BIG OLD HOUSES

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.

You've probably wondered for years how the Main Line suburb of Bala Cynwyd (pronounced 'BAL-uh-KIN-wid') got its name. Well, maybe you haven't, but I have. Bala and Cynwyd started out as separate hamlets, their names conjoined long ago, a la Buda and Pest or Peapack and Gladstone. They were located in the easternmost part of the so-called "Welsh Barony." In the late 17th century, William Penn sold 40,000 acres bordering the Schuylkill River just north of Philadelphia, to a group of Welsh investors, one of whom was named John Roberts (1683-1724). Together with his land-subdividing descendants, Roberts had a penchant for Welsh names. This is where Bryn Mawr and Bala Cynwyd come from, not to mention streets like Llandrillo, Clwyd, Rhyle, and Llanberris, all of which surrounded Pencoyd, the ancestral estate of clan Roberts.

Just as Abraham begat Isaac, who begat Jacob, who begat Judas, etc., etc., so John Roberts begat Robert, who begat John, who begat Algernon, and so forth, eventually creating an immense Roberts family tree. In 1871, on one the many limbs of that tree, the artist Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts, seen in the photo above, was born to George Theodore Roberts (1838-1921) and his wife Sarah Cazenove (died 1900). Clan Roberts was not simply land rich. In 1852, George's father Algernon, together with his Uncle Percival, founded a specialty iron works called the A & P Roberts Company. The firm soon morphed into the Pencoyd Iron Works and Bridge Company, a leader in the design and construction of iron bridges. United States Steel absorbed the firm in 1902, making members of the Roberts family even more rich. George Roberts probably had a trust or two of his own; certainly he lived like a trust fund kid. Part of that life was spent in New York, but in the summer he and his wife removed to the fashionable Catskill Mountain colony of Onteora Park. Roberts hired a Renaissance man named George Agnew Reid (1860-1947) to design the highly picturesque house seen in the images below. It was finished in 1892.

George Reid was a Canadian citizen who painted murals in public buildings, won medals at World's Fairs and Exhibitions, chaired Ontario College's art department, and was a founder of the Toronto Art Gallery. Somehow or other, he found time to design over a dozen houses in Onteora Park.

Onteora - a lovely sounding word, isn't it? - was, until our Dutch cousins came along, the Native American name for the Catskills. Onteora Park was organized in 1883 on a picturesque mountainside immediately north of the fading village of Tannersville. It was intended from the start to be an artists' colony - not for starving artists, either. Founder Candace Wheeler (1827-1923), the feminist power behind the Society of Decorative Art, and her rich wholesale grocer brother, Francis Thurber, built picturesque summer places, founded a swell club - the still extant Onteora Club - and basked together in the companionship of a literal "Who's Who" of the era's artistic types. Do you know who Richard Watson Gilder was? or Carroll Beckwith? How about Mary Mapes Dodge or Maude Adams? I didn't think so. OK, Mark Twain visited too, and I know you've heard of him. The others, plus a score more, spent mornings at Onteora busily creating, and evenings busily schmoozing with one another. If Tuxedo Park was a place for the very rich, Onteora was supposedly for the merely rich. It was and still is remote and beautiful, and has always had about it a whiff of the exquisite.

The Roberts house used to be called Napeena. It is today called Nehapwa, a name derived, according to the owners, from Iroquois words meaning "to find again." I'd call the name change an improvement. In the wake of George Robert's death at age 83, the advertisement below appeared in a 1921 issue of "Country Life." The studio building, illustrated adjacent to the text at lower left, was purposely built for Roberts' artistic daughter Elizabeth, or Elsie as she was known. In 1889 at the age of 18, Elsie Roberts left New York to study painting overseas, first in Paris, then in Italy. No doubt she periodically visited her parents and used the elaborate Onteora studio, however, she was a permanent resident in Europe until 1899. Her name inevitably appears on the list of Onteora luminaries you've never heard of, but truth be told, she didn't leave much of a mark here. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that in 1900, the same year her mother died, Elsie fell in love with Grace Keyes, a Massachusetts golf champion with whom she spent the rest of her life. Grace's extended family welcomed and encouraged the relationship, but Elsie's own father did not. Grace and Elsie spent summers at a New Hampshire farm Elsie inherited from her late mother. Other artists used the Onteora studio; Elsie apparently did not.

Jeff Summer and Tom Uberuaga operate Nehapwa, which is in what we call "mint condition," as a romantic 4-room inn. Let's take a look inside.

The heart of the house is beyond these doors - a sort of triple hall, double height in the center, flanked by a pair of lower-ceilinged spaces north and south, all of which open onto a long porch overlooking the mountains.

Jeff is on the left, Tom is on the right.

The view below looks south from the center hall. The glass door from the southern hall is one of several that opens onto the porch.

A door from the southern hall leads to a library on the southwest corner of the house. This is a summer house in the mountains, full of simple brio in lieu of serious woodwork.

The open door from the center hall leads to the porch. How about that view?

Inside the porch door to the right is the northern hall, connected by a swing door to the kitchen.

The original kitchen suffered successive "improvements" during the darkest days of American architecture - namely the 'Sixties, 'Seventies and 'Eighties. The kitchen today, though entirely new, is compatible with the house's original architecture.

Jeff is in the adjacent pantry, also new, also compatible.

Let's return to the entrance hall and take the stairs to 2.

A gallery surrounds all four sides of the center hall. A corridor leads south to a pair of guest bedrooms.

Every bedroom has it own fireplace, access to an outdoor porch, and a modern, faintly European looking bath. The minute I saw these guys, I knew the rooms would be tastefully decorated.

A den borders the eastern side of the center hall gallery.

From the den on the east, the gallery leads to a pair of bedrooms on the north.

Between the north bedrooms is a service corridor that connects stairs from the kitchen to a flight leading to former maids' rooms on 3.

The top floor is Jeff and Tom's apartment; the old trunk room is a walk-in closet, the porch is private.

Time to head outside and explore the studio.

The image above shows the studio during its salad days in the early years of the 20th century. The image below shows it today, midway in an architectural rescue operation. Studio or no studio, Elsie Roberts had little interest in her late father's Onteora estate. The property was sold after his death to New York Times managing editor, Carr van Anda. After he died, a New York City sleepwear czar named Elias Seyour bought it. Seyour is the man credited with popularizing the sweatsuit. The present owners bought it from Seyour heirs in 1999.

Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts was a prolific and widely exhibited painter, co-founder with Daniel Chester French of the Concord (Mass) Art Association, and lifelong sufferer from depression. After being diagnosed with "melancholia" in 1925, her doctor recommended she give up painting, advice that led her to hang herself in 1927. She was 56 years old.

Pencoyd Iron Works, which so enriched the Roberts family, didn't survive the Great Depression. The ancestral Pencoyd mansion, however, lasted until 1964, when it and its entire superblock lot were leveled and entirely paved over for the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center. The adjoining Church of St. Asaph, dedicated, according to wags of the past, "to the glory of God and the convenience of the Roberts family," still stands. So do many fine old neighborhood houses, at least once you get a little off City Avenue. Onteora Park is, as of 2003, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Would that I had someone to spend a weekend with at Nehapwa; it's a really romantic place. The link is www.nehapwa.com.

"Stillbrook" is what the local kids call "Millbrook," my Dutchess County home for 32 years. If I were a kid, I'd use "induced coma" to describe the nearby village of Sharon, CT. People in Sharon, I hasten to add, like it that way. William T. Jerome (Winston Churchill's cousin), William F. Buckley, Michael J. Fox, Carolyne Roehm, Benjamin Hotchkiss (think Hotchkiss School) and Jasper Johns, belong to a constellation of recognizable names that glitters against a local firmament of invisible heirs and coupon clippers. It is Sharon's anonymous rich who, over the centuries, have beautified the village with towering trees, an elegant library, fine houses and the landmark clocktower (seen above), given to the village in 1885 by the Wheeler sisters. Sharon's population in 1782 was 2230 souls; by 2010 it had grown to 2782. That's an increase of 552 people in 228 years.

Among the many fine houses hereabouts is Bogardus Hall, which is spiritually in Sharon, but actually about 100 feet on the other side of the New York border, and therefore technically in the Town of Amenia.

The house, or at least the first part of it, was built in 1781 by a local burgher named Jacob Bogardus. I suppose somebody somewhere knows who this man was, but it ain't me. Was he related to James Bogardus, the celebrated pioneer of "cast-iron" architecture? or to the Jacob Bogardus whose application for a Revolutionary War pension was (rather coldly, I thought) dismissed by a Greene County court in 1830? Or perhaps he was an ancestor of the Peter Bogardus with whom I went to school, and who fell asleep at the wheel in 1985 and killed himself? I will never know. My only clue to the mind of Mr. Bogardus is the fact that, in an era that saw the construction of Blenheim, Kedleston and Ickworth on the other side of the pond, he called his house a "hall."

Of Mr. Bogardus's Hall we have yet to see a single brick. That's because it was rebuilt on three separate occasions, and consequently engulfed. It might actually make sense to call the place Morehouse Hall, since a man named Stephen Morehouse bought it in 1792, and the last Morehouse didn't sell it until 1948, 156 years later.

The Morehouses were dairy farmers who obviously prospered. In 1871 Stephen's grandson, Julius, doubled Bogardus Hall's footprint, wrapped it in porches, crowned it with a fashionable mansard and topped the entire confection with a showy lantern. On December 14, 1871, the Harlem Valley Times described the "inauguration of a palatial residence" on the occasion of the Morehouses' 50th wedding anniversary. 600 guests - a number exceeding that of two centuries worth of local population growth - roamed a house that "puts into inferiority any house that has since been built within many miles." A supper "of the utmost richness and delicacy" was punctuated by toasts like the one from Mr. Southard Hitchcock: "Our host - His palace home; a link between modern times and the Revolutionary era." The crowd snooped, chowed down, and climbed to "the upper story, surmounted by dormer windows, (which) afforded an excellent place for dancing."

In 1934, 73-year old Henry Morehouse, dairy farmer, father of 8, proprietor of Bogardus Hall since the early 1880s, walked onto the state highway in front of his house and was hit by a car. Thirteen years later, his widow heard a knock on the door, looked outside and saw Mr. & Mrs. Walter Huber of Mt. Kisco, NY. The Hubers just happened to be driving by, just happened to be looking for an old house, and just wondered if this one were for sale. By the middle of 1948, they had become the new owners and Bogardus Hall's second major overhall was underway.

Walter Huber was a rich man, whose family-owned Huber Companies produced crude oil and natural gas in Texas, refined kaolin clay in South Carolina, produced timber in Maine and manufactured printing ink in New Jersey. Prior to buying Bogardus Hall, Huber became vice president of Sun Chemical Corp., which one assumes was a promotion. He and his wife announced that they were going to "restore" Bogardus Hall, but what they did spoke more to the era's distaste for Victoriana than it did to any scholarly understanding of 18th century architecture. Huber left the mansard roof, but ripped off the porch, put classical pediments over the Victorian doors, snapped fake mullions in the windows and transformed Bogardus Hall into an imposing, if slightly odd looking, melange of periods. In point of fact, Jacob Bogardus and the Morehouses probably considered themselves residents of Amenia, despite the fact that Bogardus Hall is a mile from the clocktower in Sharon and five miles from Amenia village. As far as the Hubers were concerned, they lived in Sharon.

Here's Bogardus Hall today, in the wake of a third rebuilding that started after 1999, when the Hubers sold the house to the present owner. Goodbye Victorian mansard, hello hipped roof with big gable and oculus; adios bracketed cornice, welcome restrained new detail at roof level; pointy old overdoor pediments now gone, nicer arched ones in their place. Architect John Lanman of Trumbull Architects in Millbrook has, like his unknown predecessor in 1871, made this into a completely new house. Unlike his predecessor, however, he's left the old house in recognizable form. Do I have any criticism of this beautiful, historic, and essentially new house? Yes; I think the roof is too heavy.

I climbed all over Bogardus Hall in an attempt to understand exactly where the 1781 house began and ended. After considerable thought, I'm still confused. The south facade, seen in the view below, is especially confusing. Does that horizontal brick protuberance that runs at different levels between the first and second floors mark the border of the 1871 enlargement? Could that door have been the original entrance to Bogardus Hall? I'm pretty good at sussing out old houses, but this one's a head scratcher. The pair of windows to the left of the door belongs to the original kitchen, now a library.

Regular readers are well aware of my strong feelings on the subject of shutters. These, I am happy to report, are brilliant.

Bogardus Hall on the west is all new. After 1871, the house was L-shaped, the short end on the south, the long on the east overlooking the drive. Architect Lanman converted the footprint of the main block into a rectangle by filling in the L. A large family room, flanked by a pair of circular porches, was then constructed facing west.

A Victorian frame addition on the north was replaced with a period-looking kitchen wing, lit by picturesque lanterns on the roof.

My first reaction to major changes in old houses is to regard them with suspicion. Bogardus Hall has been fundamentally rebuilt three times but, interestingly, this is exactly what makes it historic. Like Madonna, it has been successively reinvented.

Everything inside is absolutely first class, starting with a front door made of solid walnut.

Immediately to the left of the entrance is a drawing room. The exquisitely carved mantelpiece is new. In fact, every single thing in this picture is new, which, in the context of this house, has perfect validity.

Adjoining the drawing room is a paneled library, formerly the original kitchen. How scrumptious is that walnut paneling?

I'm thinking this doorway (not the present walnut door) was added in 1871 for access to the south side of the wraparound porch.

The solid walnut interior shutters are all new.

In this part of the world, ascribing floor hatches to the Underground Railroad is a pleasant custom with little basis in fact. This one leads to an unpaved below grade storage room with a pair of fat piers that support the fireplace above.

My pal Andrea leads us north, from the library into the large, newly constructed family room. It faces west over broad lawns and gardens.

The brick walls in the image below show the interior angle of the L-shaped footprint from 1871.

Here's the same angle, photographed after 1999. A one-story lean-to addition has been demolished and new foundations are being excavated for the reconfigured main block.

The family room is flanked at either end by a pair of appealing circular porches.

Let's return to the front hall, admire the stair to which we'll return in a moment, and have a look at the dining room.

Except for the floor, everything is new, beautifully designed and executed in a first class manner.

What I thought would be a serving pantry is actually a bar. The door to the left returns to the stair; a door on the right leads to the kitchen.

Elaborate kitchens like this are de rigueur in high class houses. This one occupies the low wing on the north end of the house. I could grow to love it, I suppose. The door to the bar is on the right.

The door to the left of the ice box - sorry, refrigerator - leads to a service corridor flanked by a pantry on the west, and a combination mud room horse depot on the east.

Was I very interested in the basement? That would be a no, although the elaborate in-house gym was worth a photo.

Let's return to the bar, peek at the amusing under-the-stairs powder room, and head up to the second floor.

The curving stair, not to mention its sinuous wooden handrail, is a triumph of geometry.

Three bedroom suites radiate off the second floor landing. Let's look first at the master, consisting of a bedroom, two dressing rooms and two baths. These rooms occupy most of the east and all of the north sides of the second floor.

The larger of the two baths is on its way to becoming a fabulous antique.

The foyer to the southeast suite leads to a pleasant enough bedroom, and a really zowie retro bath.

The southwest suite is a variation on the other two.

A nice over-the-top touch? How about those dark squares in the floor design below, made of lapis lazuli.

Kids ruled the third floor, decorated for them by Perry Rollins of Wishbone Studios in Ancram, NY.

I am at the wheel of what? of life? (Don't I wish). The Hudson beckons beyond the painted bowsprit. On its waters sails a ship bearing the family's arms.

The Morehouse ballroom was probably more playroom than anything else. Today's third floor contains a bedroom for the little boy who loved tractors, one for his brother who loved planes, and a playroom and bath they shared. They're all grown up now, and gone.

Goodbye, little boys.

Bogardus Hall, with adjoining stable complex and 132 acres, is for sale. John Friend and Deborah Montgomery of Houlihan Lawrence represent the owner. Here's the link:

http://www.houlihanlawrence.com/real-estate-agent/johnfriend/property-detail/316801/3989-Route-343-Amenia-NY-12501

I'm catching my breath. Back next week with something special.

This redoubtable female, who looks ready to take an ax to her local tavern, is Candace Wheeler (1827-1923). Mrs. Wheeler's battleground was neither moral nor political, but aesthetic. Dubbed "Mother Interior" by New York Times writer Susan Dominus, she was America's first female interior designer. (Yes, way ahead of Elsie de Wolfe). My favorite Wheeler quote: "Probably no art has so few masters as that of decoration." Too true; too true.

Wheeler was an indefatigable do-gooder whose New York Society of Decorative Art, founded in 1877 with Louis Comfort Tiffany, sought to empower aspirant craftswomen by teaching them crafts and helping them sell them. In 1883 she split with Tiffany and founded Associated Artists, a more streamlined vehicle for what became a cottage industry in needlepoint, textiles, wallpaper design, book publishing and, rather unexpectedly, real estate. It is the latter category that brings "Big Old Houses" once again to Onteora Park, founded by Mrs. Wheeler and her rich brother Francis Thurber in 1887 as a dedicated artists' colony deep in the mountain fastness of the Catskills.

Onteora Park began as a cottage industry outpost whose workrooms, at least on occasion, produced grand things - for example, the Madison Square Theater's magnificent needlework curtain, or the applique and silk embroidered wall panels in pharmaceutical czar George Kemp's 5th Avenue mansion. Mrs. Wheeler also managed to transfer, at least in summertime, the artists' salon she and her husband Thomas had established at their sprawling Queens estate, Nestledown. (How charming to think of an estate in Queens as 'sprawling'). Onteora remains a summer camp today, one with unpaved Victorian era roads which, like the houses they lead to, are closed in the winter.

Like Bruce Price in Tuxedo Park, Associated Artists built all the early cottages. Dutch doors, diamond pane windows, bark trimmed interiors and stone fireplaces make these old places deliciously picturesque but, in the manner of many antique mountain camps, structurally insubstantial. Floors and walls, rooflines and (alarmingly) some chimneys, have settled over the years into every possible angle but that of 90 degrees.

These are glimpses of Wildwood, an original Associated Artists spec cottage built in the late 1880s or very early 1890s. Like others of its ilk, it is tucked into deep woods. Cottage owners were expected to take meals at the Park inn, called the Bear and Fox (now a private house), and rough it, mountain camp style, with an outhouse.

Wildwood's north wing is a circa World War One addition. Although the house has undergone significant alterations over the years, the finished product looks remarkably of a piece. Let's circle around to the west.

When built, Wildwood's front door was on the eastern side of the house, at the top of a flight of steep stone stairs. Subsequent owners abandoned the pitons and rappelling ropes necessary to get indoors, moved the entrance to the second floor of the building's west facade and constructed this picturesque bridge to connect it to the drive.

Wildwood's first owner was Luisita Leland (1873-1956), daughter of Charles H. Leland of 563 Park Avenue, which is practically across the street from me in New York. Miss Leland, a rich and unmarried society girl, evidently found Onteora's signature mix of poetry readings, chamber music, amateur theatricals, artistic cottagers, writers and actresses, not forgetting Mrs. Wheeler's needlepointers, more congenial than the starchy elitism of Newport or Lenox. After the war, the French government made Miss Leland a member of the Legion of Honor for her work promoting The Fatherless Children of France, Inc.. She married late, in 1919 at the age of 46, to a former Assistant U.S. Surgeon General named Dr. Leland Cofer, seen in the image below.

The Cofers called Wildwood Clematis. They also entered it on the first floor. We're crossing the new bridge - well, "newish" - in the image below and entering a small anteroom on the second floor.

There are 4 bedrooms on the second floor, plus a sort of library/study/television room and three terrific old fashioned country bathrooms. Immediately south of the front door, a two-room suite with bath doesn't appear to have changed in a hundred years.

In the image below, I'm standing in the open front door. The south bedroom is behind the wall on the right. That little hall on the left leads to the rest of the rooms on the the second floor, the first of which is a bathroom.

Does it matter that Wildwood has sagged to the point where there are no more rectangles, only parallelograms? Not to me, it doesn't.

This view of the second floor hall looks south toward the front anteroom. The stairs go up to a 3rd floor bedroom, and down to entertaining rooms and the kitchen on 1.

Our first stop is an east-facing guestroom with drop dead mountain views, a small porch, and a look of uber-authenticity. Despite many changes, the sensation in this house of stepping back in time is everywhere undiluted.

Let's cross the hall and look at the third bedroom - alas, without a mountain view - and the bathroom beside it.

They call this the "TV room," a name which I, as an old house traditionalist, can't quite manage to say out loud. The evidence of structural settling would drive my brother-in-law bonkers, but to me it's rather endearing. Walking around Wildwood is like being on a yacht, except it's not the yacht that's pitching up and down, it's the house.

The master bedroom also faces mountains.

Let's take the hall south from the master, head downstairs, admire the signature Associated Artists bark wall, and have a look at the first floor.

At the foot of the stairs is the Log Room, so named because of its Onteora style natural bark paneling. I am told that it used to be two rooms: an entry hall adjacent to the original front door, and a drawing room whose fireplace faced south.

The relocated fireplace now faces east.

The old front door now leads to a deck.

Stairs from the deck descend to a vertiginous lower garden, from which glimpses of the house above can be had through the trees.

Back indoors, four log-railed steps (so 'Onteora') lead from the Log Room to the dining room.

South of the dining room is a terrific period kitchen from no discernible period.

We'll peek quickly at the laundry, before returning to the Log Room.

Wildwood's most dramatic feature is the Great Room, located in the new (comparatively, anyway) wing on the north end of the house. Like today's main entrance, it's reached via a bridge. Unlike it's charmless namesakes in charmless subdivisions across America, it really is "Great."

It's unclear who built the Great Room. Maybe it was the Cofers after their marriage in 1919, or maybe it was Luisita herself, although I sort of doubt that. Or maybe it was Wildwood's next owner, actor Rollo Peters (1893-1967), seen below playing Newland Archer opposite Katherine Cornell's Ellen in a 1929 production of "The Age of Innocence." Peters began his career as a portraitist, moved from there to set design and acting, became the first general director of The Theatre Guild, and wound up in Rockland County building houses for theatrical pals like Burgess Meredith. His designs for sets and costumes are preserved today at the Yale University Library.

If ever there was a theatrical room, this is it.

Let's retrace our steps, first across the bridge, then across the Log Room, up the stairs to the second floor hall, and finally up to 3.

The 3rd floor bedroom and bath are brand new - well, maybe about the age of my car, or maybe my cat. So is the open log railing between the Log Room and the dining room, and the scalloped shingles on the eastern gable, and the bridge to the front door, and all of the exterior log rails. Would that all old house owners were so clever and sensitive.

Like most of the houses in the Park, Wildwood is closed in the winter. Squirrels won't be getting into this closet.

Time to head downstairs, turn out the lights, and collect the car.

According to an August, 1932 item in the New York Times, "Prince Frederick chose to make his first visit with Prince Louis Ferdinand to an American country club at the Onteora." I'm not sure who Prince Frederick was, but I do know princely visits weren't the norm up here. "The Four Hundred," according to a wit of the period "would have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician or a clever Frenchman." Onteora Park is an upscale place whose upscale residents (mostly) belong to its upscale Club. Historically, however, there's been far too much talent hereabouts to make "society" comfortable.

Wildwood is for sale for what seems to me a very reasonable price, which fact in no way influences my decision to write about it or my opinions about its aesthetic merits. (Do I really need to tell people that? Apparently, for some I do). Mary Mullane of Mary Mullane Real Estate in Hudson, NY represents the owner. You can reach her at www.marymullane.com or 518.828.2041.

Here's William K. Vanderbilt II (1878-1944), a man as nice as he was rich, in front of his Maurice Fatio designed house on a small island off the southern tip of Miami Beach. In 1925, Vanderbilt swapped his yacht Ara for 7 acres of harbor dredge belonging to a Florida developer named Carl Fisher. Today's post has nothing to do with Florida, but the picture captures the man.

When he finally built on Fisher's Island in 1935, Vanderbilt had long ago disposed of Deepdale (seen below, in its prime), his and his first wife's Horace Trumbauer designed estate at Lake Success, Long Island. Deepdale was not far from Brookholt, his mother's place near Hempstead. New-ish suburban houses crowd Deepdale today, while Brookholt has been carpet-bombed by suburban subdivisions and might as well have existed on another planet.

In 1920, Vanderbilt rescued the gate to his late father's Long Island estate Idle Hour. He then moved it to a property he was developing independently of his estranged wife in Centerport, an off-the-beaten-track (for society people, anyway) hamlet on the north shore of Long Island. Houses were in this man's blood. Under the supervision - and largely the instigation - of his mother Alva (later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont), his parents had built 660 Fifth Avenue, whose chateau-esque design changed the course of domestic American architecture, Marble House in Newport, and Idle Hour on Long Island. After her divorce, Alva built Beacon Towers and Brookholt on Long Island, another mansion on Madison Ave in Manhattan, and supervised the redesign of Belcourt, her 2nd husband's house in Newport.

Vanderbilt's sister, Consuelo, didn't build Blenheim Palace, but her father's money installed central heating, a project almost on the order of electrifying Cleveland. Vanderbilt's aunts and uncles were great builders as well, but the momentum, like the Vanderbiult fortune itself, faltered with his generation. Eagles' Nest in Centerport is to me a sort of swan song of a great family's tradition of building great houses.

Between 1910 and 1912, Vanderbilt, by then separated from the mother of his 3 children, cleared and graded his newly purchase 46 Centreport acres and hired the firm of Warren & Wetmore to build him a small house. The choice of architect doubtless was related to Whitney Warren's ongoing project replacing old Grand Central with the Terminal we know and love today. Vanderbilt salvaged half a dozen limestone columns and a pair of giant iron eagles from the demolished terminal to use on the approach to his new house.

Vanderbilt was a Harvard dropout who, after a not very long stint as president of the New York Central Railroad, dedicated his life to automobiles, yachting and natural history. He was the driving force behind the first purpose built auto race course in America. In 1904, at age 26, he set a world speed record of 92mph at the first Vanderbilt Cup.

One of the troubles with auto racing - then as now - is that drivers and spectators alike keep getting killed. The Vanderbilt Cup stopped in 1906, and by 1908 the course had morphed into the Long Island Motor Parkway, a high speed (for the era) 45-mile long toll road extending from Springfield Blvd in Queens all the way to Lake Ronkonkoma. Hard to imagine today, but the automobile was not initially loved in America. "Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more," muttered Woodrow Wilson in 1906, "than the use of automobiles...(T)hey are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness."

In 1899, when but a lad of 21, W.K. Vanderbilt married Virginia (Birdy) Graham Fair (1875-1935) (not the woman below), daughter of a hard boiled, hard drinking prospector named James G. Fair. Birdy's father became filthy rich mining the Comstock Lode. Birdy and Willie were honeymooning at Idle Hour when his father's mansion caught fire and burned to the ground. A bad omen. The couple had 3 children and separated in under ten years. In 1927, by now a mature 49, Vanderbilt married Rosamond Lancaster Warburton (1897-1947)(she's the woman below), a divorcee with 2 children of her own. They met, they fell in love, they obtained divorces from their respective sophisticated spouses and married quietly in Paris a the office of the Mayor. On the way out, Vanderbilt's secretary gave the recording secretary a 500 franc tip.

If Deepdale was Willie's and Birdy's house, Eagles' Nest, as the Centerport estate is called, was Willie's and Rosamond's. Between 1910 and 1927 the house was repeatedly enlarged, and ancillary buildings added to the property. However, my sense is that the place took on much of its present character - or perhaps just its atmosphere - after Vanderbilt's second marriage.

Eagles' Nest wasn't originally built in the "Prisoner of Zenda" style of architecture we see today. A 7-room cottage of 1910 was transformed in 1924 by Warren & Wetmore designer Ronald Pearce into a 3-sided courtyard composition entered through a portcullis at the base of a showy bell tower. The 3 images below show the courtyard's western and southern sides.

Improvements never stopped. The vintage view below shows the southern arcade prior to glazing, and the courtyard without cobblestones.

The main part of the house faces east - well, more correctly northeast - over Northport Harbor. It's deep enough out there for a ship-sized yacht to enter and anchor. This is what brought Vanderbilt to Centerport in the first place, in addition to a need to get away from his first wife.

In 1935 the courtyard was enclosed on the north side with the so-called Memorial Wing. Three quarters of this wing is filled with marine specimens, ethnographic artifacts, bird and butterflies and big game trophies accumulated during "scientific" yachting trips. The last and grandest of Vanderbilt's yachts was the 285-foot Alva, designed by Cox and Stevens, launched in 1931 at the Kiel Yard in Germany, and named after his suffragette mother, Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont. Yachting Magazine described Alva as "the original over-the-top superyacht." Besides paneled salons with marble fireplaces, a private gym, and accommodations for a crew of 50, she was outfitted with her own seaplane.

Before exploring indoors, let's leave the courtyard and make a clockwise circuit of the exterior elevations. The first image below shows the outer facade of the Memorial Wing. That's a garage door at ground level (we'll go inside shortly), and a slice of the bell tower behind the tree.

Big house, right? The over-scaled wall-mounted sundial presides over a small formal garden on the south side of the glazed arcade.

The ceremonial entrance to Eagle's Nest is at the eastern end of the arcade. The interior layout, as my late mother used to say, " grew like Topsy." This lent character but not a lot of "flow."

Immediately left inside the front door is the first of two principal stairways. Beneath it is one of my favorite features in big old houses, a phone room.

The entrance hall is a double height affair with a bedroom gallery on the second floor. A set of shallow stone steps at its far end leads to an iron and glass door beyond which an enclosed porch overlooks Northport Harbor. Amusing photo blowups in one corner of the porch show Mr. & Mrs. Vanderbilt at El Morocco, with Coco Chanel in the background.

Below, to the right through the door at the end of the porch, is a paneled study. A famous photo of Vanderbilt's sister, Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, sits in a frame on his desk.

The drawing room is past the study and up the second of the principal stairs.

A tapestry hangs above the stair. The super-sized sundial is on the other side of the wall behind it. The beautiful paneling, salvaged from some ruined old joint, is unfortunately obscured by Xmas decorations.

Back on the main floor, directly below the drawing room, a guest corridor accesses two very elegant guestrooms. I'm told the green one was occupied by the Windsors, how often I cannot say.

Let's return along the guest corridor, cross the porch and have a look at the dining room, which is interesting, if not exactly grand.

A short corridor, with dumbwaiter to the downstairs kitchen, connects the dining room to a serving pantry that hasn't changed since Mrs. Vanderbilt died.

Beyond the pantry a corridor leads to spacious maids' rooms, some with water views.

Back by the dumbwaiter, a stair descends to the basement kitchen, now largely obscured by storage.

The kitchen above is connected by ramp, and second dumbwaiter, to a second kitchen on a lower level. This is the first time I've seen a house with two kitchens plus a serving pantry stacked vertically on top of one another.

In 1921, in the wake of wartime service in the navy, Vanderbilt was promoted to the rank of Lt. Commander. I'll bet you could have eaten off the basement floor of his Centerport mansion when he lived here. The image below shows a portion of the servants' dining room, two floors below the drawing room. The french doors open onto a lawn terrace facing south.

I always want to see basements, but having got that out of the way, we can get back to the good stuff upstairs. At the top of the main stair is a gallery overlooking the entry hall. A family guest room located over the study is at one end of the gallery. The owners' suites, located above the dining and maids' rooms, are at the far end of an adjoining corridor. We'll visit the guest room first and its attached bath which, as my readers will agree, is nothing short of fabulous.

My hospitable guide, Vanderbilt curator Stephanie Gress, makes sure I won't get lost.

A stone corridor proceeds north to the owners' suites.

This very large sun-flooded bedroom belonged to Mr. Vanderbilt. His bathroom is through a door on the south wall.

Another corridor connects Mr. Vanderbilt's bedroom with that of his wife. In the middle is a small breakfast room, which seems remote from the pantry, but that's what they told me. Hard to imagine a nicer place to have coffee and read the paper.

Beyond the breakfast room is Rosamond Vanderbilt's bedroom, whose look, I must say, is exactly up my alley. The framed Fabiano pastel is of Mrs. Vanderbilt. Adjoining her bedroom is a high 1930s dressing room and bath that say it all about Depression-era chic.

Mrs. Vanderbilt's clothes were protected behind sliding glass wardrobe doors in a room-sized closet tucked behind a dressing room panel.

The door in the image below is the courtyard entrance to the Memorial Wing. That Scheherazade screen above it covers a window in Mrs, Vanderbilt's closet. Her suite occupies about 25% of this wing, added in 1935. The other 75% houses 3 of Mr. Vanderbilt's 5 museum galleries that display his personal natural history and ethnographic collections. Marine invertebrates and aboriginal shields may or may not float your boat, but the scope and professional presentation of the collections is impressive.

I imagine Vanderbilt as a man in the grand tradition of eccentric British aristocrats, obsessed with things like cuckoo clocks and hair brushes. The hall below houses marine invertebrates; the one in the image below it displays birds, butterflies and ethnographic artifacts. A separate Hall of Fishes, built between 1929 and 1930 in the same Ruritanian style as the rest of the place, stands beside Little Neck Road.

This brilliant handrail, mounted along the stair to a lower level garage, is the work of the great Samuel Yellin (1885-1940), a master blacksmith whose ironwork is all over Eagles' Nest.

That's a 1928 Lincoln sitting on the turntable.

On the 2nd floor of the Memorial Wing is the Sudan Trophy Room, dedicated to Vanderbilt's deceased son (hence the name, 'Memorial Wing'). It's filled with big game trophies bagged by the son during a 3-week safari in 1931.

In November of 1933 William K. Vanderbilt Jr., age 26, disembarked his father's yacht at Miami and began driving north to visit his mother. Cousin Erskine Gwynne came along for the ride. Also in the car was a chauffeur named J. W. Guppy, more groom/postilion/relief driver than actual chauffeur. On November 14th, outside Bunnell, FL, with young Vanderbilt at the wheel, the car was moving so fast that a bird crashed through the windshield and lacerated his face. After getting stitched up in Jacksonville, and installing a new windshield on the car, Vanderbilt and companions continued north. The next day, cruising at 75 on a country road outside Ridgeland, S.C., Vanderbilt sideswiped a parked fruit truck, ripped off the entire right side of the car - being a European right-hand drive model, that's where he was sitting - hurled both himself and Gwynne into the air and trapped Guppy under the overturned wreck. Gwynne, amazingly, wasn't badly hurt; Guppy was pinned under the car but survived; Vanderbilt landed hard on the cement road surface and died in ten minutes. Does this sound like alcohol was involved? To me, that would be a yes.

More Yellin ironwork in the courtyard.

There's an entire wing we still haven't seen. Entered at the opposite end of the arcade from the front door, it is full of handsome bedrooms used today as offices or meeting rooms, or chock-a-block with stored furniture and files. Coincident with construction of the Memorial Wing, a grand paneled library was added to the west side of this building, separated from it by what they call the Moorish Court.

Beneath the library, accessed from outdoors, is the Habitat, a collection of 9 natural history dioramas designed by the American Museum of Natural History.

My last stop was a trip to the top of the bell tower for a look at Vanderbilt's son's room. A faint vibration of sadness still hangs in the air here - or perhaps I just imagined it.

Seen on google earth or Bing bird's eye, this part of Long Island appears heavily developed. On the ground, however, and especially close to the water, it retains much of the enchanting feel of woods and water that lured the disappointed Vanderbilt here over a century ago. On New Years' Day, 1944, the "Times" noted that "William K. Vanderbilt, who has been ill and confined to his home at 651 Park Avenue for some time, is improving...(and)...expected to resume his business activities within a few weeks." Six days later, he was dead of heart disease at the age of 65. Vanderbilt's will left Eagles' Nest and an endowment of $2,000,000 to Suffolk County, subject to a life tenancy by his wife. Rosamond Vanderbilt died at Eagles' Nest in 1947 and the estate has been operated as the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum ever since.

In 1932, Vanderbilt produced a full-length film called "Over the Seven Seas with Mr. & Mrs. Vanderbilt." This period travelogue, complete with dramatic music and intervals of the new colored film technology, documented a 29,000 mile 'round the world cruise on the Alva. Critics of the day noted an unfortunate lack of scenes showing the interiors of the yacht, which of course everyone wanted to see. Notwithstanding which, the film's many highlights include: WKV in immaculate blazer, white ducks and captain's hat at the wheel of his enormous ship (he was, incidentally, a fully licensed master); Mrs. Vanderbilt in chic 1930s sport clothes looking amused by the whole undertaking; Vanderbilt's son-in-law clowning good-naturedly for the camera; Vanderbilt onshore wearing another immaculate getup - this time a blue double-breasted blazer - and chatting with a naked Fiji Islander covered in paint and feathers; hokey South Pacific festival dances; and everything overseen by a smiling crew who clearly recognized a good boss when they saw one. Also of note is the narration, done by Vanderbilt himself in the unassuming, unaffected early twentieth century accent of the American upper class - a veritable "Rosetta Stone," if you're looking for one. The links below, like the vintage images above, are courtesy of the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, and will take you to edited sections of the film. I loved Eagles' Nest; the link is www.vanderbiltmuseum.org.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzPAVXE1wa4&feature=player_embedded#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQ_oMK5jQM&feature=related

In this winter of our "global warming," yet another horrible storm managed to torpedo last Monday's field trip to Grey Towers, the Richard Morris Hunt designed home of America's uber-forester, Gifford Pinchot. I finally got there, but not in time to ponder, Photoshop and write it all up for this week. (Grey Towers, or 'Liberal Towers' as I think I'm going to call it, will be online next week). A fear of online silence drove me to rummage through old boxes of "high society" research, where I came upon one of my absolute favorites among the vanished swells of yesteryear, namely, the lady pictured above, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, nee Marion Anthon, a.k.a. Mamie.

Mamie's husband, Stuyvesant Fish, as elegant and pedigreed an Edwardian era American as ever strolled into the Newport Casino, is pictured below. Fish wasn't hugely rich - Mamie used to say they had "only a few" millions - but in combination with his family background, those millions were enough to put him and his wife into the top drawer of New York Society. Fish's father was at different times the governor of and senator from New York, and eventually became U.S. Secretary of State. In an age of rich parvenus, the Fishes were a better class of families than the norm. Stuyvesant Fish even had a job, as the extremely effective president of the Illinois Central, the so-called "Society Railroad."

Mamie grew thicker and grimmer with age, but she maintained to the end a bracing sense of humor, one that terrorized those who knew her, and amused later researchers like myself. She had a wing man named Harry Lehr, the closeted gay man pictured below who is measuring us up from across the years. Harry and Mamie collaborated on outrageous stunts, creative parties, and rapid fire badinage of which, alas, little of record remains. When Harry cracked that Mamie's favorite flower was the climbing rose, she shot back that his was the marigold. Some of Mamie's cheeky talk appears in annals from the period. When a pompous visitor to Newport wondered where that great big new bridge had come from, Mamie growled, "I had it myself, and it was extremely painful." At huge parties in her Newport villa, she was wont to greet guests with lines like, "Oh it's you. I completely forgot I'd invited you." It takes a certain kind of mind to absorb a question like, "Has anyone seen cousin Alice?" consider the missing lady's good looking male assistant, and within a heartbeat chime in, "Have you looked under the secretary?"

Here's Harry and pal Charlie Greenough in Newport in 1909, at the height of the former's career as a social lion. Harry married a rich widow, a woman innocent to the point of dumbness but sufficiently rich to support them both in the company of a social set known in the columns as the "Ultra-Exclusives." Harry played the devoted husband in public, which fooled no one, and when he wasn't cracking jokes or playing pranks with Mamie - like covering a dachshund with flour, giving it a smack on the rump, and sending it scampering into the tearoom at the Newport Casino - he chased boys.

Mamie had a happy marriage to Stuyvie, as she called him, and raised well adjusted children who seemed unscathed by the limited access they had to their mother. The Fishes were Gramercy Park people initially but, like many of their friends, were inexorably dragged uptown by the tide of fashion. Stanford White, who had overseen alterations to the Fishes' Gramercy Park house, provided the design in 1898 for this new house at 25 East 78th St., notable for its elaborate ballroom.

Here's the house today, still standing but now gutted for institutional use. Inside it's all stainless steel, metal cables and industrial lighting, although the exterior remains essentially unchanged and an ornament to the neighborhood. This block of 78th Street, known as the Cook Block after the rich man who subdivided it, was a particularly grand Upper East Side block. A number of its houses have over the years had clumsy extra floors tacked on top, and just as many have had sweeping marble staircases replaced by mean metal-railed straight runs. Notwithstanding which, it's still pretty grand.

There was nothing I could do about that tacky truck parked out front. I had to get to work.

Here's a detail of Stanford White's iron railing, yet one more good reason to love big old houses. Not many people would bother with this sort of detail today, or even notice if it were missing.

Mamie's house in Newport, not designed by Stanford White, as I have thought for many years, but by a man named Dudley Newton, is called Crossways. At first glance, it seems to have survived pretty well. I don't like that modern window in the pediment over the porch, however. Some architect thought it complimented White's erudite Colonial Revival design, but I think it distracts. Worse are the ill proportioned screw-on shutters, for which someone should be taken out and soundly beaten. I know, I know, it's a condo now and no one wants to maintain shutters which actually close to cover the windows. But hey, if I had my way, those ridiculous plastic shutters would be thrown in a dumpster before you could say, "and it was extremely painful!"

The photo above, taken around 1900 on a Pennsylvania country estate called Grey Towers, shows a youthful Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) standing behind his father James (1831-1908) and mother Mary Jane (1838-1914). When I was in school, our teachers told us foreign names were properly pronounced with an American accent. Thus, for the last 60 years, I have been mispronouncing the name of America's great reformer of forest management. Belatedly, I learn that Pinchot rhymes with "go-go," not with "buckshot."

Ancestor Constantien Pinchot, a vocal Bonapartist, wisely hustled out of France after Waterloo and in 1818 surfaced in Pike County, PA. His son Cyrill became a logging tycoon, of the "rape the forests and leave the ruins behind" persuasion. By 1874, Cyrill Pinchot was one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. A decade later his son James (Gifford's father) hired the dean of American architecture, Richard Morris Hunt, to design Grey Towers, a Medieval-Frenchified mansion on the outskirts of the family's hometown of Milford, PA. Hunt's design, supposedly inspired by Lafayette's Chateau-de-la-Grange, was said to be an homage to the Pinchot family's French roots. I sometimes read attributions like this, look at a photo of the so-called European inspiration, and wonder who in the world ever saw any similarities. In the case of Grey Towers, however, it actually does look like LaGrange, or at least a junior version thereof.

Gifford Pinchot (seen below) had a father who suffered from considerable guilt on the subject his own father's rapacious logging business, guilt he assuaged in various ways. James Pinchot was a notable patron of Hudson River School artists, whose very canvasses bemoaned the environmental destructiveness of the Pinchot family. Not only did Mr. Pinchot Sr. name his son after Sanford Gifford, painter of a forested world unsullied by clear cutting, he sent that son to the Ecole National Forestiere in Nancy, France, after which he encouraged the young man to pursue a career in scientific forestry. Absent family money, this would not have been a realistic way to make a living. In 1900, eight years before his death and with his son's forestry career well established, James Pinchot financed the Yale University School of Forestry.

Grey Towers, now appropriately the property of the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, originally sat on 303 acres, had 43 rooms, and cost $19,000 to build. Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) may have been the Vanderbilts' architect, but for $19,000 Grey Towers was not in the same league as Marble House or Biltmore. The distance from Milford to Manhattan where, until his retirement in 1875, James Pinchot prospered as a wallpaper manufacturer, is about 80 miles as the crow flies. There are no other houses of similar scale anywhere near Milford. Grey Towers was the only private residence with a gatehouse for miles around.

Completed in 1886, Hunt's design reflects some alterations by architect Henry Edwards-Ficken (1844-1929). You certainly got your money's worth for $19,000 in 1886.

The Grey Towers estate covered some 303 acres, but the Pinchots owned thousands more. The balustrade below borders a lawn terrace on the east side of the house. Below it is a small pool called the moat, and beyond that a long sloping lawn, tree-free to protect the view, which descends to the edge of the forest.

The views below show the house from the south, as it looked when completed and as it looks today. The front door is located under the porch between the towers. The wing on the left housed kitchen, pantries, laundry and servants' rooms. When Grey Towers was built, local logging operations had practically denuded the neighborhood of trees. Looking at that scrawny sapling on the left side of the vintage view, and comparing it with the grown tree in the photo today reminds me that, given time, things do come back.

Grey Towers has undergone numerous improvements during its lifetime, particularly after the death of Gifford Pinchot's mother in 1914. Three days before she died, her 49-year-old son married 34-year-old Cornelia Bryce (1881-1960), a great-granddaughter of the founder of Cooper Union, ardent suffragette, opponent of sweatshops, supporter of Prohibition, and aspirant (if unsuccessful) office holder. Once in possession of Grey Towers, the new Mrs. Pinchot proceeded, with professional help, to make significant alterations both to the interiors and the surrounding gardens.

This is a wonderful old house built by a family that contributed hugely to American history. However, great architecture, it ain't. The original interiors lack the architectural brio and opulent finishes usually associated with Hunt, making me think Edwards-Ficken's contribution was to scale things down. Grey Towers was a retirement home, after all, and whereas James Pinchot was a prominent man, he was not a society man.

Not a single original bathrooms remains, including the former powder room under the main stair.

Every house of any pretense built in the 1880s had a fireplace in the main hall. At Gray Towers, the hall is not a fashionable "living hall" of the sort that conjured images of medieval barons. It's just a big hall, with an uninspired fireplace tucked into a picturesque inglenook. The over-mantle painting, which strikes an unexpected Arts and Crafts note, combines symbols of the family's native France and adopted Pennsylvania. Yale University is a leitmotif in Pinchot family history. Gifford Pinchot was Class of 1889; John Ferguson Weir, who painted this picture, was director of the Yale School of Fine Arts.

Three circular towers give Grey Towers its name - that, plus Mrs. James Pinchot's obscure observation in 1885 that the view was particularly "exquisite under soft grey light." Hard by the hall inglenook, located in the tower to the west of the front door, is a circular dressing room, presumably for visitors' coats. The colonial revival fireplace with its cheerily mismatched Victorian tiles has absolutely nothing to do with the French medievalism of Hunt's exterior. My kind and hospitable hostess, the Forest Service's Lori McKean, is contemplating scientific forestry.

Let's cross the main hall for a look at the library, which used to be two rooms until Cornelia Pinchot tore the wall down between them.

Speaking of Cornelia Pinchot, it was her husband's family friend and political patron, Teddy Roosevelt, seen below with Pinchot in 1907, who introduced the couple and probably prodded the not-so-young-anymore Pinchot to not be shy.

According to Cornelia Pinchot: "My feminism tells me that women can bear children, charm lovers, boss a business, swim the Channel, stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord...all in a day's work."

The library has better woodwork, a better fireplace, and a more sophisticated architectural look than the house's earlier interiors. Chester Aldrich of the distinguished New York firm of Delano and Aldrich, and William Lawrence Bottomley both did work at Grey Towers. While I have no citation on the subject, I'll bet one or the other did the new library.

That's little Gifford Pinchot in red leggings, depicted as a Renaissance princeling with his mother and younger sister Antoinette. Not yet born was brother Amos (1872-1944), who bcame the guardian of the Pinchot fortune while his older brother labored, essentially pro bono, to introduce common sense into American forestry. Most Americans associate the name Pinchot with forestry and nothing else. We are surprised to learn that brother Amos Pinchot founded the American Civil Liberties Union. Unfortunately, he was also a principal organizer of the America First Committee which, but for Pearl Harbor, might well have kept us out of World War II - with who knows what consequences.

Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot had one child, a boy named Gifford Bryce (1915-1989), so only one of the little boys on horseback is theirs. Mr. Pinchot has an attractive Will Rogers air about him in this family candid taken on some long ago summer day at Grey Towers. When summer rolls around again, I must remember to wear a tie and long sleeved shirt under my straw hat. I like the look, and I'm old enough to get away with it.

A circular room in the tower to the east of the front door contains Mr. Pinchot's study, which is entered from the library. In 1905, T.R. made Pinchot Chief of the newly established U.S. Forest Service. For years prior to that, he had waged a crusade within the Dept. of Agriculture to transform America's short-sighted and ecologically destructive forest industry into a regenerative science that would bring the most economic good to the most people. Pinchot was not, it should be noted, a wilderness preservationist. To the contrary, he was a foe of wilderness advocates like John Muir, and of wilderness preservation in general. He championed federal ownership of America's western forests, was labeled a socialist for his troubles, and fired in 1910 by a big business flunky named William Howard Taft. In Pinchot's absence, industrial-scale clear cutting of federal forestland became the norm. Visiting Montana in 1937, Pinchot wrote in his diary, "So this is what saving the trees was all about...Absolute devastation."

Quite a lot of scholarship went into Grey Towers' reproduction wallpapers.

We're back in the library. The door on the left goes back to the main hall, and the one in the distance leads to the drawing room.

In addition to combining an original drawing room and library on the eastern side of the house, Cornelia Gifford tore down the wall between the original breakfast room and formal dining room on the north. The result, thanks largely to faux marbre, faux moldings, and faux paintings on the walls, is a flamboyant salon which, among other things, beggars the question of where these people ate. A small table at the room's eastern end seems hardly adequate for a house of this scale, about which more in a moment. The Pinchot family was passionate for everything to do with the out of doors, including hunting and fishing. That plastic fish in the overdoor is not a gag, and does not talk. It replaces a deteriorated stuffed original, removed during a restoration in 2001.

So where did they eat? If I am to believe the literature, in an open pergola located at the middle of a small walled garden just outside the salon, or sitting room as the family called it. At the center of this pergola is a tank of water surrounded in the summer by chairs and called, rather alarmingly, the "Finger Bowl." Instead of food being passed in the traditional manner, it was floated around the table. Sounds far-fetched, but sure enough, here's the photo below to prove it. I can't believe they took all their meals this way, but it makes good tour guide patter for visitors.

Here's the Finger Bowl on a wintry day last week, with the windows to the salon behind it. Not very practical in cold weather, I'd say, not to mention during summer rainstorms. The idea was Mrs. Pinchot's, the execution William Bottomley's.

As long as we're outside, let's take the stairs behind the Finger Bowl and have a look at Chester Aldrich's swimming pool. Must have been nice in its day, but now it's filled and covered with a metal tent frame.

Grey Towers' formal dining room may be gone, but its pantries and kitchen still exist - well, in modified form. The sitting room door in the view below (with another fish on top) used to lead to a serving pantry. Now it leads into a double entry elevator whose opposing door opens into the renovated kitchen. The cabinetry has an appealing period look, but the only original thing in this room is the old stove, now used as a platform for commercial grade appliances.

Outside the back door, across the kitchen court, is a former ice house, now converted to public restrooms.

My sister Brenda used to work for the government (in her case, the Pentagon), so I'm not surprised that planning for the renovation of Grey Towers began in 1980, and the job was finally finished in 2001. I doubt many original ceilings or walls survived the installation of new plumbing, wiring, lighting, HVAC, etc., etc. The former servants' wing has become a pleasant modern office building.

Let's take the main stair to the second floor, where historical scholarship is illustrated by a preserved fragment of original wallpaper.

The owners' bedrooms occupy circular rooms in the towers that flank the front door. Each bedroom is attached to a dressing room, entered from the second floor landing. Mr. Pinchot's is in 110% restored condition and is filled with his personal belongings. There's nothing custom-made about these fireplace mantels, which is odd in so imposing a house. They look like somebody got a lot of them for a good price.

To the left of Mr. Pinchot's dressing room door, separated from it by the Xmas tree, is an alcove with the door to his wife's suite. Her dressing room has been combined with an adjacent guestroom to create one of a pair of meeting rooms. Her tower bedroom has become the other. Husband's and wife's rooms were connected by an outdoor porch, accessed through french doors.

At least one, and probably a pair, of vintage bathrooms in between the owners' suites have been replaced by rather nice (if soulless) public restrooms.

I am conflicted by the state of houses like Grey Towers. Its excellent condition is precisely what enables it to serve so successfully as a venue for conferences and social events, and as a memorial to people who gave a lot more than they took. Were it still full of grand bathrooms, useless pantries, faded wallpaper, cracked plaster and the patine of accumulated years, it would undoubtedly be less useful, but oh, so much more attractive. The Forest Service has attempted with honor to find a middle ground between these two realities but, perhaps inevitably, has come down hard on the side of practicality.

Four original 2nd floor guestrooms have become conference rooms - well, three, since one was combined with Mrs. Pinchot's dressing room..

One is a suite with what was once a tower bedroom. The original bathrooms have all disappeared without a trace.

The third floor, designed for children and nannies, is now offices and more conference rooms.

This fireplace mantel looks a lot older than the house, and I'm guessing it was relocated from Cyrill Pinchot's Greek Revival manse in Milford village.

A visiting scholar enjoys the use of this former tower bedroom.

High speed dual boilers, multiple zones, insulated pipes without one flake of asbestos...all in all, a mansion dweller's wet dream.

Gifford Pinchot not only pioneered the scientific use and renewal of America's forests, he was also two-time governor - from 1923 to 1927 and again from 1931 to 1935 - of the State of Pennsylvania. To accommodate staff and state business, Chester Aldrich, again at Mrs. Pinchot's behest, designed the small office building below, picturesquely dubbed "the Letter Box" and located immediately north of the house. It's a small theatre today, showing instructional videos and vintage Pinchot family movies.

Gifford Pinchot had siblings, but he and his wife had only one son. During the 1920s, besides the pool and the Letter Box, Chester Aldrich designed the so-called "Bait Box" as a playhouse for the little prince. Like the stuffed fish over the salon doors, the name "Bait Box" speaks to the family's love of outdoor sports. Pinchot's son's lifelong passion for sailing and fishing began in 1928 at age 13, during an extended cruise with his parents aboard their 150-foot yacht, Mary Pinchot.

Gifford Pinchot died in 1946 of leukemia, his wife Cornelia survived him until 1960, and in 1963 their son donated Grey Towers and 102 acres to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's Forest Service. President John F. Kennedy accepted the gift at an onsite ceremony. According to Forest Service literature, Grey Towers is operated "as a conservation education and leadership retreat, with public programs and tours that tell this family's fascinating story and help carry forward the Pinchot family legacy." That says it pretty well, I think. The link is www.greytowers.org.

Old houses are markers of the changing world. I personally like big ones. Here's mine in 1910.

And here it is today, scoured of balustrades, pergola, awnings, flower boxes, fretwork, gravel paths, garden statuary (the original big stuff, that is), annual beds, and a whole lot of servants. Like myself, however, it is not without residual charm.

The house and I aren't bearing witness alone to the passage of time. She'll be 32 next week.

She's married to a stand-up guy (I'm relieved to note). (And that's me, not the SUG).

And has a baby of her own, my granddaughter, Lily.

Happy New Year, and thank you for reading my blog.

I've just finished reading "Former People; The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy" by Douglas Smith, a sobering tale if ever there was. In our country, Fox News and MSNBC may detest one another but neither thinks seriously of liquidating the other. Our new mayor, Mr. deBlasio is not going to arrest his predecessor, Mr. Bloomberg. Secret police officers do not stage 2 AM raids on homophobic duck hunters. Furious peasants do not loot and burn manor houses in better zip codes. Cleveland Amory notwithstanding, the American upper class has had a lot gentler treatment than their Russian analogs. A case in point is Boston's Lyman family, whose ancestral country estate in Waltham I'm visiting today.

The elevation below shows the central pavilion of the Vale, as it was called, designed by Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) and completed in 1798 for Theodore Lyman (1753-1839), a cultured Boston merchant grown rich from the China trade. McIntire is a legend in New England, famous for elegantly symmetrical Federal houses designed for his era's "one percent." There's even a Samuel McIntire Historic District in Salem, Mass.

Here's McIntire's Vale - before Queen Victoria. The style is usually described as Federal, but I think the classically ornamented central block with outrigger pavilions connected by hyphens is more accurately described as Palladian. It was not a very big house, but certainly a beautiful one. Construction started in 1793, the year the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror. The eastern pavilion, seen to the right in the image below, still contains an exquisite 18th century ballroom. When Lyman's eldest son George W. (1786-1880) inherited the place in 1839, he expanded its famous greenhouses and built a trio of Mansarded Victorian summer places for his 3 married daughters on a portion of the estate. ('Grave, but Interesting,' a 'Big Old Houses' post from last month, tells one of their stories).

By the time George Lyman's eldest son, Arthur T. (1832-1915) inherited in 1880, his grandfather's country house was an unfashionable antique, both style-wise and mechanically. Plus which, it was inconveniently cramped for a family of eight, not counting servants. Years earlier, the Lyman men forsook the China trade to become textile magnates. Hiring architect Henry W. Hartwell (1833-1919), a high Victorian with a devoted following among what I suppose you'd call "fat cat" capitalists, seems, to me anyway, a natural choice for a Victorian industrialist like Lyman. Hartwell added new kitchen, laundry and servant facilities on the west, raised the second floor above the hyphens and pavilions in order to accommodate additional bedrooms (he left the ballroom untouched), goosed the central block upwards with an entirely new third floor full of servants' rooms, and tacked a pair of exceedingly un-Palladian two-story box bays onto the main blocks' south facade. The result was imposing, if no longer quite as beautiful.

The next owner was Lyman's son Arthur Jr. (1861-1933), whose marriage to Susan Cabot, per The New York Times of October 5, 1888, "brought together an unusually large number of representatives of old New England stock. The eight bridesmaids represented the families of Cabot, Mason, Coolidge, Codman, Lowell, Lyman and Courtis, and the ushers were of equally distinguished lineage." To many observers, including, I'm afraid, most real estate brokers, Hartwell's exteriors looked "colonial." However, heavy Victoriana raged within. In 1917, Arthur Jr. hired a smart Boston decorator and dealer named Nonie Tupper, of whom I cannot find any record, to do the place over in the newly fashionable colonial revival style. I doubt she tore off the balustrades or junked the shutters, all of which are missing in the modern view below, but with the exception of the main stair, the paneled library and bit of dado here and there, pretty much everything else inside was ripped out and replaced with restrained millwork and period repro mantelpieces - except the ballroom, which escaped alteration once again.

Let's make a counter-clockwise circuit of the building before going inside. The blank windows on the second floor of the east pavilion screen the upper portion of the double height ballroom. The porch wraps around to the rear of the house, where it overlooks a lawn bounded on the north by greenhouses. This huge range of vintage glazed buildings has been in nonstop operation since 1796. Repeatedly enlarged during two plus centuries, they are the oldest operating greenhouses in the United States.

In addition to the ballroom, an oval salon on the main floor also survives from the original McIntire design. A two-story bow on the house's north wall, the upper part of which is visible in the image below, articulates the line of the salon's north wall, plus that of a bedroom above it.

The kitchen courtyard is located at the western end of the house. A section of the Hartwell additions borders it on the left in the image below.

Time to go inside.

Once across the threshold, the coup d'oeil, given the scale of the exterior, is one of unexpected primness. The plan is McIntire's - reception, dining and salon arranged around a T-shaped central hall. The entrance to the oval salon is straight ahead, on axis with the front door. To the left of the salon, the hall leads west to the main stair; to the right, it leads east to the ballroom. We'll glance at the stair, come back to the salon, and head to the ballroom.

Just short of the ballroom is a peculiar open-sided "mud room." An exterior door, barely visible on the right, opens onto the north-facing porch. Nonie Tupper's ruthless imposition of "good taste," ca. 1917, has banished not just the the Victorian wicker and rosewood, but the cornice molding, mantelpiece, paneled doors, door surrounds and the dado. The fireplace hearth and the heat register are about all that's left, either from the Hartwell or the McIntire eras.

The doorway to the ballroom speaks eloquently, in scale and detail, to the early 20th century vogue for the colonial - even though the doors were clearly re-purposed from the Victorian mud room. The ballroom beyond, however, is pure 18th century. As for those distracting fake Xmas trees, "Bah humbug!" I say.

The interesting vintage views below, courtesy of Historic New England, show the ballroom as Ms. Tupper decorated it in 1917 and, below that, as it looked during the Victorian period. Except for the furniture and the dreadful Victorian overmantel, this room, even including its chandeliers, has survived unchanged for over two centuries.

Let's exit the ballroom, whose doors, I must say, are not in the same league as McIntire's on their left, and retrace our steps westward to the oval parlor.

I think the wallpaper borders might be a bit strong for this delicate classical room. Interestingly, wallpaper and curtains in the vintage view below are different from those in the second vintage view. The furniture, however, is the same, just recovered and moved around.

No tiger behind the middle door on the south wall, but rather the main hall with the front door at the head of it. We'll turn left at the door and have a look at the reception room.

At least if I lived here, it would be a reception room. It is in the right place for it. The "good taste" of 1917 has crushed the undoubtedly ebullient Victorian decor of the 1880s. The door to the left of the fireplace connects to the ballroom. The second view below looks across the hall from reception to dining room.

The open door on the right, in the first image below, is the one we saw from the reception room. It's hard not to like the dining room's Victorian incarnation, with its wonderfully inappropriate mantelpiece, gasolier, dark stuff on the walls and handsome painted paneling. Today's immaculate restoration is a bit chilly by comparison.

No surprise that I absolutely loved the serving pantry which, save for the sink and the Kentile floor, is a dazzling post-WWI antique.

The pantry occupies the lower floor of what was originally a one-story hyphen on the western end of the McIntire house. When Hartwell added the new service suite in the 1880s, the original kitchen, until then located in the western pavilion, was replaced by a library. It would appear that in 1917, someone drew a line in the sand in front of Ms. Tupper, because the Hartwell library escaped her touch. That's the door to it, outside the pantry in the view below.

From the standpoint of convenience, the kitchen made more sense in its original location. To get to the new one, we must exit the library into the main hall (note the Victorian dado), hang a quick left, and zigzag through a series of short corridors before arriving in the new one - well, new ca. 1882, renovated 1917, and recently upgraded for professional use.

It was the express desire of the last Lyman occupant of this house, that it be preserved for the enjoyment of the public, and generate income for the city of Waltham. Over the years, weddings and corporate events have proliferated and modern catering supplies and equipment now fill the kitchen, pantries, servant hall and laundry room. Happily, the new stuff mostly just sits on top of the old stuff, virtually all of which is still in situ.

The servant hall, mostly obscured by clutter, boasts an appealing Victorian corner fireplace.

The laundry room is chock a block with caterers' chairs and tables. The original laundry tubs, however, are all still here.

Let's return to the main hall and, before climbing the good looking Victorian stair, duck underneath it for a look at one of my favorite parts of a big old house, (you guessed it), the bathroom.

How cool is this?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the painted woodwork on this grand stairwell started life under multiple coats of dark shiny varnish. Whatever the excesses of things Victorian, they often had a lot of appealing heft. With its closely packed balusters, ornate handrail, high dado, magisterial ceiling, and in-your-face Palladian window the Victorian stair at the Vale looks heavy enough to create a structural sag in one corner of the house.

Unless I miscounted, there are 8 bedrooms on the second floor and 4 (maybe 5?) baths. The hall is Victorian. The bedrooms, for the most part, were re-colonialized in 1917, at which time bathrooms were added. I gather the Hartwell renovation was quite deficient in bathrooms.

I'm told the oval room above the salon below was the owners' bedroom. Odd, if so, since the bathroom is across the hall and by 1917, en suite master bathrooms were pretty much de rigeur.

The bedroom corridor doesn't extend too far east before running into the double height ballroom. Westbound is a different story. Beyond the partition door, which I suspect is an institutional insertion, lies a clutch of un-colonialised Victorian era bedrooms now used for offices.

Midway down the western corridor is the 2nd floor entrance to the back stair, which we'll take to the third floor. Logic, the absence of architectural detail and the presence of only one bathroom suggest servants were billeted up here. The rooms, however, are much bigger than your basic maid's cubicle. I'm guessing they must have been shared, which, if true, is again kind of odd.

If there's one more staircase, and my hosts are of the understanding persuasion, I'm going to climb it. What's at the top? A couple of windowless rooms tucked under the eaves.

I think we've seen the Lyman mansion.

The Lyman estate today occupies less than a tenth of its original acreage, but that's still 37 acres, located about 3000 feet from Main Street in Waltham. When the leaves are on the trees, it probably feels like you're actually in the country. In wintertime, however, a complex of depressing apartments is visible at the southern end of the main lawn. A renovated carriage house, gardener's cottage, sprawling greenhouses and 600-foot long brick retaining wall once used for cultivating peaches are also on the property. Bordering the 37 acres are also the original (now privately owned) farm complex, a couple of actual farm fields, and the former deer park, now part of Bentley University. Taken together, these elements create a significant integrity of site and do much to counterbalance the apartment buildings.

While the Russian aristocracy waxed and waned and the American upper class adjusted, the greenhouses at the Vale kept growing in size and fame. Begun in 1796 and enlarged in 1804, 1820, 1840, and again in the early 20th century, they have steadily produced not just flowers but grapes (from cuttings taken at Hampton Court), oranges, pineapples, bananas and, for over 100 years, Lyman camellias, grown in their own 1820 purpose-built Camellia House.

The heirs of Susan Cabot Lyman (1864-1951), last of the Lymans to live in the house, donated it after her death to Historic New England, a non-profit preservation organization that presides over 36 separate historic sites. The Vale is mostly reserved for private functions, however, scheduled tours operate on limited basis. The link is www.historicnewengland.org.

This splendid old house, until recently an orchid on uncaring waters, sits atop a 300-foot bluff overlooking the Hudson in northern Yonkers. When completed in 1912 the riverfront hereabouts was lined with big places. That was a different world. Even today, however, North Broadway from the gates of this house to the nearby village of Hastings, still winds through deep woods lined with the long walls of former country estates.

You gotta love a guy born in a Montana mining camp called Alder Gulch, who gets rich, builds a mansion and calls it Alder Manor. William Boyce Thompson (1869-1930) crammed a lot of living into his 61 years. He made a fortune in copper and gold, controlled companies as varied as Indian Motorcycles, Cuban Cane Sugar Corp., Wright-Martin Aeroplanes and Pierce-Arrow Motor Cars. He was a director of the New York Federal Reserve, a two-time delegate to Republican National Conventions and Wilson's special envoy to revolutionary Russia during the last days of the Kerensky regime.

In 1910, the 40-year-old multi-millionaire hired New York society architects, John Carrere and Thomas Hastings, to build a country house on 21 still rural acres in north Yonkers. Carrere and Hastings' high end clients at the time included Henry Clay Frick, Col. Oliver Hazard Payne and Alfred I. Dupont, all of whose celebrated houses survive today. The world seems to have forgot about Alder Manor, however, which is very much in the same class.

Carrere & Hastings gave Thompson what is usually described as a "Renaissance Revival" house. To me this description illustrates the old saw about adding the word "Revival" when you're not completely sure what you're describing. Alder Manor is clad entirely in limestone, and I cannot even guess how many tens of thousands of square feet it contains. The central design element on the river facade is a Palladian arcade, being a three-part recessed porch whose tall central arch is flanked by matching flat-roofed sections. The arcade opens onto a vast balustraded terrace that runs the length of the house. Unusual formal gardens, designed by Carrere and Hastings and about 80% intact, lie immediately north and south of the building itself.

Alder Manor's exteriors are very fine, but the interiors are remarkable. Let's go inside and take a look.

I'm going to hold myself back on the superlatives and say "magnificent" just once. There's certainly no other word for this staircase.

Typical of big old houses, gents' and ladies' rooms are located on either side of the front door. The angelic and very naked boys, oddly, face the entrance to the ladies'; the bit of door visible next to them is the elevator; the ladies' room itself is behind the camera. Fixtures and finishes in both bathrooms are happily intact.

We're going to tour the main floor of Alder Manor in a (mostly) counter-clockwise direction, starting with Col. Thompson's study. This exquisite - OK, another superlative I couldn't hold back - room overlooks the entry court immediately north of the ladies' dressing room. If anything, its faded colors add to a patine of genuine luxe. Thompson was never in the military, but was made a colonel in the Red Cross prior to traveling to Russia in 1918. Consensus in the Wilson administration held that a private citizen wouldn't be listened to, but a colonel would. Thompson's mission was to prevent the Russians' from surrendering to the Germans, which happened anyway despite his best efforts. The main impression he took from the experience was a realization of the fatal danger that faced any government that couldn't feed its citizens.

The study is immediately to the left. We're going to retrace our steps to the middle of the main entrance hall ahead.

Now we're looking in the other direction. Alder Manor's front door is just outside the frame on the right. The second visible door on the right leads to the colonel's study; the grand entrance in front of us leads to the dining room.

At the age of 17, Thompson left the wild west to enroll in, of all places, Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. There is a Thompson biography titled "Magnate," which no doubt explains this unexpected volte-face, but I haven't read it. Thompson's years at Exeter are often cited as the explanation for his ease in dealing with the "white shoe" types he came across in later life, and for the development of his cultivated taste in art and architecture. In the mid-1990s, Alder Manor went through a derelict period, which is perhaps when the Francesco Albani overmantel in the dining room disappeared.

Almost all the sconces and light fixtures "grew legs," as they say, around this same time. These dining room sconces, while simple, look original to me.

Thompson was felled by a fatal stroke in 1930. His will, interestingly, provided that his widow would inherit only if she continued to live at Alder Manor. This she did until her death in 1950. Elaborate mansions were dogs on the market in those days, especially in Yonkers. Mrs. Thompson's will, likely as not anticipating that fact, left Alder Manor to the Catholic Church, which eventually made it into the centerpiece of Elizabeth Seton Junior College. Seton (1774-1821) was the first native born American to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. The institutional kitchen in the image below dates from the Seton College period. The servant hall and an assortment of other kitchen-related spaces beyond it were gutted and replaced by the modern dining hall with the blue walls.

Let's return now to the interesting part of the house. The image below was taken in the dining room, looking south across the main hall to the drawing room in the distance.

Now we're in the drawing room looking in the opposite direction toward the dining room. These two major rooms, as well as the marble entry hall between them, give directly onto the afore-mentioned terrace. Of note in this beautiful room are the trompe-l'oeil ceiling, walnut paneling, carved overdoors, and painted door panels. One yearns to have seen it in the '20s, filled with thick orientals, damask covered sofas, old masters in gilt frames, fringed curtains, silk lampshades, and fine antique tables.

We're going to leave the drawing room and go into a corridor that extends south from the main hall. The door on the right of the hall in the second image below leads back to the drawing room; the door in the distance leads to the library; we're going to the left, into a rather erudite Italian Renaissance reception room.

I'd guess the walls in this room were originally covered in some kind of dark crimson stuff - antique velvet perhaps, or maybe silk. I'll bet Thompson had religious-themed old masters hanging from the picture moldings, and seriously grand tables and chairs made of dark carved wood. The fireplace is 15th Century Italian; the windows overlook the drive; the door beside the fireplace leads to the library.

The library is at the south end of the house, between the drawing and reception rooms. It's been kicked around, but it's a thoroughbred.

Would that my own library fireplace had hooves.

Time to go upstairs. The image below looks north from the library towards the main stair. The third floor organ pipes belong to a Welte Philharmonic Organ, whose Renaissance style keyboard sits in a lobby on the second floor.

The most interesting - though not the most beautiful - feature of Alder Manor is the vintage 1912 indoor swimming pool. A stained glass window at the end of the pool was looted during the derelict days.

The middle section of the second floor is full of bedrooms, some in good condition...

...others mutilated in the course of conversion to classroom use. All the old bathrooms are gone.

A sort of second floor lobby is located directly above the main floor entrance hall. The elevator landing is behind the door on the left. The organ console faces it on the opposite wall.

On the south wall of the lobby is the entrance to an unusual master bedroom suite. Colonel and Mrs. Thompson's bedrooms were separated by a central corridor of closets. I suppose there's no point cluttering up your bedroom with closets if you've got a maid or a valet choosing and laying out your clothes.

I'm pretty sure the image below is of Mrs. T's bedroom, for two reasons: 1) it faces the river and the lady of the house always got the good view; and 2) it has (or had) an en suite bath, discernible in spite of a walled up door. The poop brown color of the dado is awful; Mrs. Thompson's connecting boudoir shows what a difference light colors can make.

Col. Thompson's bedroom is on the other side of the closet hall and faces south and east. His adjoining bath, no doubt originally quite grand, is only a memory - and unfortunately not one of mine.

The staircase in the image below is located adjacent to the swimming pool and leads to a third floor gallery overlooking the main stair. Alder Manor's top floor is divided into two parts: servants' rooms overlooking the drive are accessible via one hall; riverview rooms for children and (possibly) guests and (possibly) upper servants (like governesses) are accessed via another.

We'll take a quick backward glance at the organ pipes, then head down the servants' corridor.

The rooms on the family side are bigger and a few of the bathrooms have survived, albeit in partly dismantled condition.

If I can get into a big old house attic, I will. What mighty steel beams these are, and how beautifully finished with tongue-in-groove paneling is this unvisited space beneath the roof.

So much for the house. Let's head downstairs and go outside.

Here's the Palladian porch overlooking the balustraded terrace.

Alder Manor is today separated from the southernmost of its two formal gardens by a modern parking lot. The garden itself, while only minimally maintained, remains largely intact.

Featureless modern buildings constructed by Seton College in the 1960s are, alas, disturbingly nearby.

A more interesting garden survives on the north side of the house. To get there, we'll cross the entry court, where I am posing on the hood of the Big Old House-mobile, then skirt the back of the kitchen wing. That porch is located just outside the ugly blue dining hall.

Some sources claim this to be a "replica" of the Theatre of Dionysis in Athens. If you believe that, I've a got a bridge to show you. Thompson's ancient world garden is indeed full of authentic ancient fragments, but they ornament a series of original outdoor rooms designed by Carrere and Hastings. I suspect most of the walls were intended to look ruinous from the beginning. I don't know for sure who's responsible for the glaring blue tiles, but I'm suspecting Seton College.

At some point in time - I doubt coincident either with construction of the house or the garden - a fragment of a 16th Century Baroque church was affixed to Alder Manor's north wall. The upper window marks the north end of the indoor swimming pool.

Alder Manor, let's be frank, is kind of run down. But it is also largely intact and spectacularly beautiful. We often wonder why bad things happen to good people. A corollary might be to wonder why good people do bad things.

This featureless 1960s dormitory was constructed by Seton College directly in front of Alder Manor and completely obstructs the river view. The Alder Manor estate that Mrs. Thompson willed to the church covered 21 acres. There was no excuse for not building it someplace else.

The victory of Russian Bolshevism convinced Thompson that the world's political future depended on food supply. "There will be two hundred million people in this country pretty soon," he said, during a junket to Peru for the Harding administration. To address the problem, he founded the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, and located it in a 16,000 square foot research and greenhouse facility across North Broadway from his Yonkers estate. For 54 years, the Institute was an anchor of the Yonkers community. In 1978 it moved to the Ithica campus of Cornell University and the Yonkers building fell into ruins.

In 1929, the year before his death, Col. Thompson bought Savarona, a 294-foot steam yacht built originally for Mrs. Thomas S. Cadwallader of Philadelphia. Perhaps not surprisingly, he rechristened her Alder. She is, sadly, a sort of emblem of his life. Thompson's widow kept Alder for a decade, selling her in 1940 to the Navy. She was then stripped of her luxurious fittings, camouflaged, armed, and reemerged as the gunboat Jamestown. Surviving the war in the Pacific Theatre, the former Jamestown ended her days as a tramp full of bananas. She foundered off the Cayman Islands in 1961.

At about the same time the Jamestown settled onto the sea bottom, Seton was busy defacing the Thompson estate with insensitively sited new construction. By the mid-1980s, the college's previous optimism was dampened by falling enrollment and rising costs, and in 1989, Seton merged with Iona College in nearby New Rochelle. Maintaining two campuses soon proved impractical, however, and in 1993 Iona announced the imminent closing of the Yonkers campus. The following year, a handful of elderly Sisters of Charity, who had expected to live out their lives on the top floor of Alder Manor, were the last to go. The City of Yonkers bought the property in 1995, converted Seton/Iona's former classroom building into a public grade school called the Foxfire School, and left the mansion vacant. Vandalism ensued until 2000, when an Irish cultural organization called Tara Circle bought the mansion and the view wrecking dormitory on 5.8 acres for $1.2 million. Since then, Tara has struggled to do the work of the angels and hold Alder together as best it can. The goal is to ultimately convert the house into a center of Irish arts and education. For the time being, they're scraping by on income from weddings, events and photo and film shoots. If you need more information, or want to book a photo shoot or a wedding, call them at 914.964.8272.

How amazing is Waltham, a slightly gritty industrial city a mere 10 miles from the Boston Common. Waltham quite unexpectedly possesses not one but three important country estates, on 109, 37 and 50 acres respectively. I've written about the first two in previous posts. Today we're visiting estate No. 3, called Gore Place and sitting on a 50-acre parcel practically in the middle of town. At first blush, the house looks like the Long Island country place of a Gatsby era swell. It is nothing of the sort, however, but rather an 1806 antique built for a "Club for Growth" type conservative businessman politician named Christopher Gore (1758-1827).

Gore made a lot of money in his life - from legal fees to textiles to bridge and canal projects - but the heft of his fortune derived from speculation in government paper. He and his partners, at times for as little as 20 cents on the dollar, aggressively accumulated script issued by the revolutionary government in lieu of actually paying its soldiers. Many former fighting men, desperate for cash at war's end, sold out at deep discounts to speculators like Gore. After Alexander Hamilton convinced congress to redeem its script at face value, Gore made a killing. This is a simplification, I'll admit, but it's essentially what happened.

The views above are of the north, or entry facade of Gore Place. The view below shows it from the south. When built, this house was considered by many to be the most luxurious mansion in New England, a fitting seat for its rich and prominent owner. By 1806, Gore had already been U.S. attorney for Massachusetts and special U.S. envoy to Britain for maritime claims. He would in time become a governor of, and U.S. senator from, Massachusetts, before quitting politics in disgust with the observation that, "nothing would tempt me to engage in public life under those who now rule our country." Gore, a property rights man to the core, had little fondness for the populism of "Jeffersonian democracy."

The most obvious clue that this is a very old house is the presence of two front doors. The main one is on the left, the one on the right is for business and tradesmen. Without being told, you'd never know which is which, a radical violation of a Beaux Arts canon. Gore Place is very refined in many respects - its comely silhouette, fine proportions, graceful Palladian-Federal architecture, beautiful Flemish bond brickwork and elegant fenestration - but it clearly predates later ideas of sophisticated upper class living. The Gores spent years in Europe - 8 years, to be precise, from 1796 to 1804 - during which time they made the acquaintance of a famous French architect named Jacques Guillaume Legrand (1743-1808). Supposedly Mrs. Gore, nee Rebecca Payne, was the designer of Gore Place, Legrand translated her sketches into elevations, and an anonymous local builder made it real.

Let's go inside, which for those with status like ourselves means taking the door on the left.

Rebecca Payne, daughter of a rich Boston banker, came to the altar with a fat dowry. In 1786, a year after their marriage, the Gores were able to buy a 50-acre country estate in Waltham. They razed an existing house and replaced it with something finer which, unfortunately, burned down while they were in Europe. The brick mansion that Mrs. Gore designed to replace it cost a little over $23,000, a sum sufficiently extravagant for her husband to complain about it to friends. It was a fitting stage, however, for a man whose political ambitions, in 1806 anyway, had not yet soured.

Gore Place may not be in the same league as the great country houses of England, but it still spoke with a forceful voice of power, privilege, worldliness and sophistication - the more so by virtue of being in the middle of a provincial boondock.

The first floor plan at Gore Place has a delicious geometry, informed by 18th century grace and rationalism. (Floor plans are at the end of this post). Gore, a Harvard man and lifelong benefactor of the college, promised Sunday dinner - and a game of billiards afterwards - to any student who'd walk the 7 miles from Cambridge. Each Sunday when the Gores were at home, thirty-or-so guests typically sat at table in the so-called Great Hall. Joining family, neighbors, guests and students were luminaries of the era like James Munroe, the Marquis de Lafayette and Daniel Webster, who began his career in Gore's law office.

High studded ceilings, marble floors and double fireplaces give any room a lot of presence.

In the center of the Great Hall's south wall is the entrance to a very fine oval drawing room. Intact two hundred year old views of broad lawns stretch beyond tall triple hung windows. There's low key but bravura millwork here as well, in the form of doors and a fireplace mantel calibrated to differing positions on the elipse of the room's perimeter.

A door at the eastern end of the drawing room connects with what's labelled on the plan as a parlor. It's presently furnished, not with a lot of logic, as a dining room, though it was likely intended for informal socializing. A great deal of scholarship went into the choice of wall covering and paint color in this house. The furniture is correct to the period, but with few exceptions it didn't belong to the Gores.

The view below looks south into the parlor from a point beneath the main stair. We're going to pivot 90 degrees to our left, and continue into the eastern hyphen and pavilion for a look at Mr. Gore's office and library.

Most of the eastern wing has two floors, which accounts for the sudden drop in ceiling height. Mr. Gore's business was conducted in the simply finished room in the image below, and in a similar one above it, now filled with storage.

From a corner of the office, a corridor extends along the south wall of the hyphen, ending at a double height library in the eastern pavilion. Gore had one of the largest private libraries in New England, in those days an eloquent measure of wealth and influence. The fireplace mantel, designed by the famous Samuel McIntire of Salem, Mass, was salvaged from the house that burned.

Let's recross Mr. Gore's office, continue into the Great Hall so I can have my picture taken by the eastern fireplace, admire the matching fireplace at the other end of the room, and wind up in the lobby by the western door.

The western door is virtually identical to the ceremonial front door on the east, which doesn't make a lot of sense since it was primarily for tradesmen and people visiting just for business. The ceiling in the western lobby is lower because the butler's room is on a mezzanine above. Besides connecting directly with the Great Hall, the western lobby leads into a private family dining room, and it also gives access to a service suite in the western wing. This promiscuous mixing of service, business and private family life must have made more sense in 1806, but you wouldn't see anything like it in important houses built later in the century.

The view below looks from the family dining room to the western lobby. There's a mezzanine above this pleasant low-ceilinged room as well, into which an oddly placed bedroom has been shoe-horned.

Gore Place suffered considerable abuse between 1907, when the last private resident gave it to the Episcopal church, and its rescue in 1935. The original west wing layout of laundry, pantries, service stair and kitchen is long gone. Nowadays, behind a relocated back stair, is a small serving pantry, cobbled together with relocated cabinetry. Further west, a large room used today for functions and presentations roughly occupies the footprint of the former laundry. The site of the old kitchen lies beyond and is full of storage. Servants' rooms were located on the second floor of this wing, at a level flush with the mezzanine in the central block.

And what, you may ask, is this? Answer: A scale model of Gore Place which, when disassembled, illustrates its incredibly complicated floor plan.

Let's give the servants' stair a pass and proceed instead to the main staircase to the second floor.

The main event on the second floor is an oval billiard room whose shape mimics the drawing room below. Both of these fine rooms enjoy views virtually unchanged since the house was built, thanks to the survival of an enormous lawn and the growth of trees. I'd never seen a pocket billiard table, antique or otherwise. The one at Gore Place turns out to be a rare specimen.

Connected to the billiard room on the west is a bedroom, now furnished as a sitting room. It seems to me it could have been used as either.

East of the billiard room, through a door beside the fireplace, is another guestroom, again with the same view.

From the second bedroom, we'll return to the stair landing, pass a service corridor that runs down the center of the main block, and have a look at the north facing owners' suite.

This suite consists of dressing room, bedroom and boudoir and extends the length of the central block facing north. In a later house on this scale, these rooms would be on the other side of the building with a better view. There might also be also be two owners' suites. The Gores, apparently, slept in one room. Of course in 1806 there were no bathrooms, and vintage facilities that were added over the years (and which I doubtless would have found charming) were removed when the house became a museum.

Beyond the bedroom is a boudoir, labeled a sitting room on the plan. During good weather, plain wooden floors in big houses like this were often covered with woven straw matting. If the house was occupied all year, the matting would be rolled up in the fall and replaced with rugs and carpets - a labor-intensive process if ever there was. Repro matting is on the boudoir floor today; a fragment of the original survives in a display box on the floor.

Now things get complicated. The service corridor in the image below runs down the middle of the second floor of the central block and connects to the mezzanine below via two stairways. In the middle of the corridor is the first stair; the second is located at the corridor's western end. (Still with me?) After a quick glance up at the unfinished attic, we'll take the second stair down.

At the foot of the stair on the mezzanine level, is the door to the butler's room. This low studded chamber sits directly on top of the western lobby.

The second floor of the eastern kitchen wing is on the same level as the mezzanine. The corridor in the image below gives access to former servants' rooms, now used as offices.

Back in the main block, the mezzanine corridor snakes east past a peculiarly located bedroom. It wouldn't have been for guests (too remote), or for children (the Gores didn't have any), was possibly for another upper servant, but I really have no idea who it was for.

The mezzanine corridor ends abruptly at the foot of the first stair to the 2nd floor corridor. We'll take it to 2, then descend grandly to the front door via the main stair.

The carriage house is older than the house, but has come through the years with a lot fewer bruises. After Christopher Gore's death in 1827, and his wife's in 1834, Gore Place was bought by a member of Waltham's Lyman clan, who sold it in 1838 to a grand-nephew of the famous painter, John Singleton Copley. Twenty years after that, a collateral Gore relation named Theophilus Walker moved in and lived by himself until the 1870s. Leary perhaps of advancing age, he invited two maiden nieces to join him. When the last of these, Mary Sophia Walker, died in 1907 she left the house to the Episcopal diocese.

Poor Maria Sophia dreamed of the Bishop of Boston residing at Gore Place while a great cathedral rose on its grounds. Instead, the diocese off-loaded the house to a pair of western shysters named Fred and Loretta Symonds, who embezzled and defrauded the locals, stripped the house bare, cut down the specimen trees, and fled in the middle of the night, leaving the diocese to foreclose on a very ill-advised mortgage.

The next owner was a German auto and airplane manufacturer named Metz. He took possession in 1911, used the house for showrooms and the grounds for a private airfield. The property was expropriated during the First World War, then reborn in 1921 as the Waltham Country Club. It was the presence of a golf course that saved the grounds from subdivision and development during the Roaring Twenties.

The club went bust after the stock market crash, after which the mansion temporarily housed local athletic teams, and finally degenerated into a low life speakeasy. It was vacant, vandalized and facing demolition in 1935 when Mrs. Helen Bowditch Long Patterson, a Boston brahmin with taste, connections and a successful track record combatting insensitive local officals arrived. Mrs. Patterson raised the money to buy it, and founded the society that restored and operates it to this day.

I am not being falsely modest about my photography when I say that Gore Place is far more beautiful than these pictures. The link is www.goreplace.org.

Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848) and Sally Foster (1770-1836) were married in Boston in 1790. He was 25, she was 20, and were I the parent of either, I would have strongly urged delay. Back then, however, people grew up faster. By age 25, Otis had graduated from Harvard, joined the Massachusetts bar and fought in the Revolution. At the dewy age of 23 Otis delivered to the citizens of Boston a ceremonial oration celebrating Independence Day of 1788.

Had they lived in Manhattan today, Mr. & Mrs Otis would have been fixtures on the New York Social Diary. They were rich, sophisticated, well born, educated, attractive, influential, gregarious and lived at the pinnacle of Boston society which, according to many, is a nice place to be. Mr. Otis survived his wife by a dozen years, dying at the age of 83 in the beflagged house below, designed in 1806 by Charles Bulfinch and facing the Boston Common at 45 Beacon Street. It has, since 1958, been the home of the American Meteorological Society.

Before they moved to Beacon Street, the Otises lived in another fine house. Completed in 1801 and also designed by Bulfinch, it is seen below on its roomy lot at 85 Mt. Vernon Street in the middle of a former pasture once owned by the artist, John Singleton Copley. The so-called Mt. Vernon Proprietors, of whom Otis was one, bought the Copley land in 1795, then set about developing it into the most elite residential district in Boston, which by some lights it remains today. The elegant Otis house helped set the neighborhood's "ton." Once that was established, the direct park views from 45 Beacon apparently became irresistible to the peripatetic Otises, and after only 5 years on Mt. Vernon, they built another house. Beacon Street facing the Common is not a very restful location today, but Mt. Vernon remains tranquil, beautiful and unspoilt.

Before 85 Mt. Vernon, there was yet another Harrison Gray Otis House, also designed by Bulfinch, completed in 1796 and located at 141 Cambridge Street. Bowdoin Square, a block from Otis #1, was, when cows were still ruminating on Beacon Hill, the "ne plus ultra" of 18th century residential Boston. The present day view of Otis #1 below, looking down the slope of Hancock Street, is deceptively tranquil. It suggests, however, what the neighborhood must once have been like. Bowdoin Square today is a daunting intersection of 4-lane streets bordered by 12-story commercial buildings. The square and its environs had already begun a long (if slow to manifest) decline into commercialism even before Otis built his house. In 1793, the West Boston (now Longfellow) Bridge transformed sleepy Cambridge Street into a major thoroughfare over the Charles River, an event Otis failed to interpret as a death knell for the neighborhood.

Here's the original elevation for Otis #1, completed in 1796 from plans drawn by the famous Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844). Besides mansions, markets and the U.S Capitol Building in Washington D.C., the celebrated Bulfinch also designed the Massachusetts State House, completed in 1798 on another former Copley pasture up on Beacon Hill, a pasture which belonged to Harrison Gray Otis. At the time of the Statehouse construction, Otis was already a former U.S. district attorney, member of U.S. House of Representatives and director of the Boston branch of the Bank of the United States. The Copley family, convinced they'd been bamboozled by a plugged-in politico with inside information, informed Otis that he owed them additional sums. Did he pay? That would be a no.

After less than 5 years on Cambridge Street, the Otises removed themselves in 1801 to Mt. Vernon Street. Otis #1 then embarked on an increasingly topsy turvy career. Every other Bowdoin Square mansion would eventually be demolished, but 141 Cambridge soldiered on, first as a progressively less elegant private house, then as two separate houses for two separate owners who split the place in two. From 1834 to 1835 the building was reunited as Motts Patent Medicated Champoo Baths, a sort of spa for ladies who "labor under diseases or infirmities." The Boston "Daily Evening Transcript" threw not a lot of light on the subject, by noting that the "celebrated female physician," Mrs. Mott, provided "remedies popular in Europe and Asia (for the cure of) all of the Chronic Diseases, Wounds, Ulcers, Absesses...Gout, Rheumatism, Tic Doloroux, Cancers..." and, well, you get the picture. From 1854 until after the Civil War, despite a row of shops erected in front of it, 141 Cambridge was a rather nice boarding house. Then it degenerated into a not very nice boarding house, after which it became a downright seedy rooming house.

Rescue came in 1916, when William Sumner Appleton (1874-1947), founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (forerunner of today's Historic New England), bought the house from Benoth Israel Sheltering Home and set about restoring it as SPNEA's new headquarters. In 1919, he bought the shops with the intention of pulling them down and restoring the front lawn. The project was hastened by the City of Boston's decision in 1925 to widen Cambridge Street, which made the continued existence of the shops moot. It also necessitated jacking the mansion off its original foundation and moving it 42 feet north.

The carefully restored Federal period interior of 141 Cambridge Street is a template for two centuries of colonial and colonial revival interiors in America.

On the east side of the center hall is a parlor and the owner's office. The view out the windows isn't what it was, but the room itself very much preserves the signature air of refinement that informs the best of late 18th and early 19th century American architecture.

On the north wall of the parlor is the door to Mr. Otis's office. The overmantel paneling is actually made of iron and conceals the owner's safe.

On the other side of the center hall is a dining room which connects to a serving pantry and kitchen in a north extension. My issue with old center hall houses, even beautiful ones like this, is the predictable and (lets face it) not very uninteresting floor plan.

The middle door in the image below opens onto a short corridor with the service stair on one side and the entrance to the original kitchen straight ahead.

Speaking of not interesting, there used to be 4 not interesting brick row houses on Lynde Street, directly behind and contiguous to Otis #1. When Cambridge Street was widened in 1925, two of them were demolished to make room for the relocated Otis house. What you're looking at below are the fragments of a late 18th century beehive oven, part of 141 Cambridge Street's original kitchen

Let's leave the kitchen the way entered it, and return to the main stair.

Gore Place, built in 1806 in nearby Waltham, is a very fine old mansion whose interior plan suffers from a careless intermingling of public and private spaces. The same thing is going on 141 Cambridge. Two major bedrooms, a dressing room and, of all things, the drawing room are all jumbled together on the second floor. This might have made sense in 1796, but later generations of sophisticated householders wouldn't have put up with it. Let's first visit Mrs. Otis's bedroom and adjoining dressing room, located on the east side of the second floor landing.

The drawing room, despite its inconvenient location, checks all the boxes under the category of "Why Federal Houses are Beautiful." It has fine proportions, high ceilings, a delicately carved mantel, mahogany doors with stylish mirrored insets, not to mention furniture that defines "delicacy made useful."

This gorgeous mahogany door connects the drawing room to a mysteriously un-purposed room. This in turn connects to the back stair hall, which leads to Mr. Otis's bedroom.

Harrison Gray Otis had a CV so heavy with honors it's a wonder it didn't sink. Besides a flourishing career in real estate, he was at various times a Massachusetts state representative, senator, speaker of the house, president of the senate and overseer of Harvard College. In 1969, his great-great grandson, Samuel Eliot Morison, published a book titled "1765-1848: The Urbane Federalist," in which, according to The New York Times, he described his "outgoing, beautifully mannered, socially inclined" ancestor's participation in the notorious Convention of 1815. I confess I had never heard of the notorious Convention of 1815 which, of all things, seriously debated a Federalist plan to take New England out of the Union. Morison describes Otis as a voice of caution in a "party of great talent and little sense," one whose end was hastened by said notorious convention. His bedroom is furnished as it would have appeared during 141 Cambridge's "better boarding house" period.

The pan at the foot of the bed is a primitive shower. You stand in the middle, are alternately soaped and doused with hot water, then step out into a large towel being held by your soaper/douser. Once you're dry, the s/d tips the pan and empties out the waste water through the spout on the right.

The back stair from the landing outside Mr. Otis's room leads up to a warren of small rooms and snaking hallways on the 3rd floor. There's been some repartitioning since Bulfinch's day, but it's hard to tell exactly when or where.

Another house down; it's time to go.

Fallout from the Hartford Convention of 1815 may have dealt a blow to the New England Federalists, but doesn't seem to have unduly damaged the career of Harrison Gray Otis. Between 1817 and 1822 he was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, and in 1829 was elected mayor of Boston.

Would that I could connect 141 Cambridge Street to another Harrison Gray Otis (1837-1917), a general in the Spanish American War and publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Alas, I can't, which is a shame since General Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler were as colorful a pair of villains as you could possibly imagine. In 2009 a PBS documentary described how the two of them turned the L. A. Times into a blunt instrument for busting unions, warping elections, and turning water - or the lack thereof - into a weapon for California real estate speculation. The movie "Chinatown" was inspired by this crew. Unfortunately, they appear to have had no connection whatsoever to 141 Cambridge.

The Harrison Gray Otis House is a property of Historic New England, formerly known as the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. I actually like the old name better, but that's just me. The new one is much more practical; the link is www.historicnewengland.org; and the author thanks HNE for use of its vintage images.

Those who like to quote the Bible, not that I'm one, relate the tale of two young mothers with two young babies. One of the latter, in the middle of the night, has suddenly died, and after an inconclusive - and I must say pretty improbable - custody battle, the matter is brought before wise King Solomon. This surprisingly accessible monarch listens to both, sends a flunky for a sword, then announces to his stunned petitioners that the obvious solution is to cut the baby in half.

What, you may wonder, does this peculiar tale have to do with a sea captain's mansion on one of the most beautiful residential streets in America? 34 Chestnut Street in Salem, Mass, seen here on the blizzardy afternoon of my recent visit, was built in 1821 by Captain Nathaniel West (not to be confused with the author of 'The Day of the Locusts'). Were I to leave it at that, you would have a very incomplete idea of why the house looks the way it does, what the people who built it were really all about, and what kind of place 18th century Salem really was.

Capt. West was a prosperous man, but not in the same league as his rich father-in-law, Elias Hasket Derby (1739-1799). When the revolution broke out, the uber-respectable, churchy, dignified Mr. Derby, like most of his confreres in the Salem shipping community, began to sponsor privateers. Privateering is a polite term for piracy, a government sanctioned license to prey, not just on combatant vassels but upon all commercial shipping involved in any way with one's enemy. Besides a personal fleet of 13 vessels, including the famous (or notorious, if you weren't an American) "Grand Turk," Derby owned a piece of every one of the 158 privateers that sailed from Salem harbor during the revolution. In the single year of 1781 to 1782 the Grand Turk alone captured a whopping 17 prizes, only a small percentage of which were British navy ships. The subsequent auctions of these vessels, in particular the noncombatant cargo ships whose holds were fat with expensive goods, netted huge profits.

Here's the back of 34 Chestnut. The kitchen door is on the right; the stairs on the left lead to a porch overlooking a side garden.

Elias Derby went legit again after the war, pioneering a lucrative sea trade with Russia, Europe and eventually the East Indies. His postwar respectability was rattled somewhat when his eldest daughter Elizabeth eloped with Captain West. The couple remained sufficiently in his graces for him to leave them a farm in nearby Danvers (now Peabody) when he died in 1799. The famous Samuel McIntire, or possibly his not quite as famous son Samuel Field McIntire, built the Wests a fine house on the property, which they called Oak Hill. Macy's in the Northshore Mall occupies the site today.

Let's return now to King Solomon. Captain and Mrs. West's marriage was gale tossed, to put it nautically, and culminated almost immediately after the new house was finished in a very public and highly juicy 1806 divorce. Mrs. West died in 1814, leaving Oak Hill to her 3 daughters, one of whom died, prematurely judging from the dates, in 1819. Enter Capt. West, stage right, heir to his late daughter's 1/3 interest in his former wife's house. He claimed this inheritance Solomonically, by amputating one third of Oak Hill, loading it onto log rollers, and having it dragged by teams of oxen 2 miles to Chestnut St in Salem. Unlike Capt. West, King Solomon didn't really cut his baby in half. After uttering a credible threat (and Old Testament types were nothing if not credibly threatening), the real mother cried, "Give the baby to her, just don't kill my baby!" while the fake mother growled, "If you don't give it to me, don't give it to anybody!" Which, to the clever king, immediately revealed their true identities.

I considered titling this post "The Perfect House," because of the renovation ordered by the woman in the photo below. Anna Wheatland Phillips bought 34 Chestnut for one dollar in 1911 and, after a top to bottom do-over, took occupancy in 1912 with her lawyer husband Stephen Willard Phillips, their 5-year old son, and a live-in staff of 3. The early 20th century, immediately before the First World War, is my favorite period for big old American houses. I like their scale and stately floor plans, the quality craftsmanship and especially their vintage technology. As readers of my column well know, old kitchens and bathrooms, in my eye, have as much aesthetic validity as white and gold drawing rooms or libraries paneled in quartered oak.

Anna and Stephen Phillips, the latter seen below with son Stephen, were rich, philanthropic and sufficiently preservation minded to recognize 34 Chestnut's aristocratic bones beneath an accretion of Victorian-era alterations and neglect. Their renovation architect, William Rantoul, transformed a rundown old house into a delicious combination of scholarly colonial-era reconstruction, 1912 mechanicals, and Edwardian-era room rearrangements.

The Chestnut Street facade contains 4 rooms dragged to the site by Captain West, in two separate pieces. On the west are a ground floor library and sitting room on the floor above; on the east are the drawing room on 1 and a bedroom above. In 1821, West sandwiched a new center hall between these fragments of his ex-wife's house, put up a service wing on the north, and added a third floor on top. Besides being home to a parade of Victorian Americans over the next century, 34 Chestnut did duty as a boarding house and a school for genteel young ladies before luck delivered it into the sensitive care of Mr. & Mrs. Phillips'.

Before being amputated from Oak Hill, the present library and drawing room were probably connected by an arch. Captain West's 1821 hallway separates them today. The drawing room mantelpiece has the refined air of a Samuel McIntire design. The furniture here and throughout the house represents 60 years of Phillips family occupancy. It was the wish of Stephen Phillips Jr., who moved here as a little boy in 1911 and died here 1971, that 34 Chestnut be opened to the public. In 1973, the Stephen Phillips Memorial Charitable Trust for Historic Preservation, under the direction of his widow, Betty Phillips, did just that.

On the other side of the hall is the library, containing another McIntire fireplace plus a particularly good looking Gothic revival bookcase from the Rantoul alteration of 1912.

The front door is behind me in the image below; the library is on my left; the drawing room on my right; the door straight ahead leads to the serving pantry. So where's the stair? Answer: out of sight to the left at the end of the hall. West left Oak Hill's stairway in situ (the house was repaired after his raid and stood for another 130 years) and built a new one here in Salem. We'll come back to the stairway, and instead turn right at the end of the hall for a look at the dining room, a very 1912 Colonial Revival makeover of its Victorian predecessor.

The dining room connects to the serving pantry through the door in the image below. How perfect is this big old house pantry, in daily use until 1971. Things to note: intact glass door cabinetry; original copper sink; a radiator that doubles as a dish warmer; original family china; a pass-through short cut for pantry bound food from the kitchen.

I was amused to recognize, in this veritable kitchen museum, the identical linoleum I grew up with in northern Westchester. My family's stove wasn't fired by coal, however, nor was our kitchen sink made of soapstone.

Herewith, a key to the kitchen annunciator: the PARLOR is the drawing room; the SITTING ROOM is above the library on the 2nd floor; OWN CHAMBER means the Owner's bedroom on the 2nd floor; GUESTS CH 2nd FLOOR is one of 3 guest rooms, 2 of which are on the 3rd floor; DRESSING ROOM is part of the owner's 2nd floor suite; the oddly labeled FRONT DOOR is located under the main stair, while the ENTRANCE DOOR opens onto Chestnut Street and the REAR DOOR leads from the kitchen to the back yard.

The back stair leads up to servants' quarters on the 3rd floor. We're going downstairs instead for a look at the basement laundry room.

There's a billiard room on the other side of the kitchen, although family and visitors would have entered it from a door on the north side of the dining room. It's used for visitor reception today and, save for a few vintage cigar burns on the mantlepiece, little hint remains of its original use.

We're going to return to the kitchen by way of a small anteroom that contains the original ice box. After that, we'll step into and out of the pantry, and wind up in the hall at the foot of the main stair.

Facing the foot of the stair is a small powder room. Can't miss that.

By the way, the door behind the stair is not the main entrance to the house. It is labeled FRONT DOOR on the annunciator, but opens onto a driveway that runs down the side of the house, ending in a yard out back. At the top of the stairs on 2, looking east past my patient and helpful guide Zoe, is the entrance to the owner's suite.

The owners' bedroom suite, like the dining and billiard rooms directly below it, is Rantoul's work from 1912. A brass house phone mounted on the wall facilitates communication with the staff. The en suite hallway, lined with closets, gives access to a terrific old fashioned bathroom, beyond which is a cheery corner dressing room or boudoir.

I know, I know...how many old bathroom pix can Foreman cram into one post? Answer: a lot. P.S. Note the dual descending flush pipes on the high tank toilet, something I've never seen. What I have seen, and actually saw again not 5 minutes ago, is the cup placed quietly beneath the questionable joint in the vintage plumbing. P.S. How about those drain levers? How cool are they?

The dressing room is off limits to the public, which doesn't include us.

The view below looks from the owners' bedroom, across the private corridor, and onto the 2nd floor landing. To the right beyond the archway is a guestroom, closed and full of storage, and a hall bath.

The hall in the image below overlooks Chestnut Street and separates the other two rooms that came from Oak Hill. To the left is a bedroom and bath intended originally for the Phillips' son, Stephen Jr.

The view is from the bedroom window. I had to drive home in this.

Across the hall is Anna Phillips' sitting room, filled with her possessions and personal papers, looking as if she might return at any moment.

Let's leave the sitting room, take the stairs to 3, and meet Zoe on the 3rd floor landing.

The third floor is divided about equally between the family and the help. The family side has two guestrooms (a meeting was underway in one), an I-don't-know-what-it-was room (maybe for sewing?) between them, and a guest bathroom with a timely reminder.

Servants' rooms and the servants' bath, distributed along a separate corridor above the owners' suite, can be separately accessed via the back stair that goes down to the kitchen. The conquest of electricity was not a foregone conclusion in 1912, ergo, the combination gas/electric fixture on the corridor wall.

We'll take the back stair to 2, then cut over to the main stair for the rest of the way down.

In 1875, despite missing shutters and an unexpanded rear addition, 34 Chestnut looked pretty much the way it does today. The photogenic snowstorm lent a magical air to the experience - plus a soupcon of terror to the drive home. Historic New England acquired the house from the Phillips Trust in 2006 and has been, as it has with all its properties, a most excellent steward. The link is www.historicnewengland.org.

"And now..." if I may crib a 43-year-old line from Monty Python, "...for something completely different." My old car, purring like a kitten these days, recently took me to Bethlehem, PA. I spent the night with my daughter and son-in-law, admired the baby, and continued the next day to Fonthill Castle in Doylestown, PA.

To describe this house as the gingerbread palace of an enchanted prince is not far from the truth.

The builder of Fonthill, Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), seen in the photo below embracing his dog Rollo, has the look of a "good little boy," which I don't think he was. Like myself, his middle name was his mother's before her marriage. The Chapmans and the Mercers were both prosperous - indeed, prominent - families, although Mercer's own father William, according to the Bucks County Historical Society, was "well bred, but without means." A rich aunt, Elizabeth (Lela) Chapman Lawrence (1829-1905), underwrote young Mercer's education, took him all over Europe, even built a substantial house, called Aldie, for his mother in Doylestown.

Fonthill, completed in 1912 when Mercer was 56 years old, engulfs an earlier structure. Crouched behind the triple arches in the image below is what used to be a free standing Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse dating from 1742.

Fonthill, seen below from the south, is a National Historic Landmark, called by some "An Architectural Treasure." Its unorthodox design and construction methods, however, led one contemporary critic to wonder whether its owner risked "being responsible for a house which might terrorize the whole neighborhood." What looks like a distant wing on the far right is actually a separate garage, built in 1913.

This house is a fantastic object, but I wouldn't classify it as a work of "architecture," partly because there was no architect. Mercer himself designed the thing, one room at a time, molding each of those rooms from blocks of clay (really), which he then stacked in a pile with little regard to interior traffic patterns or exterior appearance. Fortunately, the result is picturesque, albeit unlivable for all but a few. Except for the farmhouse contained within its eccentric embrace, Fonthill is constructed entirely of reinforced poured concrete, not the warmest of building materials, although the exterior gestalt is undeniably appealing.

Lucy the horse played a bit part in the production, which we shall get to in time.

The front door is on the east facade, facing the entrance allee.

Let's pause in the foyer - or what approximates a foyer - for a (very) few words about the long and distinguished career of Henry Chapman Mercer. Harvard 1879; admitted to the Philadelphia bar in 1881; then a career volte-face to archaeological exploration. Mercer, with the help of Aunt Lela, spelunked from Ohio to the Yucatan, eventually becoming the curator of American and Prehistoric Archaeoloigy at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1897 he started the company that would make him, for a time anyway, nationally famous. The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works of Doylestown, PA used a unique process to glaze and colorize so-called Mercer Tiles, whose historical designs and craftsmanlike appearance made them the ceramic darlings of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Arts and Crafts was a reaction to the late 19th century's soulless industrialization. Its proponents, "limousine liberals" in the minds of many at the time, plunged into a mindset of handmade anything, in lieu of goods, implements, furniture, you name it, produced industrially. One of the problems with Arts and Crafts was that only rich people could really afford the best of it. Its biggest problem, however, afflicts design work to this day, specifically work that is principally informed by intellect as opposed to appearance. Buildings whose ugliness is explained by some crackpot intellectual thesis as "referencing" something or other, are nothing new. That which architects and/or designers find symbolic or amusing often never occurs to the suffering public, who must endure wretched looking buildings until they either fall down or are demolished. But...I digress.

Mercer's Moravian Pottery hit the big time in 1901, when Isabella Stewart Gardner installed medieval-style flooring made entirely of Mercer tiles in her famous Boston mansion. Business was good before and booming after, but it wasn't until rich Aunt Lela died in 1905, and her will was settled in 1907, that Mercer inherited money sufficient to build Fonthill. From the start, the house was intended as a combination personal residence, giant catalogue of Moravian Tile products, and museum of tiles from around the world. It is, in fact, encrusted with tiles.

The main room on the main floor, called the Saloon, is one of several dramatic double-height chambers whose intended use and location could only perplex a Beaux Arts graduate. Big dinners were served in it during Fonthill's early years, despite the fact that it's nowhere near the kitchen. Then again, there is no designated dining room anywhere else, so why not eat here? Mercer possessed a sort of Bedouin mentality at mealtime, food being served wherever he happened to be.

The Saloon connects to the Morning Room, located at the southern end of the house. Tiles, tiles, more tiles, more structural columns, bewildering staircases, and a settee in its own little niche repeat an aesthetic theme seen throughout the house. Mercer's background in pottery presumably explains the decision to design rooms with blocks of clay.

I have been in many big old houses, and I'm one of those guys who never gets lost, but this place really had me foxed. In the images below we're traveling from the Saloon, across the not very well defined Entry Hall, to the Conservatory. Plans for the first four of Fonthill's interlocking levels appear at the end of this post.

A nice room for plants, if that's indeed how it was used. There are stories about the tiles in every room in the house, but we'll just glance and keep moving.

Let's recross the Entry Hall and head north into the serving pantry. Together with the main kitchen beyond it, the pantry occupies the interior envelope of the old farmhouse. For reasons unknown it is called the Front Kitchen on the plan. The ceiling in the Back Kitchen beyond it, which of course is just the kitchen, has been blown out to create another double-height space. What was originally a fireplace on the second floor of the farmhouse now hovers on the kitchen wall above the stove.

Fonthill's live-in staff had rooms on the upper levels of the north wing. Beneath those rooms, adjacent to the kitchen is one of the more elaborate servant halls I've seen. It's called the Oven Room, a reference to an antique stove that once heated it. It's once again a staff lounge.

Besides results of a lot of experimental concrete pouring, the basement contains a crypt - because every castle needs a crypt.

Without Mr. Eichenburger's excellent plans, I would have been quite unable to correctly locate the rooms in these photos. Of course, my helpful guide Dan knew Fonthill like I know Daheim. The powder room, an obligatory inclusion in every Big Old Houses post, is just outside the Library.

The Library connects to the Saloon, from which I climbed a flight of stairs, the location of which I've completely forgot, and arrived shortly at a 3rd level guest bedroom called the Yellow Room. Would that I had brought crumbs with me from the morning's breakfast muffin.

The Yellow Room and the adjoining West Room, each with en suite bath, are situated directly above the Library.

A corridor on the south flank of the house traverses the Map Room en route to Mercer's Study, another double-height chamber sitting on top of the Morning Room below.

Honestly, I don't have an over-fondness for the Arts and Crafts sensibility.

Mercer's bedroom, called the Dormer Room and seen in the images below, is, with unexpected logic, located next to his Study. A decade after moving in, the lord of Fonthill migrated from the Dormer Room to the Terrace Room, located one level up on the other side of the house. A lifelong retainer by the name of Frank Swain (1876-1954), whom Mercer hired at the age of 20 to help on archaeological digs and eventually made head of Moravian Tile, lived with his employer at Fonthill. Also living in the house was Mercer's housekeeper Laura, who also happened to be Swain's wife. When Mercer moved from Dormer to Terrace, Swain moved from Marine to Dormer. Meanwhile, Laura, on an hegira of her (searching for light and warmth perhaps) slept first in Pine before ending up in East.

Mercer never married and the mysterious intersection of stairways in the hall below might be a metaphor for who was actually sleeping with whom. The honorable state of bachelorhood, recognized for centuries before our own, now raises eyebrows. So here is a good place to address the enchantment we joked about at the beginning of this post. It's really no joke, however; poor Henry Mercer suffered from gonorrhea, an unhappy thing today but a real curse in the past. Who knows how he got it, or from whom. Alas, this dark family secret likely torpedoed his rumored engagement to the debutante daughter of a Baltimore socialite named Gustave Lurman. At least, that's one explanation.

At the other end of the 3rd level hall is a stair to the Columbus Room, named for its themed tiles.

Who was Rollo? The dog. What is the Wind Room to which these stairs lead? I dunno, but it's the last stop before the roof, from which there's an astonishing view of, among other things, the rest of the roof.

Let's take the stairs down and visit the Terrace Room on 4, where Mercer spent his last years.

Where was this staircase? I have absolutely no idea.

The East Room on the 4th level was Laura Swain's. Mercer's will gave Fonthill to Bucks County, subject to a life tenancy by the Swains. Laura outlived her husband by 20 years, staying at Fonthill until overcome by age and decrepitude, a fate that shadows us all. She was moved to a nursing home in late 1974, and died a few months later.

A creepy passage (let's be frank) runs north from the hall on 3 to the servants' wing. It passes what used to be an exterior window overlooking what used to be the second floor of the farmhouse, and is now the upper level of the kitchen. Beyond are former servants' rooms.

Everyone who worked on the construction of Fonthill, including Lucy the horse, is commemorated in (what else?) Mercer tiles mounted on a wall in the servants' wing.

Also on 3, placed oddly in the servants' wing, is a Smoking Room, next to which is the even more bewilderingly located Breakfast Room.

According to "Henry Chapman Mercer; An Annotated Chronology" published by the Bucks County Historical Society (of which Mercer, incidentally, was president), his "pro-German sentiments during World War I were misunderstood by some. True to the standards of the Victorian era of his youth, he found much to criticize about the modern age - women's hair and dress styles, the training and manners of the young, the novels of Hemingway..." In other words, he turned into a curmudgeon, another threat that shadows us all.

Doylestown's "Mercer Mile" contains not just Fonthill, but the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, seen in the image below, where you can still buy a floor, a backsplash or a fireplace, and the fantastical looking Mercer Museum. The latter was designed in 1916 with the same poured concrete look, and is filled with early American tools and artifacts. Is Fonthill beautiful? No. Did I have fun climbing all over it? You bet I did. The link, for castle and museum both, is www.mercermuseum.org.

Floor plans courtesy of Kurt Eichenburger, a puzzle master as well as a draftsman.

Today I am in Greenwich, CT, land of the hedge fund king and the $20 million "tear-down," a fate which may well await this fine mid-country Colonial Revival period piece from 1923.

Its intentional lack of flash - so scholarly, so restrained - reflects not only the rejection of Edwardian theatricality of the fashionable world of its time, but the architect's thoroughgoing familiarity with 18th century American design and detailing.

At 9200 square feet, you can hardly call this a mansion, at least by Greenwich standards. It was built for a 38-year old business executive named Louis William Dommerich (1885-1952), a Yale grad (Class of '07) and partner in a family firm that would in time become a part of Chemical Bank. Dommerich and his wife Elsa, whom he married in 1913, lived here and in New York with 3 children - Elsa, Clara and William. Interestingly, a 1914 Social Register lists the Dommerichs' Manhattan address as 314 West 75th St. What were they doing on the West Side? "Real New Yorkers live on the West Side," quipped a long departed grandmother of a society friend. "People from Pittsburgh live over there," (meaning Fifth Avenue).

The fashion for Greenwich started in the late 19th century. By the '20s it was thick with people named Converse, Milbank, Havemeyer, Rockefeller, Greenway, and generally acknowledged to be the richest town in the world. I don't know if it still is, but it sure looks that way. "Vanity Fair" describes the Greenwich grandees of today as "a closely knit, inscrutable group of men who run hedge funds..(and build)..swollen over-ambitious mansions...Who uses 25 parking spots? Does anyone sleep in all those beds?" Today's Big Old House isn't swollen, and it sits on 17 already subdivided mid-country acres, none of which bodes particuarly well for its future.

The Colonial Revival started in the late 1870s, when young American architects, brimful of post-Civil War nationalism, began a self-conscious search for a uniquely American style of architecture. The initial result was the so-called "Modernized Colonial," a pastiche of pre-revolutionary details - windows, eaves, dormers, bays, what have you - tossed into a figurative pot and shaken out in original combinations. This created undeniably original looking houses which, to the non-professional eye, just look "Victorian." P.S. The Shingle Style is a sub-category of Modernized Colonials.

Georgian symmetry, design discipline and common sense entered the picture in the 1890s, when society architects began giving rich clients grander sized but more compositionally balanced interpretations of the colonial tradition. Big Colonial Revival houses built between the '90s and the First War combine scale, formality and Edwardian detailing in a manner precisely to my taste. Today's house is another breed of colonial cat - scaled down, purposely restrained, rigorously scholarly in detail - but so well done I can't help but admire it.

The architect of this house has succeeded where the past practitioners of modernized colonialism failed. Historically correct design elements - gorgeous turned newels and balusters, wide plank floors, a well proportioned dado, recessed doors, correct reproduction hinges and hardware, etc., etc. - are employed in precisely the manner our colonial ancestors would have employed them. Of course, everything here is four times as big, but the result is an authentically American look with legitimate American antecedents.

Good Colonial Revival houses are notable for sunshine and light. Don't be fooled by the purposeful simplicity of the fireplace and cornice, the dado and the doors. This spacious drawing room was designed as an elegant setting for fine antiques.

There are 13 windows across the front of this house, 7 in the central block and 3 in each of the two flanking wings. A sunroom, designated as "South Porch" on the kitchen annunciator, occupies the ground floor of the southern wing. It is flooded with light from windows on three sides, plus a peculiar pair of glazed doors opening onto a walled garden on the south. Why are there two doors instead of one? Beats me. If the room were ever divided in half, you'd see evidence on the floor, which you don't. Plus which, the fireplace, an elaborate interpretation of some fairytale 18th century farmhouse kitchen, is located directly on axis with the two doors. Perhaps one of my readers will know the explanation, because I sure don't.

Let's return to the main hall (so colonial), admire a bit of repro (or possibly antique) hardware, and proceed to the library.

There is an almost modern simplicity to the library, whose design speaks eloquently to the architect's over-riding aesthetic of restrained good taste. Things to note here and in the adjoining powder room: a lack of elaborate moldings; unusual surface texture of the wall paneling; vintage ceramic flooring; beautiful colonial style hardware.

The dining room door, like others in the house, could be in Colonial Williamsburg.

A swing door to the right of the dining room fireplace leads to a modern (ca. 1923) serving pantry and kitchen. Had this house been built ten years earlier, it's even money the kitchen would have been in the basement. Locating it on the main floor made life easier for the servants. Save for the 1970s insertion of an unlovely pantry sink, and the substitution of new appliances in the surprisingly small kitchen, little has changed here since the house was built.

The rest of the main floor on the north wing is taken up by a former servant hall (disguised, it would seem, as a set from 'That '70s Show'), laundry room, servants' half bath, and a back hall stair to five maids' rooms on the floor above.

We, however, will take the main stair. The Palladian window at the top of it is actually a door to a terrace above the porch. The seat converts to a step, the diminutive double doors beneath the sill open inwards, and the double sash retracts into the ceiling.

More scholarly colonial design work is seen in this door on the south end of the stair landing. Beyond it is a private corridor giving access to a complex of 4 family bedrooms. Let's look first at the master, which is not overly large, has neither dressing room nor adjacent boudoir, and connects to a bathroom which lacks a separate servants' entrance. Mr. & Mrs. Dommerich apparently had a much simpler lifestyle than people in their position had a generation earlier.

Back in the private corridor outside the master, a door leads to a pair of cheerful corner bedrooms with shared bath which I assume belonged to the Dommerich girls. The box locks and strap hinges look like genuine antiques. The textured plaster is an homage to old farmhouse finishes.

In the image below, the girls' bedrooms are behind the camera and their bathroom door is on the right. The door to the private corridor is dead ahead; their parents' room is out of sight beyond it on the left; their brother's room, seen in the 2nd and 3rd images below, is beyond it on the right. The arched door in the distance marks the boundary between the private corridor and the second floor landing.

Three guestrooms and 3 baths flank the 2nd floor hall, which ends at the door to the servants' quarters.

The flooring and stair rail are simpler and the bedrooms smaller, but these cheery accommodations represent a quantum leap from the attic cubicles endured by earlier generations of hapless maids who cooked in the summer, froze in the winter, and hiked epic distances every time the annunciator buzzed.

Of course I went up to the attic, where I discovered that this rambling shingled manse was framed with steel beams.

I also checked out the basement.

Louis W. Dommerich died eleven days before Christmas, 1952. He was only 67. The "Times" described him as an insurance company exec, chairman of the board of L.F. Dommerich, clubman (Union League, Manursing Island, Indian Harbor Yacht, Greenwich Country Club), father of 3, and lifelong Republican. Mrs. Dommerich survived him by 14 years, dying in Greenwich in 1966. The present owner has been here since the early 1970s.

I try not to roll my eyes when I hear somebody calling a 2-acre property an "estate." I mean, get real. However, I suppose 17 acres on Round Hill Road does qualify. The aforementioned subdivision, which exists only on paper at the moment, is gentle as subdivisions go. The main house, heated pool, tennis court, small lake and caretaker's cottage of a type that city people kill to rent, sit on 8.74 acres.

The large building in the image below, now altered into apartments but probably built as a garage sits together with a small guesthouse on 2.1 acres to the north. The diminutive pavilion we glimpsed at the foot of the walled garden is on a 2.11 acre plot. Two additional 2-acre lots are completely out of sight and accessed from an earlier subdivision road called Sheffield Way. Perhaps you'll buy the whole thing for $16 million, keep it together and save this very worthy house. Bill Andruss of Sothebys represents the owner; his email is bill.andruss@sothebyshomes.com.

There was nothing I could do about that tacky truck parked out front. I had to get to work.

Here's a detail of Stanford White's iron railing, yet one more good reason to love big old houses. Not many people would bother with this sort of detail today, or even notice if it were missing.

The name of this house is Daheim, and I've lived in it for 33 years. Had it been mine, I would have been deprived of it long ago, but that's another story. Until 1889, it was just another boring post Civil War balloon frame farmhouse of no particular merit. Then a German Horatio Alger type named Charles F. Dieterich (1836-1927) came along and enlarged the house (on three separate occasions) and the property on which it stands (by purchasing fifty - yes 50 - adjacent farms) until both reached their present gratifying proportions.

A feature of civilized living in a big house is the owners' bedroom suite. Mr. & Mrs. Dieterich's is a particularly good one, although its appeal is more the result of chance than planning. The original alterations to the house - indoor plumbing, a better kitchen, more bedrooms - were designed by James E. Ware (1846-1918) and intended to make the place more livable until something grander could be built. Instead, Dieterich became unexpectedly fond of it. Having initially erected one tower on the west in 1889, he added another on the east in 1896, then capped off his sprawling wooden wedding cake in 1912 with a third floor between the towers (supported by invisible steel beams) and a stone service wing in the back.

Daheim has more than a few design shortcomings, but the owners' suite isn't one of them. So let's get out of the cold and have a look at it.

With neither hall nor foyer to mediate the transition, it is very awkward to walk directly from the out of doors into the drawing room. It's also hard to call this a drawing room, or even a living room. We've always just called it the Front Room. The beautiful quartered oak paneling has darkened with age. The original golden color is preserved on the sliding door, protected for decades within the walls.

The library is beyond the Front Room, spang in the middle of a sort of express lane that runs from the front door to the dining room beyond that door in the distance. In the summer, when we keep everything open, there's a 115-foot enfilade from front door to dining room fireplace. The view has impact, even though the fireplace is annoyingly off axis. You can't count on much privacy in the library, however, what with people traipsing back and forth between the stair hall and the front door. Before the east tower was built, the library was the dining room which, from the standpoint of sophisticated planning, made even less sense.

We'll skip the library and jump ahead to the main hall, where you can admire my General Grant-ish staircase. Daheim's official front door is in this room, behind the camera. Like modern subdivision ranch houses, the front door here is so inaccessible that using it never occurs to anybody. Instead of three concrete steps to an unused lawn, mine opens onto a wrap porch supported by 52 columns. It is a walk of several minutes from the door to the porte cochere, so of course nobody comes in this way. There are 4 other stairways in the house, but this one is the flagship. It's been jiggered around repeatedly; I'm pretty sure the newels at the bottom were salvaged from some earlier version.

Like the paneling in the Front Room, the woodwork on the main stair used to be a lot brighter and I could probably refinish it with spectacular results. (Not going to happen). The carpenters who built this house were very good, but they did so without benefit of a French decorateur. Daheim's woodwork was all mass produced, all from builders' catalogs.

Those double doors are the entrance to the owners' suite. Of note on the second floor landing: vintage Lincrusta on the walls; gilded canvas on the ceiling; brass finials on the newels; and an endearing, if surpassingly ugly, chandelier

Daheim may lack a proper main floor entrance, but it does have a very excellent lobby at the center of the owners' suite. To the east of this lobby was Mrs. Dieterich's room, with small dressing room and bath attached. To the west was her husband's dressing room, bedroom and bath. These rooms occupy the entire southern facade of the house, with views of broad lawns and (before the trees grew) an elaborate formal garden (now maintained as a walled orchard) and a distant lake.

Painted canvas ceilings, stenciled burlap wall coverings and catalog woodwork were all chosen in order to save money in the temporary house. Age has conferred upon them a new respectability. The (probably garish) original colors of the ceiling have faded deliciously. The former fire engine red of the burlap has oxidized to a tasteful brown. Most houses like Daheim have either burned down or been demolished. The elaborate interiors that offended aesthetes of the past now look interesting.

Mrs. Dieterich's bedroom is immediately east of the lobby in the tower addition of 1896. During our first summer here, back in 1982, I went to Surrogate's Court in Poughkeepsie to look up Dieterich's will. Among the documents on file was a 1927 inventory that itemized all the furniture and paintings in the house (including an unexpectedly good collection of Impressionists) and indicated who slept where.

My former wife and I, being disinclined to sleep in separate bedrooms, thought long and hard about which to make our own. We decided eventually on his, not hers. Since Mrs. D's had an additional door to the second floor landing, we made it into a guestroom, and as a gag called it the Imperial Suite. The name stuck for 30 years. Occasional Imperial guests turned into permanent guests, until the last of them left last fall. At that point I reunited the owners' suite as it was meant to be, and made this room into my study. I am writing these words at that big mahogany desk right now.

A fireplace identical to this one sits in various dining rooms on Manhattan's West Side, rooming houses in Buffalo, restorations in Back Bay, etc., etc. It is very, very 1890s, and straight from a catalog.

How can you not love a house with light fixtures like these?

The door to the left of the fireplace goes to Mrs. D's bathroom.

Built in stages between the 1880s and the First World War, Daheim is a museum of American bathroom technology. This one is almost, but not quite, the most modern in the house.

Shortly after moving here from Tuxedo, my friend Christopher Gray gave me the Rotogravure section of a vintage New York Tribune. Covering a third of the front page was a photo of Daheim, and above it the headline: "Charles F. Dieterich is Making Daheim, his Country Home, a Delight to the Eye of Architect and Gardener." The caption under the photo reads, "The Italian Garden..."(which, believe me, was a stretch) "...and Temporary Dwelling House of Mr. Dieterich. The house will soon be replaced by a new one." The date was November 16, 1902, six years after Mrs. D's bedroom was built.

Since restoring the original owners' suite, I've left the sliding door between the lobby and my study open. For the last 30-plus years, however, we kept it closed, referring to the former lobby as the Plant Room. The only plant still there has grown so huge and pot-bound that I've decided to just leave it alone. The architecture of the Plant Room - cozier, smaller, busier, pathologically inventive - clearly predates that of Mrs. Dieterich's bedroom, where comparative restraint prevails.

In the other direction from the lobby are Mr. Dieterich's dressing room and bedroom, which my former wife and I once shared, and which I now share with my cat (see photo above). Before the east tower was built, Mr. & Mrs. D also shared this bedroom. The dressing room may have been her boudoir. After '96 it may have become his study, or maybe not.

My dressing room is one of the few surviving farmhouse rooms from the 1860s. The corner fireplace is an obvious Queen Anne addition, although the mantel doesn't look very Queen Anne to me. Perhaps it was salvaged from elsewhere in the house.

The ceilings in the towers are higher than those in the farmhouse, which requires a step up to get to each of the owners' bedrooms.

This is a wonderful bedroom, not just because of its generous size, bow front, picturesque solid cherry woodwork, and masses of all-day sunshine, but because of the striking contrast between its design and finishes and those in the rest of the suite. Three distinct periods of American architecture are contained within one (admittedly accidentally) well planned series of rooms - 1890s Victorian with hints of classical revivals to come; domestic rural 19th century farmhouse; and fashionable Queen Anne from the 1880s.

I brought the sink with me from Tuxedo. To my mind it is a work of industrial art. The toilet is clearly new(ish). The tiled walls and floors and borders are to those in Mrs. D's bathroom, as the phone you were carrying around with you ten years ago is to the one you've got today.

Let's exit the bedroom and retrace our steps across the dressing room. The 5-panel 19th century door with rosettes in the corners of the surround is of a type one sees in zillions of old American buildings.

I'm pretty sure there used to be a painted canvas ceiling in my bedroom too, though heaven only knows what happened to it. The one in the lobby is worth a second look.

At various times during the last 150 years, my house has been pampered by servants, trampled by hippies, allowed to freeze up by a woman whose life was falling apart, and locked up by a heavy handed estate manager who wanted to tear it down. The first time I saw it, the rooms were piled with storage and secured with padlocks hung on anchor plates nailed directly into the woodwork.

What do I really know of Mr Dieterich? He made his millions by himself; his son called him "gov'nor"; his daughter-in-law ran away with Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt's coachman; he was friendly with a forgotten cartoonist named Bert Cobb; and according to the head gardener's son, an elderly man who dropped in on us one afternoon 25 years ago, he hated cats. This must explain the Bert Cobb cartoon below, found in a barn on the estate.

I confess I am put off by people who introduce themselves with a first name only. Youthful customer service people on the other side of the globe who insist on calling me "John" are equally annoying. All life is not a 12-step meeting. William Livingston (1723-1790), seen in the (probably very) inaccurate portrait above, would hardly have introduced himself simply as "William." This gentleman scion of one of America's most legitimately aristocratic families attended Yale, read law, wrote verse, had 13 children (really) and, in 1760, began accumulating land outside bucolic Elizabethtown, NJ, as today's not-so-bucolic Elizabeth was then known.

Having amassed 120 acres of woods and fields adjacent to the Elizabeth River, Livingston built the elegant small mansion in the image below. Its gambrel roof, classical quoins and matching wings (both were originally one story high) speak eloquently to the architectural aesthetic of America in the 18th century. The idea was to retire here, write poetry, farm, contribute to the community and grow old in the comfort of an extended family. Instead, he was swept up by the American revolution, became a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses, was first brigadier general of New Jersey's wartime militia, then first governor of the state. During much of the war he literally lived on the run while battles raged and British troops sacked his new house. Returning home in 1783, he repaired the damage and, judging from correspondence of the period, christened the place Liberty Hall. He didn't enjoy many more years here, however, as he died in 1790 at the relatively early age of 67.

Before Livingston's death, in anticipation of a visit by Martha Washington, a second floor was added to one of the wings. Other than that, Liberty Hall remained pretty much unchanged for almost 80 years. During that time it bounced from one cultured country house type to another, before winding up in 1833 in the hands of Colonel John Kean - which rhymes with "cane." There is a certain poetry to Liberty Hall's chain of ownership but, like certain obscure poems, it is not easy to follow. Kean inherited the house upon the death of his grandmother, Susan Livingston Kean Niemcewitz, who was, coincidentally, a niece of the original builder. Mrs. - or, more property, Countess - Niemcewicz renamed the house Ursino in honor of the ancestral estate of her 2nd husband, Count Julien Niemcewicz (1758-1841), a Polish patriot who spent the last 24 years of his marriage to the former Mrs. Kean on the other side of the Atlantic, an arrangement that worked better in the 19th century than it does today. After the countess's death in 1833, her heir, Colonel Kean, together with his wife Lucinetta Halsted Kean, produced eleven more children, nine of whom survived, necessitating the mansionization of Ursino in several stages. The image below shows the house in the 1850s. Livingston's sweet 2-story provincial Georgian country seat has become a 3-story Italianate mansion. The original house is actually all still there, interiors intact, sitting beneath a large Victorian hat.

Before he died in 1895, Col. Kean added wings and a tower on the north - the the top of the latter just peeks over the roofline in the image below - and a virtually free standing 3-story library and guest wing on the west. Col. Kean, whose military rank stemmed from a stint on the staff of New Jersey Gov. William Pennington, was a rich man - a lucky thing, with all those children. He was a bank and utilities president, a local mill owner, and when he died, after 62 years at Ursino, he did so in the very fulness of Victorian era success. Kean left the house to his son, United States Senator John Kean, subject to a life tenancy by his widow. He left the farm on the other side of Morris Ave. to another son, Hamilton Fish Kean. The widow died in 1912, at which point her bachelor son, the senator, moved into Ursino, where he himself died 2 years later.

Still with me? It gets simpler from here on. The next owner was the bachelor senator's nephew, a World War I vet named Captain John Kean (1889-1949) seen in the image below. Kean was another bank and utilities president, as well as the uncle of future New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. In 1925 Capt. Kean married the daughter of John Stewart Barney (1869-1924), a prominent and prolific New York architect whose firm, Barney & Chapman, designed a splendid Elizabethan Revival castle in Tuxedo Park owned, during a palmy period in earlier life, by yours truly. Mary Alice Barney Kean (1902-1995) inherited her father's taste and appreciation of architecture. As president of the Elizabethtown Historical Foundation, first woman trustee of the New York Historical Society, governor of the New Jersey Historical Society, etc., etc., she was, God bless her, a tireless advocate for historic preservation throughout her long life.

When Mrs. Kean's husband died in 1949, Ursino and most of Union County - and indeed most of Nassau and even parts of Queens - was still in the country. Rapid change was coming, however, as postwar sprawl rolled forth from America's urban centers like so many unregulated tsunamis. In 1958, Green Lane Farm, the name Mrs. Kean's brother-in-law had given his property across the road, became the campus of New Jersey State Teachers College. Subdivisions bloomed all around Ursino, commercial strips proliferated, and former farm fields shrank by the hour, so it seemed, until they disappeared altogether. For nearly half a century after her husband's death, Mrs. Kean carried on at Ursino in the midst of all this, accumulating grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and directing good works from the only house of scale anywhere nearby. In 1974 she resurrected the name Liberty Hall and began to prepare the house for a future as a museum. Liberty Hall survives today, chock full of family pictures and furniture, its formal gardens and integrity of site remarkably intact. By the way, that ancient tree out front was planted in 1770 by William Livingston's daughter, Susanna, probably during a picnic excursion while the house under construction.

There's often an appealing practicality - wedded to an equally appealing lack of architect's ego - to old additions tacked onto older houses. The white shutters in the view below of the east facade indicate the only visible portion of the original Livingston house. The two floors above them date from the 1850s. The rest of what we see, including the tower on the right, was built in the 1870s. It's a jumble, but a pleasing one.

Except for fireplaces, furniture and chandeliers, Livingston's "great hall," as tourist literature persists in calling rooms like this, hasn't changed since 1772. In this room in 1774, the future first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay (1745-1829), married Livingston's daughter, Sarah.

At the east end of the hall is the door to the drawing room, located in what was originally the one-story wing on the east. Save for the 1870s gasolier and a drop dead gorgeous Greek Revival fireplace, it is essentially unchanged from 1772. The fireplace, incidentally, is salvage from a demolished Kean townhouse on lower Second Avenue, arguably Manhattan's most fashionable thoroughfare before the rise of Fifth.

At the western end of the hall is the door to the dining room, originally built, in the way of very old houses, as a bedroom. Features to note: an original chandelier; another fireplace from Second Avenue; and a fine Heriz rug, one of many beautiful antique orientals scattered through the house.

In the 1870s, what had originally been another ground floor colonial era bedroom was transformed into a serving pantry. Behind the door on the right in the first image below is the elevator. That's a silver safe in the second image, recessed into a wall beside what was once a bedroom fireplace.

The corner door beside the dumb waiter leads to the dining room and to a back stair down to a new kitchen - well, new in the 1870s. The now disassembled kitchen, used today for exhibition space, was in daily use until Mrs. Kean's death in 1995.

In the image below, we're back in the great hall looking north to the main stair. In the distance is a door to the formal garden, which we'll visit before we leave. To the left of the stair hall is the bedroom that was made into a pantry. To the right, a corridor leads to a small parlor or reception room with the unmistakeable high-ceilinged, bow-windowed air of the 1870s.

Outside the parlor is a glazed porch overlooking the garden. Hard to believe, isn't it, that we're in the most urbanized part of New Jersey.

Let's recross the parlor, retrace our steps down the hall, and take the stairs to the second floor. On the first landing we'll peek into a low-ceilinged room I'm told was once occupied by slaves.

There are 7 bedrooms on the second floor (more in the library annex) plus four bathrooms. The latter look to have been installed at about the time Captain Kean married Miss Barney in 1925. The stair in the middle of the first image below leads to childrens' rooms on 3. We'll pay a visit first to the 2nd floor master bedroom, which sits directly above the drawing room.

Mrs. Kean spent her (almost) half century of widowhood sleeping in the room next door.

Among the family photos on the mantelpiece and dresser tops is this of Mrs. Kean's dapper looking father. In 1922, J. Stewart Barney, having forsaken architecture to become a painter, combined 2 modest brownstones on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 65th Street, constructing a north facing atelier on the 65th St. side. He didn't enjoy it for long, however, as he died in 1924. After that it was mostly closed, eventually becoming a kind of spooky looking haunted house. When his daughter died in 1995, jewelry designer Barry Cord bought, restored and lived in it until the value of the land became too impossible to resist. A new and not bad looking condominium tower, developed by Toll Brothers of all people, has just opened on the site.

Mrs. Kean saved her father's telephone and kept it beside her bed. Many of us remember when telephone exchanges told you where people lived. Rhinelander, Butterfield and Templeton were smart East Side exchanges; Watkins and Pennsylvania were in the business district; Trafalgar and Endicott were on the West Side, about which, back then, the less said the better.

Adjoining Mrs. K's bedroom is a small dressing room and an untouched vintage bathroom.

Let's return to the 2nd floor landing and stroll through a trio of bedrooms, with a bath in between, all of which overlook the front lawn and Susanna Livingston's tree.

This was the room reportedly built for Martha Washington. I'm getting a bit surfeited with bedrooms, so we'll just glance at one more before taking the back stair to the servant's quarters on 3.

The third floor was shared by servants on the west and children on the east, their respective domains separated by an etched glass door. Trunks full of nifty stuff must have provided untold hours of entertainment to Liberty Hall Foundation workers who helped open the house to the public in 1997. The best room on the 3rd floor didn't belong to a Kean, but rather to the family's cook.

There is a 4th floor, accessed via a twisting stair behind the cook's room. It contains one nifty room of the sort you see and think, "Wow! Would this ever be a great place to...." But somehow, the rest of that sentence never quite comes to you.

Time to go back downstairs.

But wait, there's more. Liberty Hall Director Bill Schroh is taking us to the library wing, that skinny 3-story building separated from the rest of the house by a sort of Bridge of Sighs from the dining room.

Few visitors see Mr. Kean's library, which still contains his books and furniture. That's not a billiard table under the plastic; it's just a lot of temporary museum storage. Bedrooms on the two floors above are used today as offices.

One flight down from the library is a greenhouse that's still in operation.

And we're still not done. Back in the old part of the house, beneath the main staircase are steps down to the original Livingston kitchen, restored (although not used) by Mrs. Kean in the 1970s.

The basement laundry room is next door to the antique kitchen. Many years ago I lived in a house with the same vintage dryer. You hang damp laundry on racks that roll into a heated chamber, and roll them back out when everything's dry. P.S. I wouldn't want my cat anywhere near that washtub.

Would that I could have taken better pictures of Liberty Hall's garden, an elaborate and formal affair that has been loved and cultivated since the 18th century. It was warm on the day of my visit, but the snow was still above the tops of my Bean shoes.

Equally interesting is the restored carriage house which, if I wrote about carriages instead of houses, could be the subject of a separate post.

Liberty Hall Museum is a 26-acre National Historic Site owned by and nestled against the 185-acre campus of Kean University. Kean with a total student population of 16,000, together with the old Kean mansion with a whopping total of 50 rooms, appropriately commemorate a family which the "New York Times" described in 1974 as a "political 'Who's Who' unmatched by any in the nation. A Kean was the first cashier of the Bank of the United States, having been appointed by George Washington; two were United States Senators; two sat in the House of Representatives; one is a former Speaker of the State Assembly and another is a former mayor of Bedminster." In 1982, eight years after that article was published, Thomas H. Kean became the 48th governor of New Jersey. Liberty Hall was a happy discovery for me, who didn't expect it in Union, NJ. Open to the public and well worth a visit, the link is www.kean.edu/libertyhall. (Vintage images courtesy of John Kean Collection, Liberty Hall Museum).

A Postscript on Shutters

Locust Valley Lockjaw

Ars longa, vita brevis

Third Time's the Charm

A Week Without Old Houses

Time Travel in Onteora Park

A Finale, of Sorts

Mamie Fish

Liberal Towers

Happy New Year from "Big Old Houses"

Lucky it was Over Here

Yonkers, of all places

Saved by a Golf Course and a Patrician Old Lady

"...a party of great talent and little sense."

A Solomonic Compromise

Something Completely Different

An Under-appreciated Classic

Mamie Fish

The Owners' Suite

A Noble Antique in the Urban Sprawl