. The door beside it, which probably once led to a dining room, now connects to service pantries, back stairs, an aviary (really; they kept birds) and a new kitchen.

A one-story service wing, tacked onto the north side of the old house, contained a large kitchen and laundry, a new back door and a servants' hall used today as an office. The kitchen and laundry have become a modern catering facility, and the old kitchen stove survives as a sort of souvenir.



Let's return to the family areas. The door on the right in the image below leads to the serving pantry. I'd assume this back stair was inserted into the old dining room during the Richardson alterations.

We're back in the dining room corridor, the dining room itself being behind the camera. The living hall and summer parlor are in the distance to the east. We're turning right into the so-called Autumn Parlor.

The Autumnn Parlor, originally the rear parlor before the old house was moved, has remained essentially unchanged. This area on the main floor, plus the bedrooms above it, speak with a very different architectural accent than the H.H. Richardson additions.


The adjacent Bow Parlor, sandwiched between the Autumn Parlor and the living hall, shows how far domestic taste in house interiors evolved in 20 years. There's more wood, less light, lower ceilings, no symmetry and an obligatory built-in place to sit.




Here's another place to sit en route to the main stair.

And here's another, just in case you need a rest before you start climbing. The main stair at Stonehurst is a beautiful piece of cabinet grade carpentry, much nicer than my stair at Daheim. My beautiful Daheim is a great big friendly Victorian mansion, whereas Stonehurst is a design classic. I say this not to denegrate my house, which I know is better than most, but to underscore the difference between good upper middle class work and high quality professional design.



The second floor landing overlooks a picturesque (albeit useless) mezzanine, into whose fireplace is chiselled a syrupy inscription from "The Chambered Nautilus" by Oliver Wendell Holmes, that reads: "Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul." The wall on the right used to be the rear exterior wall of the old house. The window in the middle of it still opens into a bedroom.

The second floor of Stonehurst is light on bathrooms - there are only 3. This is inconvenient considering the fact that there are 8 family bedrooms. The first bath opens directly onto the second floor landing; there are none en suite.

I wonder who did the drawings for this bafflingly complicated bathroom.




Next to the bathroom is a linen closet, complete with 1921 warning not to carry back to town the things supposed to stay at Waltham.


Running east from the second floor landing, down the spine of the Richardson addition, is a corridor leading to 4 family bedrooms, one master bedroom, and one bathroom.

Two of the bedrooms are furnished and open to the public; two are closed and stacked with storage; all are conscientiously, assymetrically, inventively, unexpectedly, a bit heavy-handedly, and elaborately picturesque, very much in the manner of the "American Queen Anne." The master and one other bedroom open onto a loggia with south views down wide lawns to, at least at one time, the rooftops of Waltham.







How fab is bath number two?



The detachable pipe stuck in the drain is a combination stopper and overflow.

Why not combine the medicine cabinet with a fireplace?

The owners' bedroom occupies the stone tower at the eastern end of the house. I have a fireplace, benches galore and a built-in wardrobe in my bedroom too, and Dieterich was probably richer than Paine. However, Dieterich's architect was not in the same league as H.H. Richardson.




A dressing room with sink and closets (and nothing else) adjoins the master.



The corridor in the image below, running west down the middle of the old house, gives access to three guest rooms, a guest bath, and a smaller corridor leading to the 2nd floor servants' quarters.

Almost at the corridor's end, a relocated door memorializes four generations of growing children.


For all the charm of H.H. Richardson, these older bedrooms have a serenity missing in the rest of the house. Things to note: the window that overlooks the stair; the fireplaces that are all alike; the unspoilt views.




From the guest bath in the west to the owner's dressing room in the east is a considerable distance. A narrow corridor to the left outside the door below leads to the back stair, 3 maids' rooms and a maids' bath.




More servants' rooms were on 3, but they have been converted into offices and a staff kitchen. The attic hasn't changed a bit, even down to stacks of dusty trunks.



Time to head down, then out via the anteroom through which we entered. The floor plans below give a pretty good - if not a very exact - idea of Richardson's plan.




Robert Treat Paine was a progressive supporter of trade unionism and affordable housing who labored throughout his life to better the conditions of the working class. All manner of clubs and institutions were invited annually to enjoy his Waltham estate. The view below shows a visit of the Wells Memorial and Peoples' Institute in June of 1890. I loved Stonehurst; the link is www.stonehurstwaltham.org.

Last week, while attending a Philadelphia wedding reception, my daughter and her husband shared a table with the groom's 85-year-old Great-Aunt Conky, nee Caroline. Aunt C, interestingly, had been Pennsylvania's first female state trooper, dubbed by her former colleagues, "the pussy in our posse." Aunt C was a pistol, according to Jazzy, who kept the table in gales of laughter and danced until two in the morning. I love stories about active oldsters, in part, I suppose, because I'm not so far from becoming one myself. Another commendable oldster, this one from the past, was Washington D.C. brewing magnate Christian Heurich (1842-1945) who, besides making a fortune brewing Senate Brand beer, and criss-crossing the Atlantic seventy-three times for vacations in Germany, also built the remarkable house in these photos.

Dupont Circle, a block north of the house, was the height of Washington D.C. residential fashion when Heurich and his second wife moved here in 1894. Post-WW II office construction has wiped out most of the old houses, but not 1307 New Hampshire Ave., N.W., whose amazing survival reflects the vigor of its owner. Heurich was still making his annual transatlantic vacation jaunts at the age of 96. His last trip - a subject, Ill confess, of speculation on my part - took him to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1939. I will note that he immediately cut that vacation short and returned to the States as soon as Hitler invaded Poland.

The south elevation of the house, overlooking a one-block side street called Sunderland Place, is made of brick. The main facade on New Hampshire Avenue is faced with more elegant brownstone. We see essentially the same facade treatments in suburban subdivisions today, reminding me of a pretentious friend who once remarked, "Do we have a suit of velvet in the front, and denim in the back?"


A sole jarring note - assuming you don't consider Richardsonian Romanesque architecture jarring in itself - is the modern elevator shaft, attached to the north side of the house like a gigantic brick leech. Far better to have it attached there, however, than clumsily inserted inside.

In 1872, six years after arriving in post-Civil War America, Heurich and a partner named Paul Ritter took a big risk and bought a failing D.C. brewery. A year later Heurich bought out his partner, and 20 years after that the Christian Heurich Brewing Company had become the largest private employer in the District. Heurich was still running it in 1945, when he died at the age of 102.

This fine (if ponderous) Victorian mansion, designed John Granville Meyers (of whom I have never heard) was built for Heurich's second wife, Mathilde Daetz, sister of his secretary-treasurer. The couple married in 1887, three years after the death of Wife #1. Mr. H. had some serious bad luck with wives. Wife #2 died in 1895, a mere year after moving into the new house. However, being a rich brewer with a mansion off Dupont Circle undoubtedly helped attract Wife #3, who was (perhaps not coincidentally) the niece of Wife #1. (Still with me?) Wife #3, nee Ameila Keyser, gave him 2 daughters (well, 3 if you count an infant who died), and a son, and outlived him by 10 years.

This is the house of a "grand bourgeois" who lived to become a patriarch of the District of Columbia, notable both for his money and his philanthropies, the latter usually aimed at local D.C. businesses and needy German charities.

I love floor plans, even when they have confusing labels. The one below shows the Heurich House's first floor. #102 is the reception room, labeled "bookstore" (which it isn't); #110 and #111 are grand incarnations of the Victorian era's typical double parlors; #112 is a music room; #106 a serving pantry; the rest you can figure out.

I had never heard of the Heurich House, a fantastic old pile that was left to the Columbia (as in 'District of') Historical Society in Amelia Heurich's 1955 will. Since 2003 it's been the property of the Heurich House Foundation, the happy resolution of a disturbing passage in local preservation annals, about which more later. What J.G. Meyers' complex architecture and New York's Huber Brothers-designed interiors lack in sophistication and elan, they make up for in impressive scale and opulence. The images below show the main hall and the hall fireplace, the latter being one of 15 in the house.


Every big old house - at least the ones I write about - has a reception or morning room for informal or family daytime socializing. This one is immediately to the left of the front door.



In a more sophisticated house the room in the images below would be a drawing room. Here, it's the grander of a pair of connecting parlors, themselves part of a showy 4-room enfilade that stretches across the south side of the house. The circular alcove overlooks once tranquil New Hampshire Ave. The vintage photo is of the Heurichs and their eldest daughter, Anita, taken in this room on her wedding day.




In the view below, the circular alcove is to our back and the drawing room fireplace dead ahead. To the left of it, beyond the baffled young woman, is the main hall and reception room; to the right is the 2nd parlor, music room and, in the distance, the dining room.

The two images below show what is called, for reasons that escape me, the Gold Parlor. The first view is towards the grand front parlor, the second looks in the opposite direction towards the music room.


The Heurich daughters were musical, the fate of most privileged daughters of the Victorian era. I doubt they had much choice in the matter, but they did have a spectacular Steinway grand piano. The musicians' loft overlooks not just the music room, but the front hall and dining room as well.


In the image below I'm posing in the dining room. Behind me is the music room, then the Gold Room, then the grand front parlor, outside of whose faraway windows is New Hampshire Avenue. Heurich House's docent manual identifies the dining room's architectural style as German Renaissance Revival. To me it has the generic "luxe" look of pretty much any American millionaire's mansion from the 1890s. A German immigrant named August Grass, who arrived in America the same year as Heurich, is credited with carving the woodwork and the furniture. Some of the former is actually gesso with a faux wood finish.



The view below looks down the entrance hall from the dining room to the front door. The balustraded mezzanine marks the eastern end of the musicians' loft.

Victorian conservatories always look naked without their original jungly profusion of ferns and palms and blossoming plants. Outside this one is a spacious walled garden - kind of amazing, in the middle of an office district - complete with a carriage house at its far end.




Meyers took less care with the house's garden elevations. That's his conservatory on the left. On the right is a two-story 1914 addition containing Mr. Heurich's office on the main floor and a schoolroom for his children above. A man named Appleton P. Clark designed it, as well as the 1902 carriage house at the other end of the garden.

I am receiving a red carpet tour from Heurich House's Executive Director, Kim Bender, who holds the door between the dining room and an enormously picturesque (and outrageously inconvenient) serving pantry on the floor below.



Here are a few crib notes to the basement plan below. #007 is the pantry we just visited; #016 is the kitchen, next to which were more pantries and a former servant hall, labeled #017 and #018 respectively; #010, also labeled rental, used to be the billiard room.

After hurriedly departing Nazi Germany at the outset of the Polish blitzkrieg, 96-year-old Mr.Heurich and his family detoured to New York to see the 1939 World's Fair. My docent manual says they bought the kitchen cabinets there, although the ones in these photos are obviously (to me, anyway) from the 1890s. It's more likely they bought the fantastic electric stove.




Equally cool is the vintage Westinghouse refrigerator, which my late mother would have persisted in calling an ice box. When Kim, a woman after my own heart, found it stashed in a basement store room, she wasted no time returning it to a place of honor in the kitchen.



There is both a servant and a family side to the basement, the two separated by a door in the kitchen. Distributed along the family hall (#009 on the basement plan) is the boiler room (#012, an admittedly odd place for it), the billiard room (#010, so full of storage I could only get a partial shot of the unusual fireplace), and the so-called German Breakfast Room.



Kim amusingly described what was designed as an in-house "Bierstube" as Mr. H's "man cave." In place of jumbo flat screen and leather recliners, it offered Teutonic atmosphere and a location tucked safely away from the women of the house. Heurich used it for drinking, card playing, and whatever else rich old guys did a hundred years ago. After 1912, at which point he was 70 years old, the family began using it as a breakfast room.



The Heurichs didn't go up and down the pantry stairs, obviously, but used this more spacious flight instead. It leads to a main floor corridor flanked with a silver safe on one side, a powder room on the other, and Mr. Heurich's office at its far end. The vintage photo shows the brewmaster "en famille" in his main floor home office.






Time to take the main stairs to the second floor.

Here's the second floor plan, complete with confusing labels.

The bedroom hall, #204 on the plan, is called, at least by Kim and now by me, the "Hall of Wives." They're all on the walls, including the head rooster himself.

#209, the master bedroom, sits above the front parlor. The Heurichs were rich and prominent but not really society people. They did, after all, sleep in the same room.




Society ladies usually had exquisite - or at least fashionable - boudoirs. By contrast, the third Mrs. Heurich filled hers, #210 on the plan, with the sort of comfy homely furniture and objets that would have made Elsie de Wolfe plotz.



#211, the master bathroom, is accessed from a corner of Mrs. H's boudoir, neither a sophisticated nor a very convenient arrangement.




#203 was Christian Heurich Jr's room. The brewmaster's son managed the family beer business from 1945 until 1956, when competition from nationally distributed brands drove it under. I am told this bedroom was the "Moorish Room" when the house was built. This dreadful Victorian conceit, wherein exotic beads and rugs and divans were flung around with chaotic abandon, was supposed to suggest artistic taste and extensive travel. Happily, not a trace of Moorish-ness remains, at least none that I can see. The sink in the en suite bath, #202 on the plan, has an attractive alabaster counter and splash.




At the opposite end of the second floor are Heurich's daughters' rooms. They're beyond a door for an elevator that was never installed, and a closet slop sink that, to my eye, is a work of industrial art.






The girls' bedrooms are labeled #215 and #208. Their schoolroom is #207, also labeled "office wing," even though it isn't.



Beyond the velvet rope the tourist cannot go, which of course doesn't include me. During almost half a century of ownership, the Columbia (later Washington) Historical Society defrayed operating costs by renting space to the National Geographic Society, the Huguenot Society, the Daughters of Founders and Patriots of America, the Daughters of Veterans of the Civil War, the Mayflower Society, the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, and anything and everything else they could think of. In 2003, the Society moved to more convenient quarters in the Carnegie Library and, incredible as it seems, simply put the old Heurich House on the market for sale. Any developer could have come along, torn it down and replaced it with a new commercial building. Heurich's grandsons, understandably appalled, stepped in, created the Heurich House Foundation, and preserved it instead.



The Foundation still rents out the third floor, seen in the images below. Occupied until recently by a hotel group, as of September, 2013, it will become home to a trio of preservation organizations. The original floor plan remains, work stations and computer terminals occupying former guestrooms.




Servants' rooms on the fourth floor, reached via the back stairs, are leased to a local law firm. The floor plan remains intact up here too, as does almost all of the original architectural finishes. I see an enormous amount of gratuitous destruction done to big old houses in the name of conversion to institutional use. I'll bet most people, certainly myself, would vastly prefer working inside an old house that still looked like one, instead of inside a soulless modern box inserted into one.




Heurich House has a fifth floor with only one room, access to which is directly from the roof. Quite a different view up here, compared to that in 1894.



Kim is unlocking the only door to a circular room with a domed ceiling, and walls with painted gnomes frolicking on painted railings. What they're doing and why they're doing it here, I cannot guess.




We'll take the back stair down, and detour into the musicians' loft for a different perspective on music room, dining room, and main hall.




I had a ball going through the Heurich House, which I might never have known existed, but for a casual comment from a friend. Well worth a visit; the link is www.heurichhouse.org

This is Alfred Irenee duPont (1864-1935), photographed in North Dakota in 1906. "Oftentimes he would be seen thus," said his 3rd wife, Jessie, "contemplating whether or not to move a tree or shrub, or visualizing a fountain or building, or gazing in wondrous admiration at a glorious sunset or storm at sea."

Mr. duPont did a lot of visualizing in his seventy years, the net of which was a stupendous personal fortune, a dramatic personal life, a country house "a la Francaise," and an internationally famous children's hospital. His house, called Nemours after his family's ancestral village in France, is located on the outskirts of Wilmington, DE, a city - indeed, an entire state - that still depends on duPont family philanthropies to function.

Nemours is a 47,000 square foot house, packed with treasures and surrounded by a vast (the only word for it) formal garden inspired by Versailles, a description that, for once, is inspired by actual fact. I took hundreds of photos on my tour and the ones you see below represent a fraction of all I saw. Fraction or no, they are the first series of contemporary interior images of the house ever published, for which I am most grateful to the Nemours Foundation. Among the hundreds omitted for lack of space are views of a noble tree-lined driveway from Powder Mill Road.


In 1784, in one of King Louis XVI's later acts, Alfred duPont's ancestor, Pierre Samuel duPont (1739-1817) was elevated to the nobility. This turned out to be a mixed blessing as, after defending the king and queen from a bloodthirsty mob in 1791, escaping the guillotine by a hairsbreadth in 1792, and having his Paris "hotel" sacked in 1797, duPont and his family in 1799 wisely - if a bit belatedly - decamped for America. As it happened, duPont's son Eleuthere Irenee had learned the manufacture of high quality gunpowder during a stint at the Paris Arsenal. Upon arrival in America he learned - during one of those chic hunting expeditions that impoverished French aristocrats just seem naturally to fall into - that American gunpowder sucked. duPont had a visualization of his own, and by 1804, with a capitalization of $36,000, his E.I. duPont de Nemours mill began producing high quality gunpowder. The house in these images, designed by Carrere and Hastings and completed in 1910, speaks to the outcome of that visualization.



Before we go inside, a few words are in order about Alfred duPont. He was a tough youth, orphaned at 13, sent away to Phillips and MIT, but more at home on the rough and tumble floor of the family's gunpowder plant. duPont was handy with his fists, a genius with mechanics, and soon reputed to be the best black powder man in America. In 1902, the mandarins of the duPont family decided to sell the gunpowder business. Alfred was 38, (unhappily) married to Bessie Gardner (1864-1949), the father of 4, and nowhere near rich enough to buy the firm. Notwithstanding which, he and his cousins Pierre and Coleman engineered the first leveraged buyout in American corporate history. Convincing their aged relatives to accept notes and stock on purchase, the new principals closed the deal with personal cash outlays of $2100 apiece, $700 of which went for legal fees. E.I. duPont de Nemours was reborn and, largely due to Alfred duPont's operational stewardship, profits surged.

Here is Mr. duPont with his third wife, Jessie Ball (1884-1970). Prior to their marriage in 1921, his history with wives had not been good. A 1906 divorce from Wife #1 provoked a firestorm in the family, many members of which - including 3 of his own children - considered the ex-wife a "wronged woman." This wasn't helped by duPont's prompt remarriage to the melancholy Alicia Bradford Maddox (1875-1920), former wife of his secretary, whom she divorced two weeks before marrying duPont. Their 1907 marriage sparked a swirl of rumors suggesting everything from adultery to illegitimacy. Nemours was supposedly built to please this woman, but apparently didn't succeed. She spent increasing amounts time in Europe, leaving her husband to strike that characteristic pose by himself. Developing Nemours captured his imagination, however, and it became a sort of supersized target for his own creative impulses. Alicia duPont died in 1920, and on January 22, 1921, a day after her 37th birthday, Jessie Ball became 57-year-old Alfred duPont's 3rd wife. This time duPont struck gold; this marriage was a partnership of equals.

Years ago, while researching the Vanderbilts, I met an old guy named Osgood Field. Osgood was an authority on glaciers, a man as unpretentious in manner as he was generous with help and information on the Gilded Age in which he'd spent his youth. He was a member of the Sloane branch of the Vanderbilt clan. His parents owned High Lawn, one of the great Lenox summer places, and spent winters in New York in the northerly of Uncle George Vanderbilt's so-called "Marble Twins," occupied today by Versace, next door to Cartier. "What was it like inside?" I asked. "Pretty fancy," he replied, which could equally be said of Nemours. The images below are of the foyer, to one side of which is a ladies' dressing room and toilet.



Here's the main hall, from which radiate corridors to: 1) the principal main floor rooms; 2) the entrance foyer; 3) the main stair; and 4) french doors to a south facing terrace. The interiors of houses on this scale are frequently designed by separate architects. As far as I can ascertain, however, Thomas Hastings did these.

Gabriel Ferrier's portrait of Alfred duPont, hanging over the hall fireplace, looks to me like the work of his ex-wife's divorce lawyer. The artist's attitude wasn't unique. duPont's 1902 buyout partners, cousins Pierre and Coleman duPont, actively took his first wife's part. When duPont had her and her children evicted (on one week's notice) from their house, then razed it to the ground, the cousins built her a new one at their own expense. The bad blood came to a head in 1916 when, after a flurry of internecine lawsuits, company shareholders voted Alfred duPont off the board. You wouldn't know it from this house, but when a big deal went south in 1920, duPont was close to bankruptcy.

While his business and family dramas unfolded, duPont continued to supervise - and probably plan - Nemours' extravagant formal gardens, while simultaneously filling its interiors with things like Marie Antoinette's clock, standing to the left of the stairs.

The corridor below leads to the drawing room, a glittering affair filled with Louis XVI antiques. I'm told the paintings, rugs, objets, lighting fixtures and furniture, not just in the drawing room but throughout the house, were all chosen by duPont and his second wife, not by a decorator.





My informative guide, Skip Harrington, is standing on the Savonnerie because, unlike most of the rugs in the house, this one is a repro.

On the southwest corner of the building, adjacent to the drawing room, is this beautiful conservatory, complete with live warbling birds in cages and glossy plants in attractive pots. Treillaged walls are among my favorite decorative treatments, and these (not surprisingly) are particularly good.



Also adjacent to the drawing room, seen below looking ready for a 12-step meeting, is the music room. That's Jessie Ball duPont over the fireplace, painted in 1926 by H.M.Linding. She was a considerably more competent person than this painting suggests. At the time of her marriage to Alfred duPont, she was vice-principal of a San Diego elementary school, a successful real estate investor, and the primary support of her aged parents, the last of whom died coincident with Mr. duPont's arrival. As his third wife, she poured proverbial oil on his troubled family waters and reconciled him with his alienated children. Her brother Edward would never have gone to work for him otherwise, nor played important subsequent roles in his businesses and charities.



That's a Romney portrait over the piano, Skip in front of the door to the drawing room, and my nephew Forest by the exit to the drawing room corridor.

Music room and morning room flank either side of the drawing room corridor. In a place like Nemours, the elegant morning room in the images below qualifies as an "intimate" setting for informal visiting, tea, reading the paper, that sort of thing.


On the opposite side of the main hall, a balancing corridor leads to the dining room. We'll visit a small writing room and connecting library en route.






The main block of Nemours is anchored on the southwest by the drawing room, and on the northeast by a splendid formal dining room. Houses this big usually have a smaller family dining room for smaller family meals, but I didn't see one here. I imagine Alfred and Jessie, alone over luncheon salads, at opposite ends of the enormous table. Nemours' aesthetic muse, Louis XVI, hangs over the fireplace,






Nemours' vintage service areas and bathrooms are all thrillingly intact. Skip demonstrates the serving pantry's elevator-type silver safe. Its multiple shelves move up and down inside a protected shaft in order to accommodate a bumper crop of sterling. PR Manager Steve Maurer (with the blue ID necklace) is taking a breather from worrying about us stepping on the rugs.



Where is Skip pointing? At a refrigerator befitting a palace.



I could have posted 20 pictures of the kitchen alone, but these 3 will have to do. The door beside the stove leads to the servant hall, alas not on my tour.



The tile floored gents' room has a door to the main hall (out of sight on the right), and another to a stair leading to the basement.



The basement of Mr. duPont's Wilmington house - specifically, the area beneath the main block - is an antique version of a private health club. His private gym includes a shower (he didn't have one upstairs), a "sweatbox" (probably about as useful as modern models), a mechanical horse (for, well, I'm not sure what for), and a cigar holder (smoking is so relaxing).





The health club corridor, if I may call it that, passes a combination shuffleboard and screening room, a bowling alley and a billiard room en route to Mr. duPont's office at its far end. It's a mystery, to me anyway, why the owner of this magnificent house would put his office in a windowless basement room.





The service wing, running perpendicular to the main block, has appropriately simpler corridors.


Some boiler room, right? I could have posted a dozen shots of this one too.....

...and a dozen more of the mechanical room beyond it. The twin belts run compressors for an in-house ice plant. The four tanks are water filters; the duPonts bottled their own (flat and sparkling) and took it with them when they traveled. The complicated engine on the left is a generator.

So much for the basement. Let's return to the main floor, take the stair to 2, and have a look at the bedrooms. The railing on the main stair, by the way, is salvage from a demolished English manor.





There are lots of bedrooms up here, some of which can be combined into suites with private corridors. The grandest suite of course belonged to the owners, and is located at the end of the corridor below.

I'm sure Carrere and Hastings' planned a pair of connecting "his and her" master bedrooms, with a dressing room and bathroom off his, and an elaborate bath/closet and boudoir/dressing room off hers. Jessie and Alfred slept together, however, in what would have been his bedroom. She used the second bedroom as a boudoir. The husband's bedroom in separate-bedroom houses, was normally smaller than the wife's. Combined with the fact that I couldn't step on the rug, my photos of this one are a bit constricted.


Of note in the photos of Mr. duPont's dressing room and bath are: his clothes in front of a cheval glass; a terrific old Tuxedo style sofa: and a complex apparatus mounted on the bathroom wall and intended for irrigation of the ear. Mr. duPont was not only blind in one eye, the result of a hunting accident in 1904, but virtually deaf due to childhood ear infections that stemmed from swimming in polluted water.




On the other side of Alfred and Jessie's room is his second wife's room, which Jessie converted to a boudoir. Although Jessie and Alfred duPont kept and cherished Nemours until the end of their respective lives, it should be noted that in 1926 they moved to Florida, built a big house in Jacksonville called Epping Forest (now a swanky yacht club), became Florida residents and refocused their business efforts down there. A broad terrace outside Jessie's boudoir overlooks gardens below and the balustraded third floor above, the latter alas also not on my tour.




A wall of closets faces Jessie's bath, a fabulous antique complete with a shower. If he wanted one instead of a bath, her husband had to trek to the basement.



The room on the other side of Jessie's bath was, I'm sure, designed to be the boudoir of the lady of the house. Two duPont daughters lived here at various times - Denise, a French war orphan adopted by duPont and his second wife, and Alicia, the 2nd Mrs. duPont's daughter, whom Jessie embraced as her own. The photo in the Deco frame is of Denise.


The rest of the second floor is devoted to guestrooms - and more guestrooms, and still more guestrooms - all painstaking preserved precisely as they were in the duPonts' day, right down to vases full of flowers from the greenhouse.









More of the same (or close to it) would naturally have been on the third floor, servants being housed in a separate wing. Unfortunately I couldn't see the third floor either.

Originally there were 14 maids' rooms in the house, several of which have been combined for present day office use. When the duPonts lived here, the total in-house staff, including butler and chauffeur, numbered 17. I peeked out the back at the laundry, housed in its own building, then returned to Nemours' main entrance.



A formal garden axis about a third of a mile in length extends in a northwesterly direction from the front door. The colonnade you see in the distance is located at the approximate midpoint. Forest is getting ready for the long walk.


Interestingly, the reflecting pool doubled as a swimming pool; there is no other pool on the property. The duPonts and their guests actually used that boat. The gilded statue beyond the pool depicts "Achievement."


The colonnade would seem to mark the end of things. Not so; there's more. There were 24 full time gardeners at Nemours in the 'Twenties; 11 do the job today, aided by more advanced equipment.


Twin flights of curving marble stairs descend from the rear of the colonnade to what is in effect an entirely separate garden. At its southern end, against the colonnade retaining wall, is an elaborate multi-tiered fountain. Formal beds, gravel walks, a small lake and a sweep of lawn separate the fountain from a distant temple. Back at the house, the drawing room, conservatory and master bedroom suite all overlook an elaborate parterre, worthy of photos for which there is no room.



Alfred duPont died in Florida in 1935, leaving an estate worth about $56 million. The $26 million remaining after taxes became the Alfred I duPont Testamentary Trust, administered by his widow. This trust funded a great number of charities, the most famous being the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, occupying 80 of Nemours' original 300 acres. duPont's will charged his trustees to "care for the mansion and grounds and gardens surrounding 'Nemours' in order that they be maintained for the pleasure and benefit of the public in their present condition." In 2004, 34 years after Jessie duPont died at Nemours, the mansion underwent a 4-year, $39 million restoration, the spectacular results of which we've seen above. If there is one false note in this otherwise wonderful tale, it is the ongoing construction of a new hospital wing that intrudes - gratuitously, as far as I'm concerned - onto the mansion landscape. This has been explained to me as a necessary expediency. It doesn't really matter whether I believe that or not, which I don't, but I wonder how Alfred duPont would react. His papers at the Montrose School in Rockville, MD, brim with what an archivist describes as his "candid and irreverant views,""wicked sense of humnor,""stinging rebukes of tradesmen," and "highly original phrases." I bet he'd have a few of the latter on the subject of that addition.

The Nemours estate is open to the public for guided, reservation-only tours between May and December. It's a remarkable place; the link is www.nemoursmansion.org.

In the summer of 2006, a few of us in Millbrook got together to give an '80s bash we called "The Big Hair Affair." The walls at Daheim were decorated with giant blowups of friends and neighbors onto which we'd photo-shopped enormous hairdos. People came in perfectly ridiculous outfits which, as often as not, they'd hidden for 20 years in the backs of their closets. The DJ looked as if he'd been poured into a brightly patterned shirt made of some heinous fabric which, I'll confess, looked much like the one I was wearing myself. The allure of this sort of thing, I suppose, is "transformation." The 150-or-so people who were there that night looked mighty different the next morning. The house in the image above, photographed in the 1880s, now looks mighty different too. In fact, although you'd never recognize it, this is the mansion at Wave Hill, part of the remarkable public garden of the same name, located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and owned since 1960 by the City of New York.

The photo above shows the house after its first transformation, from a late, vaguely Greek Revival 1840s summer house, into a high Victorian 1870s villa. A New York socialite named William Lewis Morris built the original house; the famous publisher, William Henry Appleton (1814-1899), did the makeover. Appleton, who represented literary luminaries like Lewis Carroll and Arthur Conan Doyle, first added dark porches and a weighty mansard roof. In 1891 he enlarged the building further with a two-story bow-ended addition on the north. After Appleton's death, his estate sold the house to a neighboring estate owner named George Walbridge Perkins (1862-1920). Perkins never lived in the house, his intention being solely to extend his elaborate garden onto Wave Hill's grounds. In 1909 he gave a life tenancy to a man named Bashford Dean (1867-1925), who, at his own expense, tacked an enormous Armor Hall onto north end of the already extended house. Dean's hall is visible on the right in the image below.

Here's the same house after yet another transformation, this time a fashionable Georgianization at the hands of architect Oliver Perry Morton, completed in 1933 for Perkins' daughter and son-in-law.

If you're a regular reader of "Big Old Houses," and I certainly hope that you are, you're already aware of the distinguished tenants who have lived in this house, prime among them Teddy Roosevelt's parents, Mark Twain, Toscanini, and the British UN mission. If you've neglected to commit the details to memory, you can find them again in my post from last November titled "A Most Distinguished Rental." My present goal is not to rehash rental history, but to illustrate Wave Hill's latest transformation.

After George Perkins' widow died in 1959, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses convinced her heirs to donate 28 acres of prime Riverdale real estate to the city. The tract included Wave Hill, the fabulous Perkins gardens, and the late Mrs. Perkins' own house, called Glyndor. During the half century since, desultory institutional alterations have disfigured Wave Hill to greater and lesser degrees. The summer of 2013 marks completion of a $9.7 million inside and outside do-over, a third of which was financed by individual donations.

Wave Hill's Deputy Director Michele Rossetti and Assistant Marketing Director Martha Gellens happily hosted me on a tour last fall, well before the renovation was finished. Thank you, ladies, for not panicking at the idea of somebody actually seeing the place before it was finished. The result of this commendable open-mindedness - not encountered everywhere, I might add - is the fascinating (to me, anyway) series of "before and after" images that follow. Under way behind the construction screens was a lot of not obvious pointing, painting, and replacing of rotted wooden columns and deteriorated copper crests and valleys.




In the following views, taken from the south, unglamorous but crucial (not to mention expensive) replacement copper is clearly visible on the roof.


Let's step into what today is no longer a "Hard Hat Area."




Last November's temporary door has been replaced with the restored original. I don't like the push bar, which must have been a non-negotiable code item.



Wave Hill's smart Depression-era entrance areas have more than a dash of Cole Porter about them. Beyond the S.S. Normandie anteroom and main hall is a grand Victorian staircase, its charm recognized and preserved by Mr. Morton.






Wave Hill's considerable appeal lies in a disarming pastiche of differing aesthetics from varying eras. The dining room is a good example, both for the contrast it makes to the hall and front anteroom, and for its clever combination of architectural elements. I suspect the handsome door surrounds are actually quite early. They've been transformed, however, into something more fashionable to early 20th century eyes by the addition of ornate bracketed shelves atop each.





The kitchen, serving pantry, and servant hall from the 1933 service wing have all been gutted out. A modern institutional kitchen and serving area occupy the space today. The adjacent dining room will be one of a pair of public tea rooms.


The dining room furniture in the vintage view below may or may not have been all that good, but it had a lot of old fashioned charm.


Let's leave the dining room, turn left in the hall to the main stair, and compare the stair hall under renovation to the way it looks today.



The stair is to our back in the images below. This elegant Georgian Revival stair hall is newer and more stylistically coherent than the dining room, but perfectly comfortable alongside it.

I knew there'd be a good view beyond that french door at the end of the hall, and indeed there is.




The stair hall is bordered on the south by the entrance and dining room, and on the north by an enormous elongated oval drawing room. The first image below looks from the drawing room back into the stair hall. The second image looks east in the drawing room; the door to the stair hall is boxed in on the right. The river view is behind the camera.



In the views below we're looking west towards the river, "now" and "then." The 1933 image of the drawing room provides a glimpse into the world of Dorothy and Edward Freeman, the daughter and son-in-law of Wave Hill's owner, George Perkins. This was a rich and prominent family with deep roots both in Riverdale and in the business and political worlds of New York. Mrs. Freeman's father had been a leader of the Progressive Party, a vice president of New York Life, and a prime mover and eventual president of the Palisades Park Commission. Although he died 13 years before she and her husband moved to Wave Hill, the property, for a while anyway, was a classic family compound - Perkins' widow at Glyndor at one end of the estate, Dorothy and her family in Wave Hill at the other. In less than a decade, however, the Freemans were gone and Toscanini was in.





The door to the right of the fireplace leads to the afore-mentioned Armor Hall, built by Perkins' life tenant, Bashford Dean (1867-1925). Dean's twin passions in life - and I hope he had a few juicier ones - were fish and armor. He was simultaneously the Museum of Natural History's Curator of Reptiles and Fishes, and the Metropolitan Museum's Curator of Arms and Armor. The core of the Met's armor collection used to sit in this room, albeit briefly. Dean died before his Armor Hall was completed, but his loyal widow had the room finished, the armor professionally displayed, then hired Samuel Gotscho to photograph it is situ, just as her late husband would have wished. Almost immediately after, she had the entire exhibition dismantled, the armor shipped to the Met, and herself moved to more manageable digs. This was in 1927, and may well have precipitated the Freemans' decision to move here and do the place over. The rafters in the polychrome ceiling are said to be salvage from construction of the Lexington Avenue subway.







Almost forgot one room. Let's cut back across the stair hall, pass the front door, and visit the small reception room, soon to be the second tea room. The fireplace is probably the oldest thing we've seen in the house so far.



Martha is leading the way upstairs. There isn't room for more than one baluster per tread, but I've never seen fat balusters like these alternating with iron rods. Are they later reinforcements or original details? I have no idea.





The space above the oval drawing room was originally a master bedroom suite, which would have contained a bedroom, bath, dressing area/closet, and a boudoir. Someone along the way blew the whole thing out, so there was nothing here to restore but a footprint. The two images below look east toward the driveway, the first during the recent renovation, the second after its completion. The boudoir was presumably at this end of things, focused on that fireplace in the distance.


Now we're looking west towards the river. Not a trace remains of the closet/dressing area that would have occupied the middle of the space. The master bath was probably behind the wall on the left in the first image below, in an area now occupied by a new elevator shaft. The bedroom itself was located at the western end of the modern room, overlooking the river.



Aside from some new paint, the guestrooms, guest hall and servants' quarters extending south from the second floor landing haven't changed since 1933.





The rooms on the third floor constitute an appealing counterpoint to the 'Thirties look on the bedroom floor below. In fact, Wave Hill's top floor is an 1870s period piece. The sole surviving vintage tub, noted last fall, is still here.








Time to head downstairs, with a short detour...

...to the new ultra-modern basement. The shot below was taken under the drawing room; the one below it is beneath the Armor Hall. These rooms are wonderfully functional and creatively designed, and of very little interest - OK, of no interest at all - to me.


It was cold and leafless when I visited Wave Hill last November. Last week, it being lush and summery, there was no escaping Martha's blandishments that I take a walk through the famous garden. I feel an utter fool to think that I hesitated for even a moment. My abbreviated tour - I had to catch a train back to Grand Central - took me through a dozen different worlds of intoxicating beauty. Central Park is magnificent, but Wave Hill is exquisite.







The pergola below sits at the heart of the garden. Glyndor (used for offices and art exhibits) is to the south of it; the river is due west; and old Wave Hill is tucked amidst lawns and specimen trees to the north.




Wave Hill is a 28-acre public park overlooking the Hudson in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The entrance is at West 249th St. and Independence Ave. In addition to two historic mansions and an extraordinary complex of gardens, Wave Hill offers a year 'round calendar of events, exhibitions, lectures, musical performances, excursions, etc., plus gift shop and soon to open cafe. It's a short, easy, and scenic trip on Metro North to Riverdale station, where a shuttle bus takes you on a five minute hop to the park. If you haven't been, you'd better go. The link is www.wavehill.org.

Here I am - actually I'm in the middle of the road holding my camera - in front of the gates to Blithewold, the former Bristol, R.I. estate of Mr. & Mrs. William McKee. The blaze of nearby Newport tends to obscure elegant little Bristol, where people have lived - and some still do live - rather grandly.

Blithewold, finished in 1908, was designed by a not-well-known firm - perhaps because it was a Boston shop and I'm from New York - called Kilham & Hopkins. Walter Kilham (1868-1948) is remembered today, if he's remembered at all, as a vocal advocate for decent workers' housing, seemingly a far cry from Blithewold. The firm did other upscale residential projects, scattered around the greater Boston area and, prior to Blithewold, Kilham renovated the McKee's Commonwealth Avenue townhouse, apparently much to their liking.


From the outside, showy Flemish gables aside, I wouldn't call Blithewold "inspired." However, it does have heft, which I admire in a house. Long, heavy and vaguely English, it also affords an abundance of windows with water views. Its more successful interiors reflect the golden age of plutocratic America's love affair with the Colonial Revival.


Blithewold is better known for its grounds and gardens than the house itself. Anne Raver in "The New York Times" wrote, "The trees stand like gods over the property." This is no exaggeration; they are quite amazing. You'll have to come back to see them, however, since my focus is on the building.

So, who were the people who lived in this very grand house? Or, put another way, where did the money come from? William L. McKee (1864-1946) married Bessie Pardee Van Wickle (1860-1936) in 1901. He wasn't her first husband, nor was his house the first Blithewold on the site. McKee was a parson's son with a good education and good social connections, who worked his way up to partner in an upscale Boston clothier called A.W. Tedcastle & Co. His wife was the widow of his late friend, Augustus Van Wickle, a Pennsylvania coal baron who met an untimely end at the age of 42 in a shooting accident in 1898. But for the Van Wickle millions, a place like Blithewold would hardly have been on Mr McKee's horizon.

McKee's wife, the former Bessie Pardee Van Wickle, was the 12th child of another Pennsylvania coal baron, a man named Ario Pardee (1810-1892). Pardee and Simon Van Wickle, the father of her first husband Augustus, didn't own all the coal around Hazelton, PA, but they owned a very great deal of it, and it made them very rich. Bessie and Augustus belonged to the second generation of two great Pennsylvania mine owning families. They still worked, were still earnest church-goers, but they also bought yachts, traveled in Europe and built showy houses in fashionable resorts.

Speaking of which, let's take a look inside Blithewold, starting with the frankly magnificent double-height Colonial Revival entrance hall.





The corridor below, which extends north from the entrance hall, passes the main stair and the billiard room en route to a drawing room at the north end of the house.


Kilham's Colonial Revival sure-handedness has deserted him in the drawing room, which looks like the lobby of a prewar coop on West End Avenue. This is not a bad thing, and I actually like it a lot, in spite of its stylistic incoherence. It undoubtedly looked better with more tables and lamps, pictures on the walls, orientals on the floors, silver framed photos on the tabletops, etc.



The adjacent porch overlooking Narragansett Bay is quite divine.


We'll retrace our steps to the entrance hall, detouring into the billiard room behind the wall on the right.


The Blithewold stone over the fireplace was a part of the original Blithewold, which burned - unspectacularly, but with alarming thoroughness - utterly to the ground in June of 1906.

Here's the original Blithewold, designed by the much more famous (than Kilham & Hopkins) architectural partnership of Francis L.V. Hoppin & Terence A. Koen. Completed in 1896, it was one of Francis Hoppin's (1867-1914) early big house commissions and, while charming, lacks the assertive elegance of his later work in Tuxedo, Newport, Palm Beach and the north shores of Boston and Long Island. The old Blithewold was much more of a summer house than its successor. One lovely summer morning in 1906, an electrical fire started in a wall on the third floor. Buckets failed to put it out, and the arriving fire department lacked sufficient water pressure. The firemen, joined by a crowd of local people and the employees of the Herreshoff boat-building company, then attacked the place with strong arms and crowbars, ripping out fireplace mantles, bathtubs, paneling, books, library shelves, the stair rail, the Blithewold stone, plus furniture, glassware, pots and pans, rugs, clothing, bedding, linens, and anything else they could grab. The crowd labored calmly and efficiently, piling everything at a safe distance on the lawn, until the roof crashed in. The next morning nothing remained of Blythewold but fine ash and towering chimneys.

Here's Bessie's first husband, Augustus Van Wickle (1856-1898), the father of her daughters Marjorie and Augustine, and the source of the millions required to keep a yacht, a house in Back Bay, an estate at Bristol, entertain guests at extended house parties, travel around the world, etc., etc., initially for him and his wife, but eventually for her second husband as well. Mr. Van Wickle looks like a decent sort of chap. "I do hope we shall not be disappointed in you," his mother wrote on his 19th birthday, "for we do expect great things of you after all these advantages given you." Not something I'd say to my own child, at least not in those words. Van Wickle did do his best and in the process made himself a very rich mine owner. In the summer of 1897, while he, his family and their guests enjoyed Blithewold, coal miners at the Van Wickle and Pardee mines, among others, went on strike. The coal business had been in a slump. Owners had cut pay, laid workers off and raised fees in company towns. Interesting to note, between 1870 and 1897, 32,000 coal miners died in America's notoriously unsafe mines. In Pennsylvania in late August of 1897, strikes erupted. Settlements were made, reneged on, more strikes ensued, and soon thousands had taken to the streets. The culmination came on September 10, 1897, when the sheriff of Schuylkill County, at the head of an armed posse, fired point blank into a mob waving an American flag. Nineteen miners were killed in the infamous Lattimer Massacre, all by bullets in the back. Chaos enveloped the region until the National Guard restored order. Lattimer was an historic turning point for the United Mine Workers, whose power subsequently surged. Ten months after Lattimer, while shooting skeet in Rhode Island, August Van Wickle leaned a loaded gun, stock down, against his leg - very odd, to which anyone who shoots will attest - leaned over, and accidentally shot himself to death.

Of course, the present Blithewold wasn't built in 1897. My patient guide, Ted Sykulski, leads the way from the entrance hall to the terrace. Peculiar masks on Walter Kilham's otherwise sober facade strike an unexpected note.








The entrance hall is beyond a small anteroom between it and the terrace. A powder room is beside the front door, and the dining room is to the right.



Blithewold - I'm talking just about the house - is a good example of something that's larger than the sum of its parts. "Large," parenthetically, is putting it mildly; there are 26,000 square feet of living space under this roof. However, I'm not speaking about size, but about the experience of living here. Blithewold is a wonderful, spacious, comfortable, luxurious, and beautiful old house, even if the drawing room is oddly detailed and the dining room is "millionaire generic." Beyond french doors at the west end of the dining room is my favorite room in the house.


When I was first married (agh! almost 40 years ago) we lived in a house at Tuxedo with a treillaged room like this. It was also located adjacent to the main dining room, and we called it the summer dining room. How perfect is that faded green paint? May lightning strike anyone who even considers "freshening" it up.



The serving pantry is between the dining room (behind the door in the image below) and the summer dining room (or summer breakfast room, as they call it here). To the right of the dining room swing door is a flower room.



The family converted the serving pantry into a kitchen, probably during the Depression, and stopped using the old one.


The original main kitchen is now a catering depot. Blithewold does lots of weddings these days. The old stove survives, a testament to the inconveniences of the picturesque past.


Beyond the old kitchen, in the southern wing of the house, is a back stair, servants' hall, assorted pantries and a terrific old walk-in. My regular readers will recognize the Jewett Refrigerator Company as the manufacturer of Mildred Cravens' fur vault ('Big Old Houses; Pasadena Paradigm,' May 2013).





The back stair may be right outside the walk-in, but I'm taking Blithewold's magnificent main stair to the second, or family bedroom floor.




Mr. & Mrs. McKee slept in a huge master bedroom that sits on top of - and is the same size as - the drawing room on the floor below. I don't doubt Mr. Van Wickle left his widow in excellent financial condition, but when the Great Depression arrived, it did so on the heels of three decades of her acting as her second husband's banker, without benefit of her first husband's continued earnings. By 1932, the McKees were broke. Bessie transferred ownership of Blithewold to her daughters who, together with their husbands, not only liquidated their stepfather's failing clothing store, but sold his Boston house and put him and their mother, both of whom now lived full time at Blithewold, on a strict financial diet. The preeminent corrosive element in families, most of us would agree, is money, from which often ensues humiliation, harsh words, heavy judgements, quiet (sometimes not so quiet) misery and in the present case some pretty painful emasculation. Mrs. McKee died in 1936, hardly a pauper, living as she did in a mansion with servants, but no longer her own steward nor her extended family's anchor. Over the next decade, Will McKee, reduced to the status of elderly family ward, declined steadily before dying at Blithewold in 1946 at the age of 83.


Behind Ted in the image below, french doors lead to a sleeping porch, filled now with a rather random assortment of McKee/Van Wickle memorabilia.


After Will McKee's death in 1946, his stepdaughter Marjorie Van Wickle Lyon bought out her sister's share and, together with her husband George (1876-1954), took Blithewold over for themselves. The Lyons spent half of each year in Rhode Island, and the other half in Boston. They never took over the master bedroom, however, preferring a suite at the opposite (south) end of the hall. Visiting cousins shared the big master and its grand vintage bath.


The north corridor in the image below leads from the master bedroom to the main second floor landing. Marjorie's sister Augustine's bedroom and bath is behind the door on the right. Not many more years would pass before Marjorie and Augustine had a falling out of their own - one of those "I'll never speak to you again!" types of falling out. My former in-laws had a penchant for hurling that particular pronouncement at one another, something I could never understand.





Three additional family bedrooms lie to the south of the second floor landing. The most southerly, with its singularly unfeminine paneling, belonged to George and Marjorie Lyons.





The photo below was taken in the garden at Blithewold on Marjorie and George Lyons' wedding day in 1914. Figurative light years separate that idyllic moment from Will McKee's death on the same property in 1946. The second image captures another moment in happier days. Mr. Lyons is bowling at a Blithewold house party in 1925. His mother-in-law stands to the right, screening her eyes from the dazzle of afternoon light on Narragansett Bay.


Guests stayed on the third floor, in rooms radiating off a corridor extending both ways from a landing at the top of these stairs. Five bedrooms, one bath and a smoking room seem to me to constitute a very masculine retreat, at least in the context of 1908. When Blithewold opened that summer, the Van Wickle daughters were 25 and 10 respectively. Presumably their girlfriends and female cousins stayed with them on 2, while the top floor was packed with boys.






The former smoking room is now an archive, in which an astonishing volume of written and photographic family documentation resides in carefully labeled boxes.


More bedrooms, plus the boys' bath.





Servants' bedrooms occupy the two upper floors of the service wing on the south. To get there, we'll return to the second floor landing on the family side, then take the southbound corridor to a door at its southern end.



Down a couple of stairs on the other side of the door in the image above, is this curious outrigger guestroom, sandwiched between family and service areas, letting onto its own corridor, and complete with its own non-en-suite bath.


On the other side of the short guest hall described above are 3 upper servants' rooms, almost (but not quite) guestroom sized, plus a hall bath.




Much smaller servants' cubicles, five in all, are on the floor above. Blithewold's Communications Director Tree Callanan is opening one of the louvered doors that provides privacy and ventilation to each. The shared bath is a measure of 3rd floor seniority. Between house and grounds some 20 people worked at Blithewold during its salad days. They all obviously didn't live in the house.




I couldn't leave an old house like Blithewold without a look in the basement, where I found the sort of treasure that makes it all worthwhile - an original, unrenovated, vintage laundry room.



Note the electrically powered washing machine....

A separate contraption for the spin cycle...

And a mangle to squeeze things out before hanging them up to dry. What could be finer? Several readers have corrected me, saying the mangle pressed rather than dried. Looking at the thing, I suppose anything is possible.

After George Lyons died in 1954, his widow Marjorie spent 22 more years at Blithewold - or rather six months of each of those years. She cultivated her increasingly famous garden, lived the role of family matriarch, traveled, remained vigorous, and kept the old house running much as it had in her parents' day. In 1956, the Trustees of Reservations of Massachusetts, aware of Blithewold's uncertain future in a world of crumbling country estates, urged Mrs. Lyons to consider giving it to Heritage Foundation of Rhode Island. Upon her death in 1976, she did exactly that, guaranteeing preservation and public access with a $1.2 million endowment. By the late 1990s that endowment was, unfortunately, spent and the property almost closed. Shocked local residents formed Save Blithewold, Inc., raised $650,000 in 3 weeks and effected a heart-warming last minute rescue. On my recent visit both house and grounds - the latter worthy of a separate post for which I had no time - were in magnificent condition. You can help keep them that way; the link is www.blithewold.org.

In December of 1906, Barr Ferree of "American Homes and Gardens" described Mrs. Elliott Fitch Shepard's country place at Scarborough, NY, as follows: "Immensity is one of the chief characteristics of this great house. Yet it is a beautiful immensity...It is not grandiose nor showy, it is simply grandly large, and large everywhere." I'll second that.



Mrs. Shepard, nee Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt (1845-1924), was a young woman when she was painted below by Sargent. She had been a widow for 13 years when Ferree visited her country place, called Woodlea. Not everyone can live up to a house like this, but the eldest daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt, son and heir of the Commodore, looks equal to the task. For seventeen years, until she dumped it in 1910, Woodlea was the kind of showplace that defined "Vanderbilt Style."

Mrs. Shepard's neighborhood, being the fifteen-or-so miles of Hudson shoreline between Yonkers and Ossining, was, according to an 1897 issue of "Peterson's Magazine," the "richest colony in the world." This title has been applied to many other districts, but the Shepard place was undeniably surrounded by some pretty ritzy digs. Mrs. Shepard's real estate magnificence was not limited to Woodlea. In 1900, she paid for two colossal Manhattan townhouses - 11 East 62nd Street, now owned by the Japanese government; and 5 East 66th St., home since 1947 of the Lotos Club - for two of her married daughters, Mrs. Ernesto Fabbri and Mrs. William Jay Schieffelin respectively. Maggie Shepard was born in an era, and in circumstances, where women were purposely kept in financial ignorance. Luckily, half of her inheritance was locked up in an inviolable trust, absent which she might well have spent every cent of it. When she died in 1924, she was living in an apartment - admittedly a grand one at 998 Fifth Avenue, but an apartment still and all.



To be fair, when it came to a financial role model she had a bad example in the person of her husband, Col. Elliott Fitch Shepard (1833-1893). No one in the family particularly liked or trusted him, partly because of his fanatical Presbyterianism, but more due to his social gaucheries and clumsy business schemes. Shepard started well enough, as a superior organizer of arms and recruits during the Civil War. Afterwards, however, and specifically after marrying uber-rich Maggie Vanderbilt, he wandered the proverbial desert. Shepard failed as a lawyer, failed as a banker, and became notorious as the publisher of "The Mail and Express," a sort of vintage combination of the "New York Post" and "The National Enquirer." He beat his son, told his daughter Alice her back deformity was a visitation of God's displeasure, copied member delinquency lists off the bulletin board of his club and published them in his paper (for which the Union League suspended him) and hauled to fancy dinners all manner of opportunistic political hacks and thugs who were happy to flatter his ego in return for a free meal. He is most famously remembered, if he's remembered at all, as the rich carriage-owning publisher who took control of the Fifth Avenue Stage Company in order to suspend Sunday stage service, lest the lower classes imperil their souls by breaking the Sabbath.


The Woodlea estate predated the Shepards, but in a quite different form. They bought it from a forgotten Victorian named Butler Wright, whose be-porched and be-towered house on the property had no pretensions to grandeur whatsoever. The new Woodlea was Col. Shepard's idea, a bastion of symbolic power appropriate to a man with big political aspirations - and plenty of Vanderbilt money. It was designed by McKim, Mead and White, and almost - but not quite - finished when the colonel died at the age of 59 in 1893. Unusual in the firm's opus, the house was designed by Rutherford Mead, a partner more responsible for business networking than design work, but who was also married to Shepard's sister.

Could we describe Woodlea as an example of the "English Renaissance Revival?" Well, why not? It's got lots of English looking dignity and plenty of classical architectural elements. Myself, I'd call it a prime example of the American Renaissance, that long ago national movement described - very amusingly, I think by Le Corbusier -as "more believable than the original."

Worth reminding ourselves is the fact that Elliott Shepard never lived here. Woodlea's day in the sun was produced and directed entirely by his widow. I wonder to what extent she viewed the house as a monument to her late husband's failed ambitions. She certainly kept it running grandly, although she may not have known any other way to run it. By 1910, she was 65, her children were married, and she was ready to part with the place for the fire sale sum of $165,000. It mattered not that it had cost $2 million to build. Neighbors Frank Vanderlip and William Rockefeller, already resident in grand estates in the immediate vicinity, couldn't pass the bargain up. They bought the estate, rounded up a group of congenial millionaires, and on May 11, 1911 founded the Sleepy Hollow Country Club, which owns the property today.

Sleepy Hollow, despite the ups and downs of a century-plus of existence, remains a pretty swanky club. It has been an excellent steward of its beautiful and historic clubhouse - with one exception. When Woodlea was built, and for almost 70 years thereafter, an Italian garden occupied a sunken portion of the terrace below the river facade. The fence in the image below marks the line of a former balustrade, below which lay the garden. In 1960, the club built a really ugly new golf wing on the site of the garden. For the last half century, the view of the garden from the house has consequently been replaced by a view of a large tar and gravel roof, interspersed with noisy ventilation equipment.



As the millenium approached, a growing appreciation of (and concern for) the grand interiors of the clubhouse spilled over into a concern for the appearance of the golf wing. Its elevations were redesigned and significantly improved, but nothing was done about the roof. The obvious solution, which George Perkins did with his casino at Wave Hill and modern architects have done on roofs from London to Lincoln Center, is to recreate the garden - or an approximate facsimile thereof - on top of the ugly roof. Of course, as my late father used to say, all it takes is money. If such a plan were seriously suggested, however, I'll bet the membership would embrace it with enthusiasm.





I continued walking around the house to the front door, the words of Barr Ferree ringing in my ears.




The plan below shows Woodlea's first floor as built (more or less) in 1893. #1 is the entry porch; #2 an anteroom, beyond which is #6, the main hall. #5 is the library; #7 the drawing room; #9 the obligatory white and gold room, used for big entertainments and/or just show; #14 is the dining room; #'s 16 and 17 are the serving pantry and kitchen respectively. The first floor of the service wing has today been gutted out and, including the servants hall (#18) and the row of pantries, is now a modern institutional kitchen. #15 is the breakfast room; #12 is referred to in some places as a morning room, however, I'm pretty sure it was originally a billiard room, perhaps never used due to the colonel's untimely end. #10 is an outdoor terrace with no view; and #13 is an outdoor terrace with a big view.

Inside the front door, beyond a marble anteroom, is the main hall. "The rooms everywhere are large," said you-know-who, "many of them are immense." At first I assumed it was the Shepard crest chiseled in marble above the fireplace. If I am to believe the not-always-reliable internet, however, the Shepard arms bore either a trio of dogs or of battle axes. I don't know where the cats came from; maybe the colonel cooked them up.




The library hasn't changed since the Shepards' day. "Legem Servare Hoc Est Regnare," carved in oak over the fireplace means "Platitudes R Us" in Latin. Only kidding, only kidding; actually, if my high school Latin is to be trusted, it means something like "To trust in Law is the Way to Rule." My more educated readers will no doubt correct me shortly.




Let's leave the library...

...and have a look at the ladies' dressing room, located behind that door under the stair. My late mother maintained that you could always tell a high class place by the ladies' room.


I couldn't resist including the view up the stairs from the ladies' room door. To the right of the front door is a small cloak room (I can't think of another use for it), and beyond that is the door from the hall to the drawing room.




Meal service, originally limited to the dining room, has spread into all three main rooms that form a 150-foot enfilade down Woodlea's main axis. The drawing room pictured below couldn't be in a more magnificent state of preservation, the result of careful, sensitive, consistent and expensive restoration work.





The first image below looks north from the drawing room to the gold room. No self-respecting millionaire in the 1890s - at least none with any social pretensions - would build a house without a white and gold room. Sometimes labeled a music room, this particular specimen is grand and in superb condition. In the vintage image it has a rather softer look, partly due to the portieres.







In the context of upscale 1890s domestic architecture, the dining room, seen below looking both south and north, strikes a Colonial Revival note. Dorothy Draper painted the woodwork white during a 1960s do-over.


The serving pantry that Barr Ferree described in 1906 as "almost as large as many New York apartments" is gone, together with the old kitchen, servants' hall, and pretty much everything else on the first floor of the service wing. Occupying the same space today is a modern institutional kitchen.

There are four stairways at Woodlea. The one in the image below is the northernmost of three located in the formal section of the house. The service wing was connected to the family wing through the sliver of door visible at the left in the image below. The door next to it leads to a breakfast room. At the foot of this corridor is an exit to the drive, adjacent to which is a men's toilet and a side entrance to the billiard room.



Let's retrace our steps back down the corridor (the entrance to the breakfast room is behind the sconce on the right), admire the newel at the foot of the stair, turn left, gaze down the hallway towards the entrance hall, then turn left again into the billiard room.



It looks pretty masculine (not to mention oddly placed) for a morning room, as it is sometimes identified. Today it's the club's taproom.


Time to hike south and head upstairs.





Here's Woodlea's essentially unchanged second floor plan, the rooms in which were used as follows. I believe the architect designed two connecting master bedroom suites. #4 would have been Mrs. Shepard's bedroom; #6 her boudoir; the room between 4 and 6 was (and still is) a bathroom. Her dressing room with duplexed closet was located between 4 and 3. Col. Shepard's bedroom was #3, and his dressing room #2 with bathroom attached. Bedroom #'s 1, 7 and 8 were likely family bedrooms with en suite baths. #9 apparently used an elaborate hall bath with commode in a separate room. I wonder if #9 was for Shepard's son? The hall bath is located on the other side of the stair from it. The ultimate uses of these rooms, and especially the colonel's suite, probably varied. By some reports, Mrs. Shepard slept on the 3rd floor, which is possible I suppose, but quite unusual if true.

Here's the second floor landing, looking glamorous like everything else in the place. My host, Sleepy Hollow GM, Bill Nitschke, is unlocking bedroom #1.




Here's bedroom #7.

Here's bedroom #9, the historically important but rather unloved "Turkish Room." TR's were a fashionable virus that afflicted many houses in those days. An en suite bath has been added to #9 without, however, increasingly its popularity.


Mrs. Shepard's room has been subdivided into club offices, it would appear without irreversible damage to the original architectural fabric.


The door in her dressing room still leads to a duplexed closet.


Woodlea's second floor bathrooms are a homey bunch - big, bright and barely renovated, just the way I like 'em.



The door on the left in the image of the hall below leads to #9's original non-=en-suite bath. The cubicle that housed an individual throne is now shared by stalls. Except for a missing tub, the rest of this little suite is largely intact.





Also largely intact are the second floor servants' rooms, now called the staff dormitory, and the servants' (now staff) lounge, the latter complete with endlessly blaring television. I hate dropped ceilings, but considering how well the rest of the house has been treated, I'll stop complaining about them now. In the late 1950s, there was a movement to gut the entire house and replace its old fashioned interiors with something more "a la Mad Men." The golf wing was the child of this mindset, a madness which fortunately fizzled before more damage was done.



The little sliver of door on the left side of the image below leads to the Turkish Room. We're taking the stairs to 3 to tour more bedrooms.







What a view, but ooh! that tar roof! Seen another way, what an opportunity to recreate something beautiful.

Woodlea's attic is an elephant's graveyard of nifty old stuff, some of which has been here since the Shepard days.


Time to get out of that attic heat, take the middle stair (which we haven't been on) to 2, and the main flight down to the entrance hall.



The Sleepy Hollow Country Club, together with its 338 acres of woods and rolling fairways, constitutes the premier ornament of the Scarborough National Historic District. This designation unfortunately provides no protection to open land or structures, but it hopefully helps raise public awareness of the value of both. Woodlea is a beautiful and historic place and the club deserves kudos for keeping it that way.


Vintage images courtesy Sleepy Hollow Country Club

One afternoon in the year 1923, a couple of rich brothers got into a fistfight. The depressing, unnecessary and all too predictable cause? Money. Robert Sterling Clark (1877-1956), the elder, wanted his French actress wife made beneficiary of his share of the family fortune. This amounted to some $20-odd million dollars derived from the Singer Sewing Machine Company and extensive family holdings in Manhattan real estate. Sterling, as he was called, was a high living thrill seeker who bred thoroughbreds, showered actresses with champagne and diamonds, fought the Boxers in China and collected Old Masters in Paris. His younger brother Stephen Carlton Clark (1882-1960), seen in the portrait above, was just the opposite. Restrained to the point of dour, dutiful to the point of resentful - "It is I who am doing all the work," he once wrote to his brother - Stephen became the guardian of the enormous Clark estate. "(F)rom a purely selfish point of view, I would cut loose," he wrote, adding,"I haven't of course any idea of doing this." After losing in court, Sterling said of Stephen: "May God curse him on earth as well as in heaven," and they never spoke again.

In 1909, fourteen years before this squalid family drama, Stephen Clark married Susan Vanderpoel Hun. At the time, he was living at 89th and Riverside in his mother's marble palace, a genus of private house that - if I do not fracture my metaphors unduly - flashed comet-like across Riverside Drive before being crushed under the feet of towering apartment blocks. Soon after his marriage, Clark hired architect Frederick Sterner (1862-1931) to design a more fashionable house on a much more fashionable block in the East 70s. Number 46 East 70th St. occupies a fifty-foot wide lot, basks in the luxury of side wall windows, and towers in neo-Jacobean splendor above the competition on this very competitive block.

Why Frederick Sterner? Clark family descendants explain the choice as an example of Stephen Clark's penchant for choosing "younger people who showed promise." In point of fact, Sterner was 48 years old in 1910, young perhaps by my standards, but not by those of many others. Prior to moving to New York in 1909 he had practiced architecture in Denver for almost thirty years, cranking out ponderous Romanesque and medieval style buildings. His New York reputation would come to rest on clever Mediterranean-stye facelifts of gloomy brownstone row houses. A number of these still stand in the East 60s, mostly around Lexington Avenue. At the time of the Clark job Sterner hadn't done any of them, however, and I'm not sure why or how Clark even heard of him. A footnote to Frederick Sterner; the darling of Park Avenue architects, Rosario Candela, was Sterner's protege.

When his father Alfred Corning Clark died in 1896, Stephen Clark was only 14. By his early 20s, responsibility for the enormous Clark estate had already fallen largely on his shoulders. The fortune was founded by his grandfather, Edward Clark (1811-1882), a founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, a canny investor in Upper West Side real estate, and builder of the famous Dakota. Judging from his expression in later life photos, Stephen Clark did not overly enjoy life. In addition to protecting all that land and money he also published upstate newspapers, sat on the boards of Manhattan banks, was a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, from 1939 to 1946, chairman of the Board of Trustees of MoMA. Clark was an important collector of art, in which capacity one hopes he found at least some pleasure.

Clark was an old school clubman, with memberships in the Racquet and Tennis, Yale, University, Knickerbocker, etc., etc., There's a certain symmetry to the fact that after his death his own house become a club. In 1964, after a high flying Wall Street type named Edward Gilbert defaulted on a purchase contract, Mrs. Clark sold 46 East 70th Street to the Explorers Club, founded in 1904 to promote exploration of the Earth, its oceans and, more recently, outer space.

Here's how the entrance hall at #46 looked in the Clarks' day. I'm no stickler for architectural purity, but Sterner's contrast of architectural influences - shallow Gothic arches and entry hall screen in the context of the Jacobean facade - is a little jarring. This is a very masculine house, which suits the Explorers just fine but may have stimulated Mrs. Clark to sell out the moment her husband died. She decamped to their Cooperstown estate, where she herself died in 1967. The entry hall today is the club's reception area.




I would have expected a house this size to have a reception room off the front hall. That's not the case here. Instead, Sterner has put the dining room practically next to the front door. It seems to have been used for both family and for formal meals, and to have doubled as a sort of informal seating area. (Very odd). The dining room connects to an extensive - and fabulously intact - vintage kitchen suite, which we'll visit in a moment. Nowadays this room is the club lounge and the former serving pantry a barroom. I wouldn't have thought elephant tusks and linenfold paneling would be a natural combination, but they work here.




Let's leave the dining room for a moment, cross the entry hall and have a look at the stair hall - in particular, the big globe at its center. According to club lore, member Thor Heyerdahl used this globe to convince fellow members that the South Pacific was populated by prehistoric South Americans who sailed there. His famous 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition proved the theory.





In case you're wondering, yes, there's an elevator.


Let's go back to the dining room and look toward the barroom. The ladies in the second image below are seated practically where the original dining table sat. The vintage image was taken from close to the same point. In it, a black lacquer screen obscures the entrance to the serving pantry, now the barroom.



Conversion from pantry to barroom has been achieved by tacking assorted curios and a bit of paneling on the walls. Actually, more of the old pantry survives than is immediately apparent. The sink and the metal cabinets above it are clearly original to the house. In fact, the great majority of original fabric and finish in this house is still here.



The route to the kitchen - across a corridor, through a leather swing door (held by my hospitable host, Executive Director Will Roseman), and finally through a second service hall - is virtually unchanged.


How great is this old tile walled kitchen which, despite updated appliances and fluorescent lighting, remains a fantastic antique. I'm continually baffled by people who don't want you to see the inner guts of a big old house. Those innards are often among the most interesting parts. Fortunately Will and I were on the same proverbial page.


The dumbwaiter only goes to the 2nd floor library; the industrial looking back stair goes all the way to 4.


We're going to pretend we're servants, leave the kitchen via corridors that circle around the back of the main stair hall, then peek quickly into the ladies' room before taking the main stair to 2.








The second floor landing is bracketed by a drawing room on the north, glimpsed in the first image below, and a library on the south. Our next stop is the library.




Here's the library at Christmastime, 1960. Note the art on the walls. The I'll-never-speak-to-you-again Clark brothers were both important collectors. Stephen left his pictures to the Metropolitan Museum and to Yale University. Sterling and Francine Clark's collection is now housed in a famous museum that bears their name and is located adjacent to grandfather Clark's alma mater, Williams College. I notice a lot of the original paneling seems to have gone missing.



On the other side of the glass library doors is a luxurious terrace. Another benefit of owning a very wide lot is not having to build right up to the lot line. In the view below we're looking north toward 70th Street. The library is behind the awnings on the left; the drawing room behind that huge leaded bow window directly in front of us. Above the drawing room is what I believe is one of a pair of master bedroom suites, the second (all you can see is its terrace parapet) is on the next floor up. I'm pretty sure this was a his-and-hers bedroom kind of a house, the suites themselves separated not just by connecting doors but by an entire floor.


Let's return to the library, admire the ceiling (reportedly a European import whose dimensions dictated the dimensions of the room), take a closer look at all that red oak woodwork and wonder what became of the original.



The polar bear hails from the Chuckchi Sea, located between Siberia and Alaska. (You'd know that if you were a member of the Explorers Club). Switching the light on above it triggers a kitchy recording of one of its relatives roaring.

The north end of the second floor contains a noble drawing room. The club has been an excellent steward of the Clark house, however, just as old brass sometimes shouldn't be polished, ornate plaster ceilings really shouldn't be painted.










Floor numbers above 2 in this house get a little Harry Potter-ish. Just as Hogwart's Express left from Platform 9-3/4, so 46 East 70th has floors 3, 3-1/2, 4, 4-1/2, 5 and 5-1/2. Really there are only 5 floors; the half-floor designations reflect an upper floor adjustment to the high drawing room ceiling on 2.

I think the master bedroom suite on 3-1/2, consisting of private corridor, bedroom, large bath and boudoir, belonged to Mrs. Clark. There's an almost identical suite on the floor above it, reportedly occupied by Mr Clark. OK, I'm guessing at occupancy, but having climbed around a very great many old houses, I think I'm right. Will's office is in Mrs. Clark's bedroom; staff workers use the boudoir.







The Clarks had four children, two of whom survived their parents. They probably occupied rooms with en suite baths that open onto the corridor below, which runs south down the back of the house on floor 3. There's so much "stuff" in the Explorers Club that a lot of it winds up locked away in old bathrooms. The ones I saw, happily, were in practically untouched condition.







The corridor on 4, directly above the children's rooms, is simpler and the rooms that open onto it share a hall bath. I suppose it's possible the children were up here and guests were downstairs, although I doubt it. The club combined two of the 4th floor bedrooms, all of which are far nicer than your normal maid's cubicles, into an archive. Only two more remain. Herein lies a mystery. The 1920 census counted Mr. & Mrs. Clark, 3 children and 10 servants living at 46 East 70th Street. Unless those servants took turns, I cannot guess where they slept.




What looks to me like a second master bedroom suite - private corridor, bath, den or study, and bedroom - is located on floor 4-1/2. A meeting was unfortunately in progress, so I couldn't see the bedroom (presumably Mr. Clark's) with the little terrace overlooking the big terrace on 2.



Floor 5-1/2 was the art gallery. Clark's collection included works by Hals, Renoir, Eakins, Seurat, Rembrandt, El Greco, Matisse, Bellows, Degas, etc., etc. MoMA's first donated work, Hopper's "House by the Railroad," was the gift of Stephen Clark. The gallery is now the club's trophy room; the portraid above the fireplace is of club member and arctic explorer Peter Freuchen.



On 5, half a floor (well, not quite) below 5-1/2, is the club's map room. A full bath is just outside the door. Maybe it was a guestroom, although I suppose you could also pack those 6 unaccounted for servants in here.



Another big old house, and another long trip down a lot of stairs.


Which brings me to my late father, Harrison Forman (1904-1978), who in 1932 sought the headwaters of the Yellow River and the high peaks of the Amnyi Machen range (reputed to be higher than Everest), and in 1933 organized and led the first motor expedition across the old Marco Polo trail from Hunan to Turkestan. In 1934, club member George Duncan Grant described him to the admissions committee as "A good two-fisted fellow, gentleman, and active explorer." The Chief of Clann Shearghuis wrote, "His record on the application speaks for itself... A gentleman as strong physically as he is mentally - every inch a man." The image below captures him at the age of 28, clearly enjoying himself in middle of nowhere, a.k.a. Tibet. Had I taken this photo, he would have lectured me sternly on not centering my subject and cutting off his feet. Harrison was both a life member and a flag carrying member of the Explorers Club. He wore a silver club bracelet with the number 70 on the back until the day he died.

Since my first posting of "The Irish Channel" in August of 2012, the owners of "Inisfada" have sold it to a developer. Absent some increasingly unlikely reprieve, it will soon be demolished. For 75 tax free years, the Jesuits have used this house first as a seminary and later a retreat house. During these same years they sold off the great majority of Inisfada's original acreage to developers. Do they love the house? Yes. Have they made any attempt to safeguard its future? No. Do they feel any responsibility to the community that has hosted them for 75 years? Not one that I can see. I'm posting "The Irish Channel" again so that those of us who care about beauty and history and the buildings that define our world can look again at what's about to be lost.

While not exactly an insult, the "Irish Channel" wasn't precisely a compliment either. During the politically incorrect 1920s, it was a smug WASP joke referring to an imprecisely bounded section of Long Island's North Shore favored by rich Irishmen. Most Americans today have forgot that back in 1960 the election of Irish-Catholic John Kennedy occasioned no less national amazement than the recent election of African-American Barack Obama.


The Irish business barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to fall into three groups vis a vis Catholicism and American "society." According to the old saw, heaven was a palace with many doors, but a gentleman used the one marked "Episcopalian." Ergo, the first group either abandoned Catholicism altogether and/or raised their children in whatever fashionable Protestant church was handiest. The second group may or may not have been good Catholics, but didn't care about society so it didn't matter what they did. The third group embraced Catholicism with a special intensity, sometimes showering Catholic charities with sufficient millions to attract the attention of the pope himself. Utilities and tobacco mogul Nicholas F. Brady (1878-1930), builder of the Tudor Revival palace in the vintage aerial below, falls into category three. He called his Manhasset estate Inisfada - pronounced "in-ish-FAH-dah" - which means Long Island in Gaelic.



Brady's widow gave Inisfada to the Jesuits in 1937, and it survives today - albeit not for much longer - as a retreat house. The original estate covered 300-or-so acres on Searingtown Road between Northern Blvd and the Long Island Espressway. The aerial view above, taken some time in the 1920s, looks south over rural Manhasset. Searingtown Road runs diagonally from mid-left to upper right. Inisfada's main drive is the tree lined allee that starts at Searingtown on the left and disappears out of sight on the right. The drive, which originally afforded fine views of the house, is now buried within a condo complex called Estates I. The entrance to today's St. Ignatious Retreat House, as the Inisfada mansion is called, has been moved slightly north on Searingtown Road and is marked by the relocated stone standards that flank my sister's car. The original 300-acre estate is now reduced to a 33-acre island surrounded by a sea of condos, superhighways and subdivision houses.



In 1916 when the Bradys started buying land in fashionable Manhasset, they were in their 30s, married ten years, childless but presumably hoping. Their architect was a man I've never heard of, John T. Windrim (1866-1934) of Philadelphia, PA. Windrim's practice focused on banks, office buildings, telephone exchanges, police stations, hospitals, and the like. He was the designer of the famous Franklin Institute on Logan Square in Philadelphia. Of course, Inisfada is the size of many a not-so-small institutional building - its in-house telephone system had 89 extensions - so maybe the architect was less of an odd choice than one might think.



Inisfada is gorgeously detailed with stone and wood carving, and was pervasively religious even before the Jesuits arrived. The medallion above the porte cochere, for instance, depicts Mrs. Brady's namesake, St. Genevieve. For those who may have forgot, she is the patron saint of Paris, credited with saving that city from the depredations of Atilla the Hun, purely through the power of prayer.









Here's Nicholas Brady in a photo taken, judging from his collar, around the time Inisfada was either under construction or recently finished. Brady's father, Anthony, was a classic American success story - a penniless Irish immigrant who rose to economic prominence by his own smarts. The elder Brady was, among many other things, president of the New York Edison Company. He was also one of those Irishmen who cast aside Catholicism and raised his children in the Anglo-Saxon faith of Ireland's historic oppressors. His eldest son Nicholas, interestingly, converted to Catholicism in 1905, the year before his marriage to another child of the Catholic elite, the devout Genevieve Garvan. It's tempting suspect a man with so much privilege - and such a big house! - as being irredeemably self-satisfied. However, this same man once said, "What are rich people but the trustees of God for the deserving poor and honest labor... The working man's right and dignity should come before high dividends." I hope he meant it.



Brady died unexpectedly in New York in March of 1930 at the age of 52. Of the financial empire over which he and his brother, James Cox Brady, presided, the press observed, "A New Yorker cannot light his gas or turn on his electric bulb without adding to their riches." Those riches were augmented by major holdings in mining, banking, fuel, iron, sugar and rubber. Plus which, according to the press of the day, you could, "hardly puff a cigarette or enjoy your favorite pipe without paying tribute to the Bradys." More about that in a moment. In 1926, in the wake of a million dollar gift to the Vatican, Pope Pius XI made Brady and his wife a papal duke and duchess. After his death, Brady's widow, seen below receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Georgetown University, continued their Catholic philanthropies with, if possible, even more of an open hand.



This man is Francis Garvan, Nicholas Brady's college roommate and Genevieve Brady's brother. Garvan was another Catholic swell from the Irish Channel who happened to be married to Brady's sister, Mabel. In late 1923 he represented his wife and another Brady sister in a nasty lawsuit alleging that Nicholas and James Brady had misappropriated funds - specifically relating to tobacco stock - from a Brady family trust. The Brady boys had, in truth, been using the trust as a sort of personal private bank. The case made juicy headlines in late 1923 and early 1924. A lead in the Times on January 10, 1924, reads, "Witness and Lawyer Appeal to Court to Stop Each from Insulting the Other." The case, settled out of court, once again leaves unresolved the age old question of how much money is enough.



To circumnavigate Inisfada on foot is to realize how immense it is. Oheka, the late Otto Kahn's estate in Cold Spring is generally held to be the largest house on Long Island, but I don't see how it could really be bigger than this. Inisfada's porte cochere is obscured by the big tree.



The terrace adjoins an enormous solarium located at the western end of the house. An elaborate master bedroom suite on the 2nd floor was one of the very few parts of Inisfada's remarkably preserved interior to be destroyed during conversion to institutional use.



The view from the terrace originally looked down an axis of formal gardens, now mostly lawn. The vintage view in the second image below looks the other direction towards the house. The formal pool with its lovely statue was apparently a later addition.









My guide, St. Ignatius Administrator Tom Evrard, is standing in front of the south facade. There were originally sweeping views from here down to the drive, and beyond that to distant open fields and woody hills. The solarium is out of sight on the left. The big windows in the middle right are located in a great hall whose organ pipes are housed at the top of the stone tower.



The weeping beech in the middle of today's view is pretty spectacular, but the distant prospect is gone and condos are now tucked behind the trees.



Every big old house makes me wonder what it would be like to live there, regardless of size. I may have met my match with Inisfada.



Enough dreaming. Let's cut across the kitchen court, circle the end of the east wing and head for the front door.









Inside the front door is a stone entry hall which adjoins a (gulp) 163-foot long hallway. This hallway traverses the spine of the main body of the house. The solarium is at the western end; the dining room is at the east. Typical coat rooms flank either side of the entrance hall. We'll take a peek at one before moving along.













Now we're in the middle of the hallway looking west towards the solarium. The front door is to our right; the second image is a detail of the carving above the first arch in the distance.





The heart of Inisfada is the great hall, seen below in its salad days. The widow Brady's grandest hour arguably came in the fall of 1936 when Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, visited the United States and stayed at Inisfada...for a month. According to the Times, the visiting cardinal "appeared greatly impressed by the magnitude of the structure." Mrs. Brady, who had been received by the pope in 1935, was by this time considered the preeminent Catholic woman in America. Before the cardinal left, she gave a dinner in his honor for 700 guests. It was Inisfada's last great party. In March of 1939, Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, whose controversial papacy was questioned for its silence on the persecution of the Jews.





Here are Mrs. Brady and the cardinal in the great hall at Inisfada during his 1936 visit. Today the hall is a chapel, intact architecturally but looking quite different with pews.













The door in the image below connects the west end of the great hall to an elegant adjoining salon. Inisfada is filled with so much bravura craftsmanship that it's easy not to notice that a lot of it is missing. The simple surround and painted brick on the fireplace in the second image below would never have passed muster in the Brady days. That's because the original marble mantelpiece was sold at auction. Not long after Cardinal Pacelli's visit, Mrs. Brady moved to Rome and donated her mansion on 122 of its original 300 acres to the Jesuits. In February of 1937, 11,500 curious gawkers filed through Inisfada, at 50 cents a head, to see how the one percent of the one percent lived. That May, a famous 6-day auction of Inisfada's contents raised almost $450,000 for charity. The highest price paid for any single item was $900, on May 13th, for a Georgian claw-and-ball-foot concertina table. A man named E. Holt bought the dining room paneling for $3500. The wine in the cellar was left for the Jesuits.





Here's the salon as it looked before the auction.



The door to the salon is on the right; the dining room is in the distance at the eastern end of the hallway; the front door and entrance hall is to the left of the chandelier. Behind us is the main stair.







Opposite the main stair is another salon, rather obviously simplified, and now used as a meeting room. Hanging on its walls is an evocative set of framed photos showing Inisfada's interiors with original furniture.





Down a short hall just west of the main stair are the solarium, a library and the original billiard room, the latter set up for a zen retreat on the day of my visit.

















We're back in the hallway facing east. The front door is to the left; the great hall is behind the wall on the right; the dining room is dead ahead. A secondary main staircase, located at the east end of the hallway and a tick or two less grand than the first, is out of sight to the left of the dining room.





This was originally the breakfast room, located next to the dining room and across from the eastern main stair. The door in the third image below originally opened into the great hall. It is now blocked by the altar on the other side.







The vintage image of the dining room shows the late 17th Century pine paneling that went for $3500 in 1937. The modern view is of the room today.





Far more interesting than the cannibalized dining room are Inisfada's extensive - and virtually intact - pantry and kitchen suites.























When I stepped inside Inisfada for the first time, I wanted to use the front door. By the same token, when Tom and I went upstairs I wanted to take the main stair. This required a considerable hike back from the servant hall in the image above.









The elevator clanks up and down with a good deal of wheezing and complaint but appears to be dependable.



The master bedroom seen in the vintage image below was part of a luxurious suite located at the top of the main stairs and directly over the solarium. This suite was not just chopped up, but finely diced into fourteen cells for Jesuit seminarians. The ceiling beams, visible in the second image below, are all that survive.





We're looking east on the second floor from the top of the main stair. The master bedroom suite is behind us; guestrooms are ahead on the left; the upper portion of the great hall is behind the wall on the right; the door at the end of the hall leads to a sort of high-value guest suite. Cardinal Pacelli stayed there during his visit in 1936. To the right of the suite is a private chapel dedicated to St. Genevieve; to the left is the second main stair.



This door leads to a musicians' gallery that overlooks the great hall. The original organ pipes are two flights up inside a stone tower on top of the house.







The guestrooms, as expected, are lovely, even though numerous fireplace mantels have gone missing and the once grand bathrooms have been "updated" in ersatz fashion.











I love mail slots in guestroom doors. How delicious to think of being a guest in Manhasset for long enough to have your mail delivered there.



Here's the east main stair, and across from it...



...the door to the private chapel.



I have seen a few private chapels in my time, but this one is hard to beat.











The first view below shows the lobby of the high-value guest suite. It's got two rooms and a formerly sumptuous bath that has been converted into a dispirited looking kitchen. The second image looks west from the lobby to the master suite in the distance.





Another second floor hall, this one located above the kitchen and pantries, leads to more guestrooms, and ends finally in a servants' stair at the east end of the house.







The "not-for-the-servants" main stair on the east leads, unexpectedly, to a multitude of servants' rooms distributed along very very long third floor corridors. I like the ceiling motifs at the top of this stair, although I cannot figure out what's chasing the rabbit, and do not understand the meaning of three entwined fishes.















Inisfada is so big that it wasn't until I got home and looked at my photos that I realized I'd forgot to go to the top of the tower. Tom Evrard understood completely, invited me back, even picked me up at the station in Manhasset. Climbing the stone stairs to the highest point on Inisfada was a voyage of discovery - of organ pipes, multiple chimneys, and a panorama of former farmland whose modern tree-shaded subdivisions, from this height anyway, look like virgin forestland.









From the roof, we went straight to the basement for my obligatory look at the boilers. These twin behemoths, each hiding beneath a sort of giant tea cosy, burned 80,000 gallons of oil last winter.



We exited the house via the kitchen court and walked around to the front.



Genevieve Brady's childlessness is said to have instilled in her a particular love for children. This may or may not have been true, but it is supposed to explain the unexpected presence of whimsical stone medallions on the facade depicting nursery rhyme and fairy tale characters. Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots are easy to identify.







There's an odd one in the gable above the master bedroom, identified by one source as Mother Hubbard. To me it looks like a scene from Hansel and Gretel. The same year that Mrs. Brady donated Inisfada to the church, she married William J. Babbington Macauley, the Irish Free State's Minister to the Holy See. One year later, in 1938, at the age of 53, she died in Rome as suddenly and unexpectedly as her first husband. A thousand people attended her memorial at St. Ignatius Loyola on Park and 84th. She was buried, curiously, alongside that first husband at a Pennsylvania novitiate he had endowed before his death.





My guides, Tom Evrard and Kathy Waldow, were the souls of hospitality and helpfulness during two visits to Inisfada. In fact, everybody there couldn't have been nicer.



After 75 years, first as a Jesuit school, then a seminary and more recently a retreat house, St. Ignatius is closing Inisfada next year. This was an economic decision that has saddened everybody. The church's long stewardship of this invaluable cultural artifact comes, however, with a responsibility to the greater community. Disaster threatens Inisfada, as much from vandals who would destroy it if improperly secured, to developers who would demolish it to build another condominium community. Not yet officially on the market, interested parties are circling the property already. We can only hope that everyone involved does the right thing. As of this writing the retreat house is still functioning; the link is www.inisfada.net.

If you've got $26 million dollars in your pocket, you can be the next owner of this undeniably impressive marble mansion on Washington's Dupont Circle. Happily, TTR Sotheby's, the local shop representing the owner, knows better than to describe it as a "copy of" or "inspired by" some famous European palace. Usually, if you look these palaces up, they turn out to have little if any resemblance to the so-called copies.

15 Dupont Circle was built between 1901 and 1903 for Robert W. Patterson (1850-1910), a parson's son who climbed the ranks of the "Chicago Tribune" to finally become its editor-in-chief. In the process he 1) made the paper an influential voice in national politics and 2) became the owner Joseph Medill's (1823-1899) son-in-law. Although Patterson and his wife didn't spend a lot of time in Washington, they were always here during the congressional and social seasons.



The Patterson house isn't a copy of McKim, Mead & White's New York State Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. However, it is what my late mother would have called "the same breed 'o cat." Very white, very big, very ornate, very "sort-of-Renaissance-y" and, in the instant case, literally crawling with marble pastry work, it delivers an unequivocal message about who the owners were and how they rated in the world. The house is a wonderful historic artifact whose survival is a miracle. However, to my eye there is a perfunctory air to Stanford White's design, as if he tossed it off in an afternoon, handed the sketches to his designers, and continued talking on the phone to the next client. 15 Dupont Circle has presence, but it's not the firm's most beautiful house.

Since 1951, the Patterson house has been the home of the Washington Club, a women's social organization which, having despaired of keeping the place up, has put it on the market for sale. Back in 1956, the club bulldozed the garden on P Street and erected a depressing institutional addition, seen in the first image below. This provided needed banquet and meeting facilities, which, I'll admit, couldn't very well have taken place in the garden. Other than blocking off assorted rear windows, the addition has the virtue of barely impacting the original house.



The woman curled up below with the big poodle (photo courtesy Jackie Martin, Syracuse University Special Collection) is Eleanor Medill "Cissy" Patterson (1881-1948). She was Robert Patterson's daughter and the owner, from 1923 until her death, of 15 Dupont Circle. She was also a talented, controversial and (let's not say 'delving implement') much hated newspaperwoman. Back in 1920 Cissy pestered her brother into giving her her first newspaper job on his "New York Daily News." In 1930 she convinced William Randolph Hearst to make her editor of "The Washington Times" and "The Washington Herald," a job she turned out to be very good at. By 1937 she had leased both papers, and in 1939 she induced the reluctant Hearst to sell them. At this point she combined them into the "The Washington Times-Herald," whose arch-conservative editorial stance and proliferation of popular features transformed it into a cash cow with a potent political voice. Among other things, the "Times-Herald" virtually created the modern women's page and, we note with approval, also printed the first gay letter to the lovelorn column asking for advice. This was all good, but what was she like personally? Joseph Epstein's 2011 review of "Newspaper Titan" by Amanda Smith describes Cissy Patterson as a "wildly intemperate woman who used her money to bully friends and employees...Far from being a titan of newspapers or anything else...(she was)...capricious, spoiled, headstrong, snobbish, anti-Semitic, a mean drunk and vindictive." (Ouch).

If anybody was a titan, it was Cissy's grandfather Joseph Medill. He was a founder of the Republican party, played a critical role in Abraham Lincoln's decision to run for president, was mayor of Chicago, owner of the "Chicago Tribune," and father of a pair of daughters (one being Cissy's mother Nellie) whom he described as "the two biggest bitches in Christendom." (Thank goodness my family is nothing like this). Joseph Medill sired a dynasty of press lords which, in addition to Cissy and her "Times-Herald," included her brother Joe and his "New York Daily News" and her cousin Col. Robert (Bertie) McCormick and his "Chicago Tribune." Bertie, Joe and Cissy, united by a hatred of FDR and a remarkable lack of concern over the perils of Nazism, were "the three furies of the isolationist press."

Cissy's cousin Col. Robert McCormick (1880-1955) took control of "The Chicago Tribune" in the 1920s. Bertie was a grandson of both Joseph Medill and W.S. McCormick, brother of International Harvester founder Cyrus McCormick. Bertie hated the New Deal, socialism, communism, liberals of any stripe, the East and Easterners, all politicians, the United Nations...you get the picture.

Cissy's brother Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946) had a college boy flirtation with socialism that drove his father crazy. He got over it, however, and turned his consistently conservative "New York Daily News" into the highest circulation tabloid in the country. In the middle of World War II, a Pennsylvania congressman named Elmer Howard gave a speech on the House floor claiming that Cissy and her brother "would welcome the victory of Hitler."

In 1940 Joe Patterson's daughter, Alicia (1906-1963) continued the family newspaper tradition, albeit with fewer fireworks, by founding "Newsday."

Time to go inside, but first a few notes about the floor plan. The footprint of the original house is that sort of lopsided "L" on the left side of the image below. The new - well, new in 1956 - addition is the rectangle on the right with the Banquet Hall in the middle. 15 Dupont Circle contained one of the very first garages in a Washington townhouse. That space is now a cloak room with an adjacent institutional bath.


The architectural grandeur of this house speaks to Robert and Nellie Patterson's respective positions on the political and social stages - but perhaps more to hers. Joseph Medill's daughter was reportedly no easy spouse. Competitive, cruelly ambitious, chilly as a mother and remote as a wife, she doesn't sound like much of a bargain to me. Stanford White may have subconsciously - or perhaps not so subconsciously - understood Mrs. Patterson's character and given her precisely the chilly formality she wanted.


Just inside the front door is a library, with a probably different color scheme than White intended, and a nearly intact vintage gents'. I have been asked by several disturbed readers to PLEASE lower toilet lids, but what can I do when there is none?




Sotheby's Christie Weiss, my patient guide on this hot Sunday morning in August, is about to lead the way for a peek at the original garage, rendered unrecognizable today by acoustical tiles and wall to wall carpeting.

A reception and attached ladies' powder room are on the other side of the main hall.



The rest of the first floor - not counting the addition - is occupied by an original kitchen, still in use, and series of pantries. About 80% of the kitchen suite remains largely as built. We'll turn right outside the reception room door, cut past the service stair, and head into the kitchen itself. An unexpected survivor from 1904 is an original prep table.






The corridor below doubles back to the main hall. I glanced down the stair to the cellar, which Christie was perfectly prepared to show me, then said, "Nah."


The grand staircase could be in a hotel.




The second floor contains three important rooms - drawing room, dining room and ballroom. (I'm pretending the auditorium in the addition doesn't exist). French doors from a broad second floor landing lead to a balcony overlooking Dupont Circle. A famous (and famously blurry) 1927 news photo shows President Coolidge, Cissy's tenant during renovation work on the White House, together with guest Charles Lindbergh, waving to well wishers on the circle below.



The drawing room door is next to the balcony. The club erected the wall surrounding the stair to 3 in order to conform to fire code.

To my eye, the pine paneled drawing room is the most beautiful room in the house. Doors and cornice molding appear to be antique, though I don't think the walls are. The windows provide excellent views of leafy Dupont Circle.




On the opposite side of the landing, situated above the reception room on 1, is a stately, if uninspired, formal dining room. A scattering of Cissy's furniture remains in the house, including the pair of console tables against the window wall. The second image below (courtesy Jackie Martin - FCWP-HHL) shows W.R. Hearst in 1938 helping himself to a piece of his 75th birthday cake while standing in front of one of those very same consoles. Not everybody loved Cissy, but Hearst did, perhaps because she had recently loaned him a million dollars.





An amazingly intact duplex pantry, extending from the dining room to the ballroom, connects via dumbwaiter to the kitchen below.



We'll exit the serving pantry through a door to the service stair, and cross the main landing to the ballroom.


From "The New York Times" of February 6, 1904: "Mr. & Mrs. Robert W. Patterson christened the ballroom of their beautiful new house on Dupont Circle to-night by giving a cotillion in honor of their daughter, Miss Eleanor Patterson. A hundred guest were present, including Miss Alice Roosevelt...Major McCawley led the cotillion with Miss Patterson." Three months later, on April 15, 1904, Cissy married a wife beating, child kidnapping, gold digging, womanizing gambler named Count Joseph Gizycki in this same room. Four years after that she and her child fled to London from the count's immense manor in Russian Poland, only to have his agents kidnap and hold the child for a million dollar ransom. It took the combined efforts of President Taft and the Russian Czar to get the baby back. It wasn't until 1921 that Cissy finally managed to get a divorce.




Whatever the world thought of Cissy personally, her frequent parties were crowded with the rich and powerful. Until the war, the servants in the house wore full livery. The photo below (courtesy FCWP-HLL) shows Doris Duke at a smart dance in Cissy's ballroom.



Stanford White, of course, did not intend the stairway to 3 to be enclosed in a box. En route up, let's detour onto the musicians' gallery.







The 3rd floor appears to consist of three bedroom suites and one large single guestroom. President Coolidge and his wife occupied a suite above the drawing room; Cissy's parents presumably slept over the dining room; Lindbergh stayed in a pair of originally connected rooms above the ballroom. The 4th floor housed servants in variously sized rooms appropriate to their different pay grades, adjacent to a suite Cissy had built out for herself.



Either Cissy gave several of the 3rd floor bathrooms a touch of Deco swank in the 1930s, or the Washington Club did it in the early 1950s.




The connecting bedroom in the Coolidge Suite boasts a similarly touched up bath.




Here's the master bedroom, boudoir and bath, located (more or less) on top of the dining room. In 1927 Cissy lent the house to the Coolidges because she was living in New York with her second husband, attorney Elmer Schlesinger. Their four year marriage ended abruptly in 1929 when Schlesinger dropped dead on the golf links in Aiken, South Carolina. The widow Schlesinger promptly had her name legally changed to Mrs. Eleanor Medill Patterson.










This is the door from the master bedroom to the 3rd floor hall. The sliver of light on the left in the image below looks into the boudoir; the stair in the distance adjusts for the extra height of the ballroom on the floor below; the barely visible hanging plates on the right hand wall are actually photos of Cissy's dog; the door beyond the plates goes to a sitting room. (Why do people have sitting rooms off bedroom hallways?)




Stanford White had nothing to do with that door on the right. I don't think there's much doubt the Lindbergh room was originally a suite. Somebody started pulling the grand old bathroom apart, then stopped. The second room is full of club miscellany, including an article describing the move here in 1951.





One more guestroom, before we head up to 4.



The glass circle in the middle of the 4th floor hall provides natural light - albeit not a lot of it - to the family bedroom hall below. The short stair is another accommodation to the high ballroom ceiling, however, here on 4 it only leads to an attic. The servants at 15 Dupont Circle inhabited a maze of rooms and halls, seemingly unchanged from Cissy's day. Her own suite up here was too obscured by boxes to get a shot. Interesting to note, no steel structural elements support the roof, nor did I see any in the building elsewhere.







We'll take the service stair to 3, the main stair to 2, and then I'll pose on the famous balcony, a la Calvin Coolidge, so Christie can take my picture.





Could there be a more eloquent sketch of character than Cissy's self portrait below? ('E.P.' stands for Eleanor Patterson). "The most hated woman in America," as she was dubbed during the war by "Time Magazine," didn't just feud with political liberals. I'm not sure exactly how, but in 1945 Cissy's own daughter publicly "divorced" her. Cissy's final years were marked by a downward spiral into drugs and alcohol. She was found dead in her Maryland country house in July of 1948, aged 67, the victim of a likely alcohol-related heart attack. As had been expected, her newspaper, valued at between $7 and $8 million dollars, was left to seven of its veteran executives, taxes prepaid by Cissy's estate. The "divorced" daughter promptly challenged the will in court claiming "fraud and deceit...undue influence, duress and coercion." In a nice ironic touch, the "Times-Herald" heirs sold the paper to its arch-rival, the liberal "Washington Post," which promptly closed it down. Cissy left 15 Dupont Circle to the Red Cross, which sold it to the Washington Club.

15 Dupont Circle is represented by Brad Nelson and Christie Weiss of TTR Sotheby's. Details on the sale are at www.ThePattersonMansion.com.

A cultured lady I know, of the Republican persuasion, lectured me recently for using the word, "foyer.""Very non-U," she said, adding, "The word is 'anteroom.' I don't really know why, it just is." Back in 1954 Nancy Mitford did a humorous piece for the magazine "Encounter" on British linguist Alan Ross's division of words into "U" for upper, and "Non-U" for non-upper class. Almost immediately, Mitford's gag reportage, in the secret souls of many, acquired a deadly cultural resonance. Even my own mother, hardly a stickler for upper class conventions, would have shot me dead if I'd said the work "drapes."

The peculiarly shaped, uber-luxurious house in today's post is located in Washingotn DC, at 1618 New Hampshire Ave., NW, 2 blocks north of Dupont Circle. Completed in 1909 for Perry Belmont (1851-1947) and his wife, the former Jessie Ann Robbins Sloane (died 1935), it is a very U house for a very U couple. The architect was a famous Frenchman named Paul-Ernest Sanson (1839-1918), whose many European palaces included Boni de Castellane's famous - and now lamentably demolished - Palais Rose in Paris. During Belmont's 1889 tenure as American ambassador to Spain, he either lived in or admired - depending on the source one consults - a very fine Sanson-designed house, so when it came time to build in Washington, he went direct to the master. Sanson drew up plans, but flatly declined to travel to Indian country - namely, the U.S. - to oversee the job. Ergo, an associate architect was hired, none other than that palace-building Philadelphian, Horace Trumbaer, who entrusted the Belmont job to his Beaux-Arts trained African-American chief designer, Julian Abele.

The lot is an odd one, a right angle triangle with the base on 18th Street, short side running along R Street, and an hypotenuse paralleling New Hampshire Ave. The front door is under a porte cochere extending from the building's narrow southern tip. The view below looks from north to south down New Hampshire Ave.



A reader tipped me off about this place, said it was grand, but I was unprepared for what I found.



I always want to know who lived in these places, so here's some preliminary background. The man below is August Belmont (1813-1890), nee Schonberg, the legendary Jewish banker who arrived in New York at the behest of the Rothschilds in the midst of the Panic of 1837. Young Schonberg had planned to continue on to Havana. Instead, he stayed in New York, changed his name, founded August Belmont & Company, rescued local Rothschild interests and became rich. In 1849, at the age of 36, he married a New York belle named Caroline Slidell Perry (1829-1892), whose father was a naval hero named Matthew Calbraith Perry. August Belmont was a lavish entertainer who brought continental style to provincial New York. His wife became a leader of local society, his sons social heavyweights in their own rights, and he became an Episcopalian.

Belmont may have provided the cash, but Commodore Perry (1794-1858) supplied the sort of national distinction money alone can't buy. Perry fought the invading British in 1812, invaded and seized Key West himself in 1822, attacked the Mexicans in 1846 and, perhaps most famously, pried Tokyo Harbor open in 1854, thus exposing the Empire of Japan to the profit-seeking juggernaut of Western commerce. Perry was a forward thinking warrior who is remembered as the Father of the America Steam Navy.

Caroline Belmont's was a mild personality that lacked the piranha instincts requisite to a Leader of Society. Plus which, the ascendance of Caroline Astor coincided with a decline in her husband's health. She was relieved to focus on him and leave Society - and its "leadership" - to the ascendant Mrs. Astor.

This hot looking young guy is the Belmonts' eldest son Perry, photographed probably when he was at Harvard (Class of 1872). Unlike many of his peers, Belmont spent the majority of his life in public service. He earned law degrees from both Columbia and the University of Berlin, served as a U.S. congressman from 1881 to 1888, resigning in order to become U.S. ambassador to Spain. Belmont was deeply engaged in Democratic politics and a delegate to numerous national conventions. One of his successes was passage in 1911 of the Publicity Law, legislation that sought to established precisely the sort of campaign finance transparency that's under attack today.

This is Perry Belmont Belmont's wife, Jessie. Their marriage on April 29, 1899 took place at night, in a small Connecticut church, with little ceremony and no attendants. She had been divorced from Henry T. Sloane, her husband of 17 years, for approximately 6 hours. There is more than a little Anna Karenina in this story. The vengeful Sloane who, it should be noted, was not taken by surprise (he and Jessie were already living apart), exacted draconian concessions in exchange for agreeing to the divorce. According to "The New York Times," the Sloanes' decree granted him "custody and full control of the children." Little Jessie was 15; her sister Emily was 10. "(T)heir mother is to have no right of access to them until they shall have attained the age of 21 years." Nor was she even permitted to acknowledge them on the street. Jessie was denied the right to remarry, but since this only applied in New York State it didn't really count. By contrast, her ex-husband was allowed to marry again "in the same manner as though the defendant were actually dead." It wasn't money that lead Jessie Sloane to this dramatic leap. Both Sloane and Belmont were rich men. We'll never know what passion, or misery - or maybe even terror - led her to abandon her own children.

Perry Belmont was 48 years old at the time of his first and only marriage. Worth noting is the fact that his brother Oliver had in 1896 married the divorced Alva Vanderbilt. Unlike Henry Sloane, the gentlemanly Willy Vanderbilt did everything he could - legally and socially - to assure Alva's future was as easy as possible. Unlike the doomed Anna and her useless Vronsky, Jessie at least had Perry Belmont, who publicly and doggedly fought for her honor. The papers of the period are full of either thinly disguised snubs (denials that so-in-so refused to receive, observations on the Belmonts peculiar absence from certain social events) or outright scandals (Perry's blackballing at the Chevy Chase Club, Ambassador and Mrs. Henry White's refusal to acknowledge their visiting cards). This is not to say they lived like outcasts; they certainly did not. Jessie Belmont reveled in grand entertainments, and she and her husband gave and went to many. However, given Belmont's long standing entree in Washington plus the city's cosmopolitan society, settling here seemed a better choice than New York.

The house is in magnificent condition, which fact is clear the moment you step inside.


Notable on the first floor plan:
1) The front door is on the far right, leading into the oval entrance hall;
2) The stairs lead to the 2nd floor, not to the rooms on this plan;
3) A project that never came to pass would have converted the house into a club. The floor plans were marked up by someone who was thinking how to re-purpose the rooms.
4) Building this place, let alone designing it, was a triumph of complex geometry. It is simply amazing how these gracefully proportioned rooms have been arranged inside a right angle triangle.

My exploration began along the western corridor, 18th Street being outside the windows on the left and the library doors dead ahead. That contraption in the left corner at the end of the hall is a cane holder for visiting guests, each slot protected by a security key.



Perry Belmont's library which, according to the first floor plan, might have become the club office, is, like everything else here, in very good condition. It even has a few pieces of original furniture, including Perry Belmont's desk. The portraits on the walls are of past officials of the Order of the Eastern Star, owner of the house since 1935.


The first floor is the family floor, distinct from the 2nd floor which was dedicated to big entertainments. The image below shows the view from a center hall into the library. Mr. and Mrs' Belmonts' bedroom suites are on the other side of this hall, overlooking New Hampshire Ave.

This view looks south in the hall to the underside of the grand marble stair. The door beyond the arches - a not very good modern insertion - leads to an ornate marble and wrought iron stair that leads down to a basement squash court.




See the clock on the north wall of the hall? To the right of it is a door leading to the Belmonts' bedroom suites. We'll look at his first, on the other side of the, um, anteroom.







The Eastern Star has been a loving and attentive steward of this fine old house. There is such a thing as too much love, however, especially when it results in throwing out beautiful old things, like the vintage fixtures in Mrs. Belmont's fabulous circular bathroom, and replacing them with what is "new and modern" but otherwise unexceptional.

We're back in the central hall, where we'll take the door on the left of the fireplace to the one and only guestroom, or suite, actually. In in an unhappier world this would have been demolished to make way for a ladies' room.






Please! Stop with the improvements!


The grand rooms upstairs are far too vast for evenings home alone. Eastern Star has scrupulously repainted every panel and molding in the first floor family drawing room, however, today's palette is way stronger than the original would have been.



Adjacent to the drawing room is a small, elegantly paneled family dining room. The modern kitchen beyond it was originally the serving pantry, connected by dumbwaiter to the kitchen in the basement.




Let's head down this corridor to the central hall, continue to the front entrance, then take the marble stair to the piano nobile.




Four main rooms on the second floor - small salon, picture gallery/ballroom, dining room and large salon - have been fitted brilliantly into a weird footprint. Our first visit is to the small salon, located at the top of the stairs directly above the entry hall.

Most top drawer mansions of this period have a white and gold room. This is a good one in perfect condition. However, the gilded moldings have been painted over with gold paint, which has impaired the room's original delicacy.


That's Bill Bane under the arch on the left, waiting to lead me down the western corridor, which overlooks the main stair, to the picture gallery, which doubled as a ballroom. The fireplace is on the gallery's north wall. With the exception of 4 chandeliers over the main stair, all the others in the house are gifts from the members of various Eastern Star grand chapters.






Here's the south wall of the gallery. A musicians' loft is located above the middle and left side arches. There's a view through the middle arch of the small salon on the opposite side of the main stair.


Here's a nifty survivor, which I doubt lived in this room.


Yes, there is an elevator, connecting this floor to the family level and basement below.


How about this dining room, located beyond the picture gallery in the upper left hand corner of the plan. What a place.




The adjacent duplexed serving pantry is in a gratifying state of preservation. Note the twin dumbwaiters, a needed aid to efficient service between a dining room and a kitchen located two floors apart.





A corridor runs west from the dining room to the large salon.

To my eye, the large salon is the nicest room in the house, primarily because it hasn't been renovated. The wall panels haven't been repainted; the original pale gilding on the moldings is untouched; the intended subtlety of the decor is intact, and it shows.



The only way to the third floor is via the service stair, whose door opens onto the corridor between the large salon and the dining room. On the way up I detoured to the pantry mezzanine.



At the center of the third floor is a pair of large covered bulkheads protecting skylights over the main stair and the picture gallery.

Surrounding the skylights on all three sides are servants' bedrooms, occasional bathrooms, sitting areas, and long long hallways. Today these bedrooms are used by Eastern Star leaders visiting Washington for quarterly trustee meetings.







Here's the skylight over the picture gallery.

And the balustrade outside the third floor.

The "Future Plunge" pencilled in on the basement plan below is actually the squash court. The original kitchen, if you overlook the "rec room" furniture, is another remarkable survivor.





Next door is the prep pantry, its dual dumbwaiters no longer operable.


The door from the kitchen to the servants' hall (under the clock) is locked. We'll have to detour into the corridor outside, admire the servants' dinner bell en route, then inspect the room where the help took their meals. (Think: Downton Abbey).




The rest of the basement is largely unchanged, save for the former laundry, now a modernized office.




I think we've seen it.

Would that man could realize when life has reached its zenith. By comparison, the downward slide is soon obvious. The Belmonts gave up on Washington in 1925, closed their New Hampshire Avenue mansion, and stayed mostly in Paris. In the dark Depression year of 1932, Belmont returned to the States to auction off the furniture - at least such of it that got bids. In March he went to Newport to rescue his late brother Oliver's house, Belcourt, from a tax sale. Perry had inherited a life tenancy in Belcourt when Oliver died in 1909. He and Jessie used it as a summer place. By 1932 Oliver's widow, the ferocious Alva, who had lived in France for many years, was so diminished that she had neglected to pay her Newport taxes. Alva died in 1933, Perry bought Belcourt in 1937, and though he sold it in 1940, he stayed in town and became a Newport resident.

I don't know how old Jesse Belmont was when she died in 1935. If her eldest daughter was 15 at the time of her 1899 divorce, she must have been in her mid-70s. The pressed lips, scored forehead, and beseeching look of the eyes in this haunting candid speak to a life marked by a lot pain. I don't know if she ever managed a rapprochement with her children, but I hope so.

By the end of his life, Perry Belmont had become a grand old man and a Newport fixture. His 90th birthday in 1940 witnessed a flood of cabled congratulations from FDR, the Duke of Windsor, Harvard president Nicholas Murray Butler, Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, etc., etc. Belmont died in 1947 at the age of 96, alert and hearty to the end. For the last 78 years, his Washington house has been the International Headquarters of the General Grand Chapter, Order of the Eastern Star, a half-million member fraternal organization founded in 1850, related to Freemasonry, and open to men and women alike. Eastern Star welcomes visitors to the Belmont house; the link is www.easternstar.org.