BIG OLD HOUSES

At the end of the 18th century, what we call the Upper East Side looked like this - one gracious old country place after another, perched on bluffs or at the heads of long sloping lawns, enjoying unsullied vistas of glittering waters on the Sound, as the East River then was called. Much loved by generations of Knickerbockers with names like Beekman and Schermerhorn, Gracie and Astor, Rhinelander and Jones, these vanished waterfront estates stretched in an almost unbroken line all the way to Hell Gate.

Three generations in the same house lend an air of permanence to any locality. However, the pre-revolutionary look of Manhattan's countryside north of New York turned out to be very fleeting. Development along the shoreline had been mostly elite, but those acres immediately inland were sketchy from the start. Area-wide decline began in earnest with imposition of the infamous Commissioners Plan of 1811. Devoid of even a whiff of imagination or sensitivity, the new street plan decreed that anything and everything old and/or charming be leveled, removed and/or demolished in the name of the almighty right angle. The plan was implemented in stages, and only over many years, but already by the 1830s Third Avenue had been laid out and fairly built up, in a desultory way, with wooden commercial structures, almost to Harlem Bridge. Then in 1837, the Harlem Railroad came along, spewing smoke and cinders into the dispirited fields and increasingly blowsy woods. The railroad replaced a revolutionary era bridge over the Harlem marshes with a railroad trestle and, in the process, converted not just Harlem Village, but the single stop at 86th Street into into a pair of commuter suburbs. Abandonment of the old waterfront estates was wholesale by the 1850s, when the "Forty Thieves" ran the city council and Manhattan's sordid shantytowns were being cleared, Mugabe-style, to make way for Central Park. By the close of the Civil War, when the idea of a waterfront country place on the East Side had become an absurdity, a new reality took form. Boss Tweed's Dept of Public Works embarked on a furious and, yes, first class implementation of the Commissioners Plan as it applied to the East Side. Over a thousand laborers were plunged into the construction of streets, lighting and sewers, none of which was on the West Side. Why the focus east of the Park? Not a decision made for the public good, you can be sure. Tweed and his cronies had a scam; they bought tracts of unimproved lots, Tweed then ordered construction of immediately adjacent streets, after which the lots were sold for whopping profits. (A confession: my 3 vintage images are all of the same house - Mt. Pleasant, built by William Beekman in 1763, on a site adjoining today's Beekman Place. They capture the right mood, however, and the others were, after all, the same breed of cat).

Which brings me to the Madison-Park block of East 63rd Street, seen here looking east, on which I have lived - at least, during the week - for the past 14 years. From the late 1860s until the Panic of 1873, the East Side crawled with small time land speculators and independent builders, the latter erecting speculative brownstone-front rows of anywhere from 4 to 8 houses on practically every block. Fifth Avenue had big lots, big prices and big expectations. Third Avenue became the dividing line between the working classes to the east and the gentry to the west, a divide which, despite everything that has happened since, has never really been erased. The irony of the East Side, of course, is that during the 19th century, the gentry and the working classes swapped seats, so to speak. Despite the many luxurious buildings built east of Third Avenue since the 1954 demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated train, real estate customers still abound who, as we say in the business, "get nose bleeds if they cross Third Avenue."

After about 4 years of economic blood letting in the wake of 1873, the American economy staggered back to its feet. By the late 1870s, houses that had sat unsold were selling, and builders who had been licking their wounds were back building. To my archaeological eye, development on my block of East 63rd Street appears to have sprung from bare earth to unbroken street front in 3 to 5 years. Starting in the late 1870s, four separate rows of speculative middle class houses - two rows on the north side and two on the south - went up in rapid succession, or maybe even simultaneously. Despite elaborate disguises acquired during the last century-plus, they mostly survive. The building on my northeast corner is actually part of a 5-house row fronting Madison Avenue. It was a middle class product, perhaps a little bigger and better than its mid-block sisters. When Madison went commercial after the First World War, shops invaded ground floors up and down the avenue, bedrooms above were chopped into apartments and the owner of the house on my corner expanded it into a former rear yard on 63rd St. It stands today much as it has for almost a century, its ground level now occupied by Roberto Cavalli, an uber-chic clothing store for women who wear 8-inch heels and, if I am to believe the fashion blowups usually in the windows, keep cheetahs for pets.

I can safely date the Cavallo house to the late 1870s due to the deeply incised decoration in the window surrounds called Eastlake motifs. These are specific to a genus of mid- to late-1870s brownstone house labeled, for reasons obscure to me, as "Neo-Grec." Charles Eastlake (1836-1906) was a Brit who in 1868, at the age of 32, wrote a runaway best seller titled "Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details." Eastlake's ubiquitous influence is to blame for much of the Victorian era's dispiriting taste. The machine made geometry of Eastlake motifs is like a computer chip in your dog's shoulder - its result is instant identification.

Edith Wharton described the New York of her childhood, unlike our soft focus perception of it today, as shrouded in a "universal chocolate-colored coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried." Between the death of the Greek Revival and the bloom of the Queen Anne, Manhattan and Brooklyn underwent almost 40 years of brownstone fronted Italianate rowhouse construction, resulting in tractless urban neighborhoods of startling uniformity. Many of these neighborhoods still exist, in Harlem and especially in Brooklyn. However, streetscapes on the East Side, once equally brown and militarily regular, have, as a result of wandering fashion in early 20th century, undergone significant individual rebuilding. The image below shows the north side of 63rd between Madison and Park. You may not believe it - and perhaps you may not care - but what you're looking at started life as a uniform row of practically identical high stoop heavily corniced brownstone row houses. Edith would have hated them.

Two separate builders erected these houses. The westerly row was more upscale, each 3-bay house sitting on a 20-foot wide lot. The cornice second from the left in the image below is the only remaining piece of original construction fabric that survives in this row. The original 1880s facade of the house behind the construction netting was replaced long before my arrival with a sort of ersatz stucco Georgianization. I cannot guess what's coming next.

I find this house, the second in the row, of particular interest. When I came in 1999, its facade was faced with brownstone...well, faced on the upper stories, at least. Back when it was chopped into apartments (probably in the 1930s), the original high stoop was torn off (a depressing practice of the time) in order to provide more rentable space on the parlor floor. The demolition of ponderous stone stoop and ornate front door surround required reconstruction of the ground and parlor floor facades. Houses like this typically got new bibs made of brown-tinted stucco designed, as far as proportion goes, with an often unsteady hand. Deprived of heavy front door and window surrounds, the reconfigured parlor floor windows suddenly appeared under-scaled, not that anyone cared.

During my time on the block, this house has been gutted not once but twice for single family owners, in the course of which its rooming house facade has been carefully recreated in marble.

The other three houses in the row had degenerated into similarly nondescript stoop-less brownstone apartment buildings. They were bought by one owner (not all at once), demolished (in apparently unplanned stages), and reconstructed as a single luxurious rental building that only looks like 3 separate houses. A "premier pre-school" (according to the web) called the Garden House occupies not just the ground floor, but an enormous rear winter garden as well. The latter is sunk so deep in the earth that I honestly wondered, after observing the 30th or maybe the 40th container of dirt being hauled away, if the owner was expecting to reach Beijing. Upstairs are a few $10,000/month 1-bedrooms, plus a triplex on top which is bigger than the marble house next door.

The quality of construction in this building is about as good as it gets. The design aesthetic, however, has a slightly brutal, non-hand-drawn quality to it. Compare its door to the door on the house in the second image below, also on the block, also once a high stoop brownstone, but renovated at the beginning of the 20th century.

The easterly row was more modest than its competition to the west, each house being only 16-feet as opposed to 20-feet wide. This allowed for only 2 windows per floor overlooking the street instead of 3.

Stoop removal, notwithstanding the negative vicissitudes it has inflicted upon many an old house, has some respectable antecedents. In 1911, Elsie de Wolf and Ogden Codman tore the stoop off a typical brownstone house at 123 East 55th St. and replaced it with a formal lobby on the ground floor and an entrance court outside. The house was famous in its day and, in addition to its fashionable cachet, was a lot brighter indoors. The Georgian Revival facade of the Leash, a low profile club for aficionados of shooting and hunting dogs, looks to me like it dates from the 1920s.

Sheer chance has preserved a great deal of the original architectural fabric of this row. The vintage looking facade below, however, is a recent reconstruction. Stripped in the 1940s (or maybe the '30s, hard to tell) of cornice, stoop and window surrounds, it was smooth, featureless and dull until 2010, when everything was reapplied. Indoors, it's still very "Hollywood Regency."

The cornice on the left is from 1882; the one on the right from 2010.

The private house on the left in the image below gives a good idea of what the whole block used to look like. The early 20th century extension on the house next door illustrates how totally that look has been obscured.

Shortly after completion of its new Grand Central Terminal in 1913, the New York Central embarked on a massive beautification of Park Avenue, decking the railroad yard behind the terminal and converting its partly covered sunken tracks into a landscaped boulevard. Construction of upscale apartment houses, and even a spate of private mansions, promptly ensued. In 1923 J.E.R. Carpenter designed 580 Park, which anchors my block on its northeastern end. 580 is a superbly maintained coop with interesting layouts and a movie palace lobby. Fortunately, no one can any longer mutilate its facade with through-the-wall A/C, although that's probably more a function of landmark law than coop policy.

570 Park, facing 580 across 63rd Street, was an early entrant on the avenue, designed in 1915 by Emery Roth. Like most Park Avenue buildings it was built as a rental, but Roth designed it with admirable sensitivity to Delano and Aldrich's Colony Club under construction at the same time next door. (Hear that, Frank Lloyd Wright?) The bricks are redder than they look in this photo, and make a nice contrast with the white trim, which is marble at street level and glazed terracotta above.

Here's the south side of my block, with signature Upper East Side architectural variegation.

My apartment is in one of two old houses hiding behind that vaguely Art Moderne facade. They were originally part of a row of five, although some may have been demolished to make room for 570 Park.

The most easterly in the row looks like the house across the street, before the facade facelift. No one seems to know where the stone lion beside the front door comes from. My guess? A demolished ramp on the old elevated West Side Highway, but that's just a guess.

Years ago, while showing a back apartment at 45 East 62nd Street, I glanced out the window and was surprised to see that my building on 63rd, at least from behind, still looked like two old houses. The pair of brownstones to the right of my building have largely preserved their original facades - minus the stoops, of course. Judging from the sort-of-Arts-and-Craftsy 16-over-1 windows, I imagine the house with the oriel underwent a stylish update sometime around 1900.

Despite its aristocratic Federal Revival facade, the narrow lot on which this very good looking house stands makes me pretty sure it started life as a modest brownstone row house that was renovated in the early 20th century. The difference in floor levels makes me also think it was part of a now demolished spec row that extended to the right.

The brilliant looking mansion in the images below could be on Beacon Hill. It is a house today, but was designed in 1929 by Cross and Cross for a group of amateur flyers who called themselves the Hangar Club. Note Mercury wearing his winged cap under the pediment above the front entrance.

The Hotel Lowell, designed by Henry Churchill in 1925, replaces what was probably the rest of the Hangar Club row.

Rounding out my block is the Leonori on the corner of Madison Avenue, now a condo but designed in 1901 as an apartment hotel, a species seriously out of date for most of the last century. Layouts in the Leonori suffer from an ailment afflicting most former hotels; namely, it is full of hotel rooms. The period heft makes those of us who don't actually live in it grateful for it anyway.

I love my little apartment on 63rd St., which is as extremely small as my house in the country is extremely big.

I love my little terrace as well, which is full of blooming things in the summer, and from which I can gaze upon my block and understand what it is and what it was.

Soon after moving in, my terrace provided me with a ringside seat to a peculiarly "New York" story. It unfolded during construction of that rental building across the street, the one that looks like 3 new townhouses. There were, of course, rent regulated tenants in the original buildings, some of whom were disinclined to move. The owner eventually thinned their ranks to one pair of obstreperous holdouts who occupied the front and rear apartments on the 4th floor of the middle building. Having consolidated his remaining tenancy the owner began demolishing not just the 2 flanking houses, but also the facade of the occupied house, plus most of the 3 floors below the occupied apartments. Then the man in the front died, after which his apartment was obliterated literally overnight. There was an expected flurry of anti-landlord tabloid articles, which noted that the World War II vet in the back had still refused to move. Meanwhile, steel beams were being hoisted and riveted for new floors at different levels than those in the old buildings. This necessitated hanging a sort of sling that would support the remaining half-floor occupied rent controlled apartment while the original floor supports beneath it were removed. It hung there for a while, accessed via the original public stair, now in the middle of a construction site and open to the elements. Finally the tenant left, and in less than a day his former apartment disappeared as well.

Time to go inside....

...sit at my computer, and write all this up.

First there was a blizzard, then another blizzard (or nearly one), then a collapsed drawing room ceiling led to a last minute cancellation. The net result has been a string of field trip postponements. Ergo, I have only myself to present this week. I am seated on terrace steps at the Braes, Herbert Pratt's former country place at Glen Cove, Long Island. It's a very grand house ('Forget Gatsby,' posted on October 11, 2012) and I was happy that day. Next week: Winterthur, a remarkable building, quite aside from the treasures it contains.

The name of this place falls into an oddly foxy category. Like "Alma-Tadema" or "imprimatur" I have mangled it for years. Its stewards today are quite forgiving, even to their own employees, many of whom haven't really got it right. Winterthur, the Wilmington, Delaware mega-mansion built (well, really rebuilt) for Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), is pronounced like "Summer vacation" if you follow my analogy.

Although it's been enlarged over its 63-year career as a museum, 80% of what you see in these images was completed in 1931 as a private residence for Mr. du Pont, his wife Ruth Wales, their daughters Pauline and Ruth Ellen and 29 servants. Winterthur, at least to yours truly, is just as interesting as the famous collection of Americana that is displayed within it.

Incorporated within the western facade in the image above, lurking behind the two-story columned conservatory, is the ghost of a 12-room Greek Revival country house built by Antoine Bidermann and his wife Evalina du Pont. "Ghost" is a literal description. The shape of the old house may persist but every vestige of its original architecture has been replaced. Mr. Bidermann bought the land in 1834 from the estate of his wife's late father, gun powder king Eleuthiere Irinee du Pont, then started on the house 5 years later. If I were to name a house after my ancestral village, I'd just have to call it New York. Antoine Bidermann named his house Winterthur, commemorating an undoubtedly more authentic ancestral village in Switzerland. (P.S.'Preserved in Amber,' recorded here on 10.22.13, records my visit to father-in-law du Pont's house, now called Hagley).

After Evalina Bidermann's death in 1866, her son sold Winterthur to his uncle, Henry du Pont, who didn't live there, but continued to operate the farm and rented out the house. In 1876 he made a present of it to his newly married son, Civil War Colonel and future Delaware Senator Henry Algernon du Pont (1838-1926). In 1884 it got a high hipped roof with faintly frenchified dormers.

By 1904 Winterthur had been mansionized - fetchingy, I think - to the designs of the Philadephia firm of Elliston Perot Bissell (whose first wife was a du Pont) and his cousin, Robeson B. Perot. In 1902, with the alteration well underway, the senator's wife Pauline du Pont suddenly, prematurely (she was only 53) and rather mysteriously died. The senator and his 22-year-old son, Henry Francis (a.k.a. Harry), saw the house project through to the end, not that there was much else they could do. Fourteen years later, upon his 1916 marriage to Ruth Wales, Harry du Pont brought her home to Wilmington, where they shared the house with his widowed (and famously difficult) father. By the early 1920s the young Harry du Ponts had houses in Southampton, Boca Grande and Park Avenue, but Harry's center of gravity was, and always would be, Winterthur.

Now enter Albert Ely Ives (1898-1966), a devilishly good looking architect who, among other commissions, built a house in Boca Grande for Harry's cousin, Isabella du Pont and her husband H. Rodney Sharp. Everybody had a crush on Ives, with the notable exception of available du Pont daughters. Fleeing bursting Florida land bubbles, Ives landed on his feet in Wilmington, where he made stylish alterations to the Sharps' local manse, called Gibraltar. He also got a contract from Pierre du Pont to build a house for Bessie Gardner du Pont, whose vindictive former husband Alfred had demolished his ex-wife's house on a week's notice. That, however, is a story for another time. In 1926, Senator du Pont died and left Winterthur to Harry, which, together with the spate of du Pont family commissions, was "Kismet" for Ely Ives.

Ives had a distinguished CV, working at various times in the '20s for Theodate Riddle, Carrere and Hastings, Trainor and Fatio, even Addison Mizner. His enlargement of Winterthur, designed in 1927 and built between 1929 and 1931, included virtual demolition of the existing house. Winterthur's new steel innards look to be surrounded by some of the original fabric, but not much.

Besides rebuilding what was already there, Ives added an enormous wing. The engaged columns seen on the extreme left of the second floor on the elevation below were originally part of an open porch on the back of the older house. "He was always sniffing around my sisters looking for a wife to put him on easy street," Irinee du Pont observed to Winterthur historian Maggie Lidz. "Well-dressed, smooth, pushy, 'Don't Burt Ives me' became part of the family lexicon. He would highly approve of you giving a lecture about him."

The rooms in my house have names as well (at lest, some do), but nothing like this. There were 74 telephone extensions at Winterthur.

Here's the house today as seen from the south. The shape of the older portion is readily discernible on the left. If you look closely, you'll see the aforementioned back porch, now subsumed by the Ives addition of 1931. On the far right is a museum office wing built in 1957.

Here it is from the north, seen from across a divine swimming pool, which would be more divine if the museum hadn't painted it black and pretended it was a pond. du Pont was as engaged in the development of his gardens and grounds as he was with his house, and involved himself intensely - his MO in everything he did - with both Marian Coffin and Ely Ives.

The service courtyard (the kitchen was 4 floors up, accessible by elevator) was located at the eastern end of the building. It's been replaced by new museum construction. In the image below, exhibition space occupies a 1992 addition on the left; the museum entrance is inside the glazed pavilion in the middle; on the other side of the pavilion is the 1957 office wing, distinguishable by its roofline from the earlier Ives addition; the low Crowninshield Library and Conservation Building on the right, built in 1969, plays a valuable preservation role but no aesthetic role whatsoever.

Visitors to the museum enter the building on the south side of the entrance pavilion, seen below. The bus shuttles back and forth from parking fields. It's hard to imagine a house as big as Winterthur being obscured by anything, but from this vantage point, you can't see it at all.

I like to think of myself as a front door kind of a guy, so let's forget the museum entrance and imagine ourselves entering as guests. Ives' 1931 addition, as Ms. Lidz describes it, is an "idealized cast stone version of an 18th century house." The specific model was Port Royal, built outside Philadelphia in 1763 and demolished in 1928 - not before Harry du Pont salvaged some of its woodwork. Maggie calls Ives' front door a "jazz-age riff" on Port Royal's original, which is true, although putting it that way might confer more aesthetic virtue than is warranted. The disconcerting stare of Winterthur's facades is partly a function of sun-blocking plastic membranes that obscure the 12 over 12 windows. Removal of these is planned for the near future.

Here is the master of the house, Henry Francis (Harry) du Pont, painted in 1914 by Ellen Emmet Rand. When the senator died in 1926, Harry inherited not just the house but a huge block of DuPont company stock. The shares were worth $177 apiece in 1926, $322 in 1927, and $500 each by 1928. During the '20s, E.I. du Pont de Nemours had metamorphosed from a manufacturer of gunpowder into an immensely profitable chemical company. It made the already prosperous du Ponts hugely rich, and allowed Harry in particular to pursue his passionate collecting of Americana with no financial restraints. Winterthur was a museum from the beginning, albeit a private one, it's salons and hallways, guestrooms and dining room, drawing room and library all "historicized" with priceless antique art and furniture.

Mrs. du Pont, nee Ruth Wales (1889-1967), seen below at the time of her wedding in 1916, moved with her family into the new Winterthur in April of 1931. Over the next 3 months she and Harry entertained 113 overnight guests, while the world outside slid inexorably into Depression. Harry was a micro-manager, focusing on everything from guest lists to seating charts to flower arrangements to table settings. His wife was a contented passenger.

What could better complete this apotheosis of American aristocracy than two beautiful debutante daughters, Pauline (the future Mrs. Alfred C. Harrison) and Ruth Ellen (who married George deForest Lord Jr.). 835 guests attended Pauline's wedding breakfast at Winterthur in 1938.

If we'd walked through the door to Winterthur in the 1930s, the Port Royal Hall, as it's called, would have looked like this.

Today it looks like this.

Winterthur is a labyrinth and even I, who never gets lost in big houses, am not entirely sure how many levels it actually has. So many antiques, so much glitter, so many hallways and so many levels. Maggie and I started our tour turning right out of the Port Royal Hall into the Port Royal Parlor. Funny, isn't it; you can leave all the family's furniture behind, but if the family's gone the room just does't look lived in. There are 50 fireplaces (non-working these days), 175 display rooms (with names like Nemours, Patuxent, Empire, Hart, Essex, etc.), two elevators and a trunk lift. There used to be a badminton and a squash court, plus a bowling alley, billiard room and a movie theatre too, all of which have been converted into display rooms. One thing there isn't, is a single surviving vintage bathroom - out of an original 39. Not surprisingly, the kitchen and pantries are all gone too.

East of the Parlor is the Hall of Statues, seen below in the '30s and today. From there we circled through the Blackwell Parlor (with the nifty fireplace detail), crossed the Port Royal Hall to the Readbourne Parlor, and took a surprisingly intimate stair up two landings to the second floor.

The view below looks west down the long axis of the house, from the top of the stairs towards what used to be Bissell and Perot's front door and porte cochere. I couldn't possibly photograph every room in this place; you'd expire from antique overload. Besides, I didn't bring breadcrumbs and am not even certain, despite Maggie's indefatigable helpfulness, that I saw everything. The highlight en route to the old front door is the Chinese Parlor.

The vintage view below shows Bissell and Perot's Edwardian entrance hall of 1904, complete with grand marble stair and classical columns. The door leads out to the porte cochere.

The views below show the same floor space, now called the Montmorenci Stair Hall, as reinterpreted by Ive's 18th century "jazz-age riff." The door to the porte cochere now leads to a double height glazed conservatory, presided over by marble busts of family founder Pierre Samuel du Pont (1739-1817) and his wife Nicole Charlotte Marie Louise. Born the son of a commoner, the clever du Pont became an intimate at court, and was ultimately ennobled by Louis XVI in 1784, rather late given events at the time. He and his family emigrated - or perhaps escaped - to America in 1800, and went into the gunpowder business.

On the south wall of the Montmorenci Hall is the door to Bissell and Perot's old drawing room, elegantly colonialized and reborn as the Marlboro Room.

Let's wander east to the dining room and be dazzled by treasures in every direction.

Alas, no more pantries and kitchen; just more treasures.

Outside the dining room is a grand double height porch overlooking lawn terraces, stone stairs and Mrs. Coffin's elegant swimming pool complex.

And then rooms, and more rooms, and more gorgeous American antiques. Conversion from private house to museum resulted in some family areas being converted to exhibition space. However, the "museum gestalt" was here from the start.

We're taking the stairs from 2 to 4, skipping guestrooms on 3 for the moment, going instead direct to the family bedrooms on 4.

The view below looks east down the axis of the 4th floor. The stair is beyond the arch on the left; Mr. du Pont's suite - bedroom, study and bath (the latter now an exhibition room) is behind the wall on the left; his private elevator is ahead on the right beyond the first arch.

It's probably time, since we're now in Mr. du Pont's private study, to talk about the dark cloud that descended upon the enchanted world of Winterthur as the Depression deepened. Harry didn't pay for his house in cash. Instead he borrowed almost $9 million from Bankers Trust in New York and an outfit called Laird, Bissell & Meeds in Delaware, then collateralized the loans with DuPont stock. This meant one thing in 1928, when each share was worth $500, but something quite different at the end of 1929, when the share value had dropped to $116.50. By the end of 1931, DuPont shares were trading for under $54; by April of 1932, a year after moving into Winterthur, they were down to $37.50. Harry's lenders threatened foreclosure unless he came up with additional capital. Lammot du Pont, president of the family firm and Harry's cousin, saved his bacon, temporarily anyway, with a $2 million loan. In 1936, Harry and family closed their 4 houses, let most of their staff go, and took a 6-month world cruise which, for them anyway, was a major money saver. Clearly things improved, since by 1938 they were back in town giving a wedding breakfast for 835 people which, you can be sure, was but a fraction of the total cost of daughter Pauline's marriage.

Mr. du Pont's study opens onto a terrace located above the Dining Room Porch.

On the other side of the hall were the du Pont daughters' rooms...

...and down at the western end of the building, in the original (or what's left of it) house, is their mother's suite, located two stories above the Marlboro Room.

The Montmorenci Stair, which replaced Bissell and Perot's marble number, is off the beaten path in Ives' version of Winterthur. Actually there might not be any beaten paths in this tractless and convoluted mansion. The green upholstered bench is on the 2nd floor; Maggie and I are still on 3, ready to inspect more period rooms. Harry might photograph a room in its original condition, restore and install it at Winterthur and, if he were able, track down the original furniture.

29 servants' rooms were distributed along tiled corridors on 5.

Now we're back on 2, looking at guestrooms and more guestrooms, not all of which are furnished any longer as bedrooms.

Winterthur's library, located on the 2nd floor beyond the Montmorenci stairs, contains 87,000 volumes and half a million manuscripts and images, not all of which are in this room.

Can we leave without visiting the basement flower room? That would be a no.

How about the badminton court, decorated originally with antique American eagles, then redecorated in 1948, on the occasion of a visit by the Walpole Society, with 4 entire 18th century New England house facades.

Did the museum construct this Hello Dolly (well, maybe earlier than Dolly) American streetscape, and stock the shops with authentic antique merchandise? No, Harry did.

The gatehouse on Kennett Pike was the ceremonial entrance to the 2500-acre du Pont estate.

It's still there, although the estate now covers 982 acres and museum visitors use a more highway engineered entrance at a purpose located traffic light a quarter mile north.

In 1951, Mr. & Mrs. du Pont moved from Winterthur into a cottage - if one can properly describe a 21,000 square foot Regency Revival mansion as such - located about 300 feet from the new museum entrance. Harry du Pont may have sat on boards of the DuPont company, General Motors, the New York Botanical Garden, the Whitney Museum, Cooper Union and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but Winterthur was his true life's passion. According to his daughter, Mrs. Lord, conversion of the house to a museum was his intention all along.

Almost 130,000 people visit Winterthur every year, to tour the house, do research, wander the gardens, ride (or observe) the point to point, and enjoy special exhibitions like the nifty Costumes of Downton Abbey on display as of this writing. The link is www.winterthur.org.

Vintage photos courtesy Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and Maggie Lidz.

In a 1950 letter to his old pal Eugene Grace, Henry F. (Harry) du Pont (1880-1969) wrote, "I have been building a small house at the foot of the lawn...(and) ordered steel long before Korea...I am really getting quite desperate." If building a "small" house required ordering steel in the first place, who better to complain to than the chairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel, who happened to be the old school pal. Grace replied, "I like your emphasis on 'small house.'" To which du Pont responded, "Perhaps I should say that my house is a big small house." Modestly called the Cottage, it possessed 21,345 square feet of interior floor space, of which about 50% was devoted to the activities of 13 live-in servants.

Mr. & Mrs. du Pont are seen below, flanked by their friends the Athertons, en route to Europe in 1956 on the Italian liner Saturnia. Ambassador Atherton, called by friends "the beau of beaux arts," and his golf champion wife Maude, made several crossings with the du Ponts - one on the ill-fated Andrea Doria, although happily not on the occasion she sank. Dressed for dinner in first class, the du Pont party seems unconscious of the pending end of glamorous transatlantic sea travel. Nine years after this photo was taken, the no longer profitable Saturnia was scrapped.

Harry du Pont was 71 years old when he converted his famous mansion Winterthur (see last week's post:'It's pronounced 'winter-Tour') into a museum of Americana, and moved into the big small house, located about 300 feet from the great big old one. "Nobody lived like Mr. du Pont did," observed family retainer Herman Regenard, accurately I'd say. The Cottage, a soigne essay in Regency Revival architecture, was the last work of architect Thomas T. Waterman (1900-1951). Not overly large compared to Winterthur (which has 175 rooms) it waa clearly built for Edwardian scaled living. The family, which at this point consisted of just Mr. & Mrs. du Pont, occupied the elegantly bowed wing on the right. Everything on the left was servants. "Big small house" says it well.

About 2/3 of the service areas are housed in the wing below, seen from the kitchen court on the west. Kitchen and pantries are on the ground floor on the left; the servants' hall and office are to the right; 8 of the 13 servants' rooms overlook the court from the second floor.

In the view below we've circled around to the north. The big glazed room on the right is the conservatory. The front door is on the left (east) side of the building, sheltering under that little bracketed shed roof. Institutional stewards of old houses, no matter how lovingly they maintain their charges, appear uniformly afflicted by an uncontrollable urge to strip away precisely the foundation plantings, vines and ivy that soften the building's line and connect it to its site. I know, I know..."bad for the facade." Well, worse for the way it looks.

For the last 20 years of his life, Waterman was Harry's architectural consultant. He was a disciple of William Sumner Appleton, founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, a restoration architect at Colonial Williamsburg, and a ground-floor architect-draftsman for the New Deal-era Historic American Buildings Survey, a.k.a. HABS. "Dedicated to authenticity," is how his HABS colleagues described him, which must have endeared him to Harry. The erudite Waterman gave du Pont a sophisticated and complicated retirement home - first floor plan is below - which allowed him to live and entertain on essentially the same manner he had at Winterthur - in 100,000 fewer square feet.

Here's Maurice in the dining room, making sure everything is perfect. Each table was a work of art. Harry "chose everything," Herman recalled, in an oral history in the Winterthur archives. "...the flowers, the mats, the colors, the glasses, everything," adding, with a laugh, "He was more concerned about the plates and the things than the food." The Cottage's furniture, incidentally, had been stored in a local warehouse since 1942, when the du Ponts' closed their apartment at 280 Park Avenue.

Florence Vanderbilt Twombley was known for her strapping young footmen; Harry had a penchant for good looking boys, purely for aesthetic reasons I'm sure.

The grand rooms on the main floor of the Cottage are today an elaborate gift shop; the rest of the house is given over to offices. The stair in the view below - seen "before" and "after" connects the small entrance hall inside the front door to a broad east west corridor with the dining room in the distance. We'll first visit what's labeled "sitting room" or "green room" on the plan.

In du Pont's day, this was what the hall to the green room, which you can just see in the distance, looked like. (How about that tapestry?) Mrs. du Pont died in 1967, her husband in 1969, after which all the furniture and some of the fireplaces were sold at auction.

Those same bow windows today, minus curtains.

Below is the fireplace in the green room then, and below that, its replacement now.

The corridor back to the main hall doesn't look so grand without its tapestries.

Now we're in the main hall looking east. The front door is visible at the end of the entrance hall, framed by the split stair. The entrance to the conservatory is between the columns on the left.

Not a very good shot, but an evocative one, of a cultured old man near the end of life, quietly reading in his conservatory.

Infinitely more people enjoy the same room today, although it's not really the same room.

Across from the conservatory is the drawing room, labelled "living room" and "recept room" on the plan.

The early 1950s, contrary to their Vaseline-lensed image, was a period of high prices and scarcity. A great deal of the Cottage was cobbled together from salvaged materials - mantels, fanlights, doors, fireplaces and especially bathroom fixtures - that were either on hand or surplus from Winterthur across the driveway. "Scarcity," however, isn't a concept you'd associate with this exquisite traditional drawing room.

The flowers were changed every day. Each evening, a footman would collect every vase, store salvageable stems in a walk-in cooler, and in the morning take them all out, rearrange them in fresh vases and return them to the main rooms. Who is that lady on the sofa? Not Mrs. du Pont, but Elsie Woodward, made notorious years later by Dominick Dunne's profoundly unfair book, "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles."

The same room today, minus its original fireplace. The door to the left of the windows leads to the green room.

We're back at the western end of the hall, looking into the dining room...

...which used to look like this. Mr. du Pont's daughter, Ruth Lord, remembers a man who for 50 years kept a daily record of table settings but rarely had much to say to his children. He was, as she put it, "a very sort of kindly person, but he was not intimate."

The same room today, now the gift shop cafeteria. The doors on the back wall are new.

Highly unusual in old houses is photo-documentation of service areas. These views were taken after Mr. du Pont's death. These pristine mid-century Modern service areas, despite half a century of disrespect, are largely intact.

Here's the "cold room," where flowers were stored at night.

The glazed block walls in the service corridors, not accidentally I suppose, have the air of a public school from the 1950s.

Here's the kitchen, then and now. It would be a terrific restoration project.

A long corridor wanders south from the kitchen, past the butler's office, eventually to the servants' hall, now divided into modern offices.

We're not taking the service stair, but returning instead to the main stair and climb to a mid-point mezzanine above the entrance hall. In addition to Mr. & Mrs. du Ponts' suites are 7 guestrooms. Two are reached via a door on this mezzanine.

Minus du Pont furniture, these rooms look undeniably spartan.

The 2nd floor begins at the top of the stairs.

The mezzanine and 2nd floor interlock cleverly on the east and west sides of the house. If you're a floor plan maven, you can figure it out from the plans. The image below is of the hall labeled 4F, looking south towards the entrance to the owners suites. 4B is a lobby between those suites. Mr. du Pont's rooms are his study (4A), bedroom (4C), dressing room (4D) and bath (4E).

The lobby, then and now, is virtually unchanged.

The study is quite recognizable too.

Mr. du Pont's bedroom may be unchanged, but without his furniture it is unrecognizable .

A bit of the original dressing room has survived. However, the adjacent bathroom has been demolished and replaced with an office. Winterthur's 39 bathrooms, torn out during convertion to museum use, provided the Cottage with sinks, tubs, towel bars, toilets, fixtures and mirrored cabinets.

Mrs. du Pont's suite was on the left (west) side of the lobby. It contained her bedroom (4H), dressing room (4J), small sitting room (4G), bath (4K) and closet with separate maid's entrance (4I). According to Herman Regenard, "In the morning when Mrs. du Pont was ready, she would ...call Emile (the chef) to see her. She would make the menu; Emile would make a suggestion what was fresh in the kitchen and if she gave her 'all right,' she would make up the menu. After this, Emile had to go with the tray to Mr. du Pont, show him a plate, a placemat, and a glass and a flower."

Let's leave the owners' lobby...

...and proceed west down the 2nd floor corridor to five additional guestrooms, distributed around a gallery lobby at the corridor's western end.

Located off the gallery (with scenic wallpaper) were two guest bedrooms, each with en suite bath. A third was located above them, in a small penthouse.

Two more bedrooms, each with bath, are on the other side of the gallery hall. I'll admit it's hard to appreciate Waterman's interesting plan without furniture. However, if you're like me, you want to see it anyway.

The small descending stair below the gallery on the left leads down to mezzanine level servants' quarters.

We can't leave without a look at the basement.

With the exception of the oddly labelled Play Room and Young Room, the Cottage basement is largely devoted to more service areas.

"He didn't ask for much," said Herman Regenard of his employer, "but he expected everything to be done to his pleasing. People wouldn't change their ways especially at his age."

Vintage images courtesy Winterthur Museum Garden and Library, and Maggie Lidz.

In this case, it really is gold. Hillwood, the Washington D.C. mansion of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973), is chock full of important French furniture and decorative arts. It is far more famous, however, for housing the largest collection of Czarist-era Russian art - Faberge eggs, precious icons, the diamond marriage crown of the last empress, golden chalices, etc., etc. - outside Russia. All this glittering loot is not, however, the subject of today's post. My subject is Mrs. Post's house.

Marjorie Post was the only child of Postum Cereal Company founder, Charles William (C.W.) Post (1854-1914). Mr. Post doted on his clever daughter, took her with him on business trips, explained his business to her, even let her sit in on company meetings. Post employed a thousand people in the town of Battle Creek, MI, became rich selling cereal, and flabbergasted the world in 1914 when he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. He was 59 years old. Nine years prior to this horrendous event, Marjorie, at age 18, had married her first husband, Edward Bennett Close (1882-1955), a Connecticut socialite who took her to Greenwich, gave her two daughters and settled her in a big house on the Sound. Tea parties, small children, Greenwich...boring. She divorced him in 1919

A year later she married Edward Francis (E.F.) Hutton (1875-1962), whom she called Ned to distinguish him from husband #1. In 1904 Hutton founded the firm of E.F. Hutton & Co., once the second largest brokerage firm in America. (It merged with Shearson Lehman/American Express in 1988). Ned and Marjorie were a pair of lookers, as was their only daughter, Nedenia (born 1923), who, when she became an actress, changed her name to Dina Merrill. The same year Nedenia was born, Hutton became Postum's board chairman. By 1929, he and Marjorie had together transformed Postum into the General Foods Corporation, the uber-profitable purveyor of Jell-O, Hellman's, Log Cabin, Sanka, Maxwell House, Birds Eye, etc., etc. Unfortunately Hutton couldn't keep it in his pants. After ignoring a figurative cacophony of flapping red flags, Marjorie woke up, lost her temper and divorced him in 1935. Oddly, for a woman who had grown up with a close father-daughter relationship, her divorce decree effectively forbade Hutton from seeing his daughter. Well, not quite forbade perhaps, but every other Xmas, every other Spring vacation, and one month every other summer had the unsurprising effect of sundering a formerly close relationship.

Almost immediately after her divorce, Marjorie married husband #3, Joseph E. Davies (1876-1958), a lawyer, diplomat, former Federal Trade Commission chairman and, between 1936 and 1938, America's ambassador to Soviet Russia. Moving to Moscow might have seemed a hardship, but for the magnificent (and totally bugged) embassy building, the comforting presence of Marjorie's yacht at Leningrad, and her discovery of pre-revolutionary Russian art. The kleptomaniacal Soviet government, having stolen everything of value from its people, and now finding itself practically broke, was only too pleased to sell artistic national treasures for practically nothing. Thus began Marjorie's lifelong passion for Russian art. After the war, Ambassador and Mrs. Davies were for some years the toast of Washington society, entertaining grandly in a big house called Tregaron (now the Washington International School). Alas, by 1955 the marriage had degenerated into figurative guerilla warfare. Maybe not so figurative; for example, one night in the middle of the breakup Marjorie sent a raiding party to dig up and cart away all the azaleas around Tregaron.

Having decided to wash that man right out of her hair, she legally changed her name to Mrs Marjorie Merriweather Post, gave Tregaron (minus flowering bushes) to Davies, and set about locating a suitable home for her French and Russian treasures, not to mention herself. In 1951, for what seems today the very modest sum of $200,000, she had sold to Long Island University a house in Brookville, Long Island called Hillwood, which she and Hutton had built shortly after their marriage in 1920. Rather like the Beatles, who had a driver but not a car, Marjorie had a name but not a house, but not for long.

In the same year as her 3rd divorce, 1955, Mrs. Post purchased Arbremont, home of the late Col. Henry Parsons Erwin (1881-1953), then still occupied by his widow. Arbremont, a handsome Georgian Revival mansion on 25 acres adjoining Rock Creek Park, was designed in 1925 by John Deibert, an architect about whom I cannot find a single citation - aside from the misleading assertion that he designed the present Hillwood. Arbremont had been a gift from Erwin's mother-in-law, Daisy Peck Blodgett, who in 1893 had married a 68-year old Michigan lumber baron named Delos A. Blodgett (1825-1908). Blodgett's "Grand Rapids Herald" obit of 11.2.08 notes (obscurely) that he was "an agnostic, believing in one world at a time." After her husband's death the widow Blodgett moved to Washington with her husband's late life daughter, the future Mrs. Erwin. Arbremont's pretty name only coincidentally sounds like a Francophonic version of Hillwood.

Arbremont, unfortunately, was a tear-down, replaced by a new house which, as far as I can tell, preserved only a few sections of the original exterior walls. The new Hillwood, was designed by a well born New Yorker named Alexander (Sandy) McIlvaine (1910-1985), whose Harvard classmate, Alexander (also Sandy) Rumbough had in 1946 married Mrs. Post's daughter, Dina Merrill. McIlvaine was also a nephew of William Adams Delano, partner in the famous architectural firm of Delano & Aldrich. After their deaths, McIlvaine continued to practice in their Murray Hill office under his own name. McIlvaine was as much a sportsman as an architect, an avid skiier, designer of ski lodges from Stratton to Windham to Camelback, and inventor of an improved chair lift. If he designed other big houses, I haven't found them.

McIlvaine replaced Deibert's restrained Arbremont...

...with a very different breed of cat. Hillwood is a distinct, if unusual, product of the 1950s. It combines period rooms worthy of Newport in the 1890s, with bathrooms a la Sherle Wagner and up-to-the-minute (ca. 1955) kitchen, pantry and service suites (at least, those I saw), all coexisting within a slightly jazzed up Georgian Revival-ish envelope topped off with a vaguely French roof and a porte cochere designed with just a whiff of Vegas.

The interior plan is completely different. The drawing room and pavilion on the west are additions. The original footprint has been extended on the east as well, with an expanded dining room and service suites. All the major rooms are now separated by anterooms, usually given over to displays of precious porcelains. Hillwood was built for eventual conversion to museum use, but as long as Mrs Post lived, it was a glittering private jewel box of art, and a sumptuous venue for frequent entertainments.

These days you can't drive through the main gate, so we'll have to pretend.

The differences between Arbremont and Hillwood are not immediately noticeable on the south or garden front. The 2-story porch appears unchanged. However, where there were originally 3 bays on either side of it, now there are 5 bays on the west (left) and 6 on the east (right), and the porch is no longer really centered. The dormered roof is different too. It gives the house more presence, but does so at the cost of its original delicacy. Mrs. Post reportedly insisted on an expensive alteration of the south facade in order to create a visual axis from the front door, through the center of the columned porch, to the Washington Monument 6 miles distant. This is a good story, although looking at the porch and surviving fenestration, I don't see how it was done.

Arbremont's sunporch has been replaced by Hillwood's French drawing room. The former walled garden with reflecting pool is now a French parterre.

The grounds are elaborately landscaped and the house is surrounded by elegant outdoor rooms.

However, it's raining, so let's get inside.

It took two years to build Hillwood. Bear in mind this grand double-height stairhall, except for the recessed lighting, is all 1950s work. Members of the Russian imperial family, putting aside their shortcomings as rulers, were nothing if not decorative. Portraits of them adorn the entrance hall walls, from Catherine the Great to Nicolas II.

Here's the main hall looking east to an anteroom outside the dining room.

This view looks south from the main hall, across the library, and (supposedly) through that curtained window to the distant Washington Monument. I couldn't see it, even from the lawn, but maybe that was because of the rain.

This door opens off the north wall of the hall, into a ladies' dressing and powder room, a '50s period piece if ever there was, which I talked my way into with effort.

At the western end of the hall, a small room full of Russian porcelain serves as anteroom to the French drawing room.

This room and Mrs. Post's bedroom suite upstairs are part of McIlvaine's 1955 additions. Quite aside from the museum quality French furniture, tapestries, objets d'art and paintings, is the superb period design and finish of the room itself.

Before her love affair with Imperial Russia, Mrs. Post was a serious collector of things French. The swivel chair below belonged to Marie Antoinette.

On the other side of the Russian porcelain anteroom is the so-called Icon Room, filled not just with icons, but Faberge eggs, the unlucky Empress Alexandra's wedding crown, and a great deal of gorgeous pre-revolutionary silver. The Soviets, who considered it junk, sold it by weight for 5 cents a gram.

Another small anteroom leads to the library, whose three french doors open south onto the columned porch.

Another anteroom on the east connects to the dining room.

It's a tossup between drawing and dining rooms as to which is the grandest in the house. The dining room boiserie, removed from a Parisian mansion (at least the antique parts), was sold and installed by Mitchell Samuel's famous French & Co., founded in New York in 1907. One hundred craftsmen were dispatched to Washington for the Post job, to paint, plaster, fit new sections of oak between the old panels and horrify Mrs. Post by the cost.

So much for antique boiserie. Let's go see something really interesting - the butler's pantry!

In last week's post I visited Harry du Pont's retirement house, called the Cottage, in Wilmington, DE. The Cottage has pantries and a kitchen very much like Mrs. Post's, the difference being that during the half century they've been kicked around. Arbremont's 1920s era service suites undoubtedly would have appealed to me more, but Hillwood's are still great. They remind me of a 1962 Buick Electra 225 that belonged to a high school girlfriend's father, a man who would have strangled me had he ever discovered I was driving it.

I wouldn't doubt the engine room in Mrs. Post's famous yacht "Sea Cloud" was as immaculate as her kitchen at Hillwood.

At the other end of the hall from the dining room, just out of view on the left in the image below, is a corridor leading to the Pavilion.

The succession of house parties, annual parties, dinner parties, galas, etc., demanded a venue for after-dinner entertainment. The pavilion, attached to the north side of house and screened from the drive by evergreen shrubbery, was most often used as a private movie theatre. It proved ideal as well for Mrs. Post's late life fascination with square dancing. Few of her friends shared this penchant, although fewer dared turn down an invitation from Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Time to climb the grand stair, every inch of which is McIlvaine's (or maybe French & Co's), peek into an oddly named non-bedroom at the top called the Snooze Room, then continue to Mrs. Post's suite above the drawing room.

Mrs. Post's private bedroom corridor, full of more collectables.

Finally, the owner's bedroom, which is a good place to mention Mrs. Post's 4th and last husband. Swearing she was done with men after Joe Davies, even legally changing her name to Mrs. Post, Marjorie turned around in 1958 and surprised everyone by marrying Herbert Arthur May. Her first husband was a bore, the second a philanderer, number three was nuts, and the fourth turned out to be gay. Everybody knew it except Marjorie, who might have remained (willfully) ignorant had Mr. May not made the serious error of alienating Margaret Voigt, his wife's long time personal secretary/assistant. Who exactly paid for those photos of Herb, naked as a jaybird, cavorting poolside at Mar-a-Lago with a passel of equally naked boys? No proof, but lots of suspicions. May was gone by 1964.

Marjorie's beautiful dressing room, which is exactly my taste, served as an informal office. Beyond it is her bath.

Clothes closets and a large safe are arranged along an adjacent corridor.

The door to the Adam room, tenanted for a spell by Mr. May, opens onto the private hall in his wife's suite. Together with a small dressing room, bath (unviewable, alas) and closet, it overlooks the south lawn.

Atop the formal library on the main floor is this private family library, designed originally as part of the Adam bedroom suite.

From the library, we crossed the 2nd floor hall for a peek, across a rope, of a north facing guestroom. And here, unexpectedly, my tour came to an abrupt halt. With 40% of the house as yet unvisited (including important features like back stairs, servants' hall, maids' rooms, service baths, butler's apartment if there was, servants' bathrooms, etc., etc.), and despite my polite and repeated requests that we continue, I was met with equally polite but intractable refusal.

Instead, we took the elevator, and then a pair of descending stairs, to the bomb shelter.

Some of my readers will remember the Cold War fad for private fallout shelters, and/or school drills during which we took shelter under our desks, in retrospect a not very efficient protection against atomic bomb attack. There are 3 shelters at Hillwood. This one is equipped with a flat screen monitor that plays an instructive video.

I enjoyed visiting Hillwood, in spite of my thwarted expectations for a thorough tour. The focus of "Big Old Houses," after all, is architectural. In addition to the French and Russian collections the Hillwood Museum offers visitors fine gardens, interesting outbuildings, and spacious woodlands barely a mile from Georgetown. The link is www.hillwoodmuseum.org.

Floor plans and vintage views of Arbremont courtesy Hillwood Museum.

Americans love real a good estate speculation and there were some hot ones in the 1790s, particularly within the borders of the new Washington City. Our father George decreed that by 1800 the nation's capital would rise amongst boggy swamps east of Rock Creek, Maryland. Within the borders of the new District of Columbia, drawn in 1791, was the established (since 1751) tobacco port of Georgetown, a considerably more salubrious place than the mosquito-y swamps of future central Washington. Land values accordingly leaped. In 1796, a descendant of Georgetown's original patentee (who bore, with dignity we hope, the name of Ninian Beall) sold a bluff overlooking the new capital to one Peter Casanave. Casanave flipped it in 2 months to Uriah Forrest, who sold it the next year to Isaac Pollock. In 1798 Pollock traded it to the over-leveraged Samuel Jackson, whose small house was auctioned out from under him in 1804. Enter Joseph Nourse, Register of the U.S. Treasury under 6 presidential administrations. Nourse re-purposed Jackson's modest dwelling as one of two symmetrical wings on a new Federal Palladian mansion, which he called Bellevue.

In 1813, during our so-called "Second Revolution," a.k.a. the War of 1812, Bellevue was sold to Charles Carroll, cousin of the eponymous signer of the Declaration of Independence, and proprietor (with his brother) of a paper mill at the foot of the bluff below the house. Carroll was a society type, an intimate of the Madisons, and the man who in 1814 helped Dolley beat it out of the White House barely ahead of Brits bearing firebrands. The event is famous, among other things, for Dolley saving the new velvet curtains and an $800 portrait of Washington. Dolley and Carroll caught their breath at Bellevue, before she headed west with as much loot as her wagons could carry. The main theatre of war, until then largely on the Canadian border, had changed in 1813 to the Chesapeake Bay, where a British campaign of terror and burning was corroding American morale. The Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland, known by wags of the day as the "Bladenburg Races," witnessed Continental soldiers fleeing with disheartening speed, their officers reportedly galloping right through houses along the way. The British General Cockburn ordered the burning of public buildings, but not private residences and, when petitioned by Georgetown's fearful mayor, promised rather grandly to protect those houses from the depredations of retreating Continentals. After the war Carroll first leased then sold Bellevue to Samuel Whitall, whose daughter was born there, married there, modernized and ornamented it during her life as Mrs. Rittenhouse, and died there in 1896.

By 1915 Washington had grown considerably. A decision was made to connect Georgetown to the Dupont Circle area on the other side of Rock Creek by means of a bridge along the line of Q Street. The map above shows Bellevue, since 1912 the very elegant residence of John L. Newbold, sitting spang in the middle of a not yet opened stretch Q Street. In lieu of demolition, the City of Washington paid to have it moved. Bellevue's wings were demolished, the central block set onto huge rollers, and a complicated series of pulleys was connected to a windlass, around which a single horse plodded day after day. Progress was microscopic, but eventually old Bellevue was deposited 60 feet back from its original site. The bluff on which it had sat was leveled, the two sides of Q Street connected, the demolished wings reconstructed, and the house continued in elegant private residential use for 13 more years.

Big changes began in 1928, when Bellevue was purchased as a new headquarters for the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. (Sidebar: The NSCDA, based in Georgetown, is not tobe confused with the Colonial Dames of America, whose Manhattan headquarters are located in an 18th century estate outbuilding at the foot of East 61st St.). The Georgetown Dames, in the name of architectural purity, and with the guidance of Fiske Kimball of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stripped away a century of accumulated architectural charm. Quoins, balustrades, 12 over 12 windows, french doors, and any and everything not correct to the 18th century were chucked, and a period correct, rather stern, and newly renamed Dumbarton House was born.

From 1942 until 1945, Red Cross volunteers sewed surgical bandages and took medical training exams on the main floor of Dumbarton House.

After the war, it reverted to the combination house museum and national headquarters intended in 1928

And so it remains today. Those of us who live at the center of the Universe (i.e. New York) are repeatedly amazed by how interesting and attractive the rest of the world can be. Low-rise, old-fashioned, complicated Washington D.C. - especially the Georgetown district - couldn't be more appealing, in no small part thanks to houses like Dumbarton, which exist in abundance all over the place.

Joseph Nourse's Bellevue sat on 8 acres and included stables, a bank barn, 3 slave cottages plus producing farm fields. Dumbarton House today sits on 1.2 acres, although a considerable tract of wooded acres, in Montrose and Dumbarton Oaks Parks, are right behind it - more correctly, right behind a large private mansion which is right behind it.

In 1703 Scotsman Ninian Beall dubbed his Maryland land patent (now Georgetown) "The Rock of Dumbarton," an homage to Dumbarton Castle, which sits upon Dumbarton Rock in Dumbartonshire, Scotland. Georgetown's Dumbarton House is not to be confused with Dumbarton Oaks, a grand 20th century estate located 6 blocks to the northwest. Dumbarton Oaks has been owned since 1940 by Harvard, was site of a famous WW II Conference, and is home today of a noted research institute.

When the Colonial Dames bought Bellevue in 1928, it was in good condition.

I don't know if I'd have had the heart to pull off all that beautiful ornamentation, added so lovingly over the years by owners with taste. There are conflicting schools of thought on preservation, specifically whether, or to what extent, additions should be kept. In 1928, however, Fiske Kimball's ruthless reduction to earliest era won the day.

The three views below show the main hall, or Lower Passage as it's called, in 1928, in 1932 after the Dames' renovation, and today. They are an essay in "Less is More."

Who in the world are these old guys? Answer: members of "Project Enlightenment," a living history course at McLean High School, on a visit to Dumbarton House that coincided with mine. Like their confreres at Colonial Williamsburg or the Renaissance Festival in Sterling Forest, they never slip out of character. Ben Franklin and Albert Gallatin I remember; the name of the fellow who posed with me at the foot of the stairs has slipped my mind.

Flanking the Lower Passage are four museum rooms that demonstrate the considerable care and scholarship that has gone into the choice of wall-covering, rugs, furniture, silver, etc.. The Parlor is on the southwest corner.

A door to the Dining Room is on the north wall of the Parlor.

The views below show the transformation from private house, to early museum, to museum today. It's hard not to love those delicious french doors, sacrificed, alas, to the rigorous scholarship of Fiske Kimball.

I assumed, in my innocence, that the kitchen would have been in the wing adjoining the dining room on the west. Not so. Prevailing breezes in tropical Washington blow from west to east, and kitchens in very old houses hereabouts are often located as far to the east of dining rooms as possible. When Nourse completed Bellevue, the western wing was his office. It's now NSCDA headquarters, and off my tour.

We'll leave the dining room and, after admiring the marbleized floor cloth in the Main Passage, cross over to the Best (which is the say, the Owners') Bedroom, located in the northeast corner of the main block.

The Best Bedroom, together with the Breakfast Room that connects to it on the south, had been by the 1890s combined into one large drawing room, with french doors opening onto the garden. Would that I had a picture. The idea of a bedroom - leave alone a "best" bedroom - sited in so public a location may jangle modern sensibilities, but was apparently typical in Nourse's day. The unusual detailing on the fireplace mantel, imported from a ca. 1790 house in Philadelphia, is called "punch and gouge."

Here's the view from the Breakfast room to the Best Bedroom.

And here's the Breakfast Room in 1932, and today with ever fewer objects. The door on the right leads to the east wing, which originally contained kitchen and pantries. It's now a modern reception area and gift shop. New construction offices are on the floor above.

Let's return to the Main Passage and head upstairs.

There used to be 2 (probably fabulous old) bathrooms at the south end of the Upper Passage. These were removed during conversion from private residence to period house museum.

Antique center hall layouts, I have to say, aren't very interesting - two rooms on each side of the hall downstairs, and two rooms on each side of the hall upstairs. The southwest bedroom is now an exhibition space.

The northwest bedroom is furnished and upholstered with great accuracy, the product of an Historic Furnishings Plan completed in 2010.

The northeast bedroom is partly occupied by a modern corridor leading to the elevator. The rest of the room is exhibition space.

Since the southeast bedroom is a construction site and off my tour, we'll head downstairs.

The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, founded in 1891, is dedicated to the promotion of colonial history and patriotism, the latter as adjunct of the former. Besides Dumbarton House, NSCDA owns and interprets 42 other historic sites. Are you surprised to learn that you can also get married here? (Of course you aren't). The Belle Vue Room, a handsome modern banqueting facility tucked unobtrusively beneath the north lawn, is ideal. The link is www.dumbartonhouse.org.

Vintage images courtesy Dumbarton House, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.

According to the New York Times, "He termed (the administration's) leadership non-existent under a President 'harassed and indecisive' and called for the election of a Republican Congress. He blamed 'Federal overlords' (for) conditions in Washington 'so chaotic that they are really pathetic. We witness our national Cabinet split with extreme and contrary views (and) unsuccessful efforts to regiment and shackle our people and to control the country's economy through unstable policies.'" Ted Cruz on Barack Obama? That would be a no. This was New Jersey Gov. Walter Edge speaking in October of 1946 about Harry Truman. (Plus ca change...). Prior to the administration of Walter Edge, New Jersey had no official governor's mansion. A year before that fire breathing speech in Newark, Edge purchased Morven, a Princeton mansion dating from the middle of the 18th century. Morven would remain the state's official gubernatorial residence until 1982, when it was outgunned by a snazzier mansion called Drumthwacket.

Here's Morven in 1875. The wing on the left was the original house, or at least part of it was. Young Richard Stockton (1730-1781), a member of the first graduating class of the College of New Jersey (future Princeton), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and eventual prisoner of the occupying British, built it in 1754. It stood on 150 of his grandfather's 5500-acre spread (now the city of Princeton), purchased in 1701 from William Penn himself. Gutted by fire in 1758, Stockton rebuilt and enlarged the house in 1760 with what is now the central section. His bride Annis christened it Morven, after a mythical Gaelic kingdom in Ireland.

The house hadn't changed much by 1900.

Between the 1750s and the 1920s, five generations of Stocktons occupied Morven. Here's the family of Civil War Major Samuel Witham Stockton (1824-1895), seen "en famille" on the porch in 1885. Stockton bought the house from the estate of his uncle, a U.S. Senator and Navy Commodore named Robert Field Stockton (1795-1866). It was the Commodore, incidentally, who in the 1850s added the wing on the right. Unfortunately, in 1891 Samuel Stockton went bust (all those children, no doubt), his 150 acres were chopped into lots, and the ancestral home on a 5-acre morsel was purchased by a Princeton Professor of Science and Revealed Religion named Charles W. Shields (1825-1904). Dr. Shields was, as it happened, the father-in-law of Bayard Stockton (1853-1928), a grandson of the Commodore, who moved into the house with his wife, Shields' daughter Helen.

How lovely was Morven in the early 20th century, before heavy traffic, jet planes, suburban subdivisions, commercial strips and urban decay. Graced with beautiful old gardens, brimful of family antiques, spang in the middle of charming old Princeton, it was alas, unaffordable for the Widow Stockton. After her husband's death in 1928, she rented it furnished to Robert Wood Johnson II (1893-1968).

Johnson, then 35 years of age, was a Jersey native in the early stages of his first divorce. A "take charge" kind of a guy, he had, for the previous ten years, been vice president of Johnson & Johnson, the surgical dressing firm founded by his father and uncle. He became president in 1932, chairman of the board in 1938 and, largely through his own efforts, transformed the family firm into one of the largest healthcare corporations in the world. Here's a good Robert Wood Johnson story: Between 1920 and 1922, Johnson was mayor of nearby Highland Park, NJ., an experience, according to his Times obit, that "taught him more about psychology than all the books he had read." One night, in the middle of a black tie dinner, the phone rang. An irate constituent was on the line hotly accusing him of being a lousy mayor because her garbage wasn't being collected. Johnson left his guests, drove to the woman's house, asked where the garbage was, loaded the cans into his station wagon, and drove them to the dump. "The dry martinis which preceded the dinner may have had something to do with (it)," he later allowed. The story speaks eloquently to character - or at least to personality.

I'm not sure who painted the house white.

The original dwelling, seen in the center of the image below, became the service wing, with kitchen and pantries on the ground floor, and maids' rooms above. The separate structure on the north side of the kitchen courtyard (at left in the image below) was a combination wash and ice house. It's now a gift shop.

During 17 years at Morven, Johnson (and two successive wives) made a number of changes, including construction of a pool and Art Moderne pool house at the north end of the property. To the house itself, however, they didn't do much. The most obvious addition was a north facing solarium (now called the garden room) and miscellaneous bathrooms. Two of the latter are seen in the elevation below, perched like "Mickey ears" above the solarium. When his father died in 1909, 16-year-old Johnson inherited $2 million. When he himself died in 1968, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation inherited $400 million.

In 1945, Walter E. Edge, former U.S. Senator, ambassador to France under Hoover, and Governor of the State of New Jersey (for the second time; the first being back in 1916), bought Johnson out of his lease and Morven from the Stocktons. Edge paid for the place himself, however, Morven was intended from the start to be New Jersey's first official gubernatorial residence. After Edge's death in 1956, it continued to be just that. Gov. and Mrs. Edge are seen below at their daughter's wedding reception at Morven. Edge was the deprived-background version of Johnson. In "A Jerseyman's Journal," his dry 1948 memoir, he described the failing Atlantic City ad agency he bought (as a teenager, no less) for $500 borrowed dollars, and turned into a "world-wide network of resort-promoting enterprises" (whatever that means) which made him rich.

Between Helen Stockton's departure in 1928, Johnson's in 1945, and Edge's in 1956, Morven didn't change all that much. Its various residents tinkered with it - some with the interiors, some with the gardens - but the early 20th century gestalt remained largely unaltered. The first plan below shows the main floor during Walter Edge's lifetime; the second shows changes proposed for conversion to an official residence; the third is of today's museum.

In 1956, 82-year old Republican party mentor and elder statesman Walter Edge died at Morven. The following year, Gov. and Mrs. Robert Meyner moved in. Gov. and Mrs. Richard Hughes followed in 1962, then the William Cahills in 1970, and the Brendan Byrnes in 1974. Then in 1982 New Jersey's governors were seduced by another Princeton mansion, a great sprawling columned affair called Drumthwacket. Morven's days in the gubernatorial sun were over. Drumthwacket, interestingly, had been sold to the state in 1966 on the specific proviso that it replace Morven as the official governor's residence. Why did this take 16 years to happen? I have no idea. Morven's next 22 years were passed under state and historical society stewardship. Major exterior and interior restorations culminated in a 2004 debut as the Morven Museum and Gardens. All the old bathrooms are gone, replaced by new ground floor ADA-compliant facilities. The kitchen wing has been gutted, a visitors' lobby occupies the first floor and a conference room is on the second. Subtle interior plan refinements made during the 19th and 20th centuries have been removed. Morven's plan today, with exception of the original kitchen wing, is probably close to that of 1850. With the exception of the dining room, there is no furniture, and all the walls are linen white with contrasting white woodwork. In the view of the main hall below, the front door is behind the camera, the dining room is to the left, the parlor (or drawing room) to the right, and the door straight ahead, which originally went outside, now leads to the Johnson era solarium.

Let's go first to the drawing room, which the museum calls the parlor.

In Helen Stockton's day, there was an open arch to the staircase on the north wall. It is seen at left in the 1899 image below. It's been closed in the name of period accuracy, or perhaps for more display space.

From the parlor, a short flight of steps descends to the morning room, added in the early 19th century.

The library, through the door to the right of the fireplace, was a somewhat later addition.

That's Johnson in the second image below, with riding boots and Schnauzer, sitting before the library fire. The Latin inscription on the mantel, if I am correctly informed, says "The Hearth Glows for You."

Returning to the morning room, we'll take the arch on the right, pass the main stair, and have a look at Johnson's solarium.

That's the front door, straight ahead in the image below, charmingly off center. To the right of it is the dining room. The floor is brand new, the walls and the ceiling probably are too, and the millwork is so immaculate it's hard to believe it isn't new too. Something must be old, but I'm not sure what.

The photographer's flash-lamp spoils the atmosphere of this 1885 view of the Stocktons in their dining room.

This short passage once connected the dining room to a suite of pantries, kitchen, servants hall, etc., altered variously over the years...

...and now completely gone.

This door, located on the south wall of what is now the museum's lobby, was used by business visitors and later for the governor's security personnel. Kitchen help used a door on the other side of the building.

Let's retrace our steps to the hall and the main stair.

At some point, if I'm to believe the ivory inset on top of the newel, Morven was mortgage free.

Here's Brian, waiting to take me all around the 2nd floor. Every so often, like a prom date suddenly determined not to part with her panties, one of my field trips is abruptly and mysteriously terminated, way before I've seen everything there is to see. Not at Morven.

Former bedrooms lie to the east and west of this hall.

The plans below show the 2nd floor in Gov. Edge's day, the alterations made for succeeding governors, and the museum layout today.

A pair of former bedrooms on the west side of the central block is now connected for ease of circulation. The floor is old, although I doubt it used to be so plumb. Brian's holding a new door to the conference room, located on the second floor of the west wing, space that formerly was divided into maids' rooms.

The large bedroom on the southeast corner of the central block looked like this in 1885. At some subsequent date, the closet beside the fireplace was opened and a small stair installed to the east wing. Today's fireplace looks too perfect to be an antique; it's probably new, like everything else except the floor - wait, some of the windowpanes are old.

I can't think the owners' suite was located anywhere but in the east wing. Minus furniture and a bathroom, it's hard to perceive these sunny chambers as what they once were.

We're looking west in the image below, across the owners' sitting room towards the central block. A brief study of the 2nd floor plan shows the master bathroom migrating from one place to another. Like every bath on the 2nd floor, it has today disappeared entirely. The door on the right leads to a mid-level landing on the main stair, probably, in times past, the main entrance to the suite. We'll head out that way and take the stairs to 3.

What's under the eaves today? Assorted corridors, rooms with locked doors and humming HVAC machinery, and one very pleasant bedroom.

I think we've now seen Morven.

Next time, I'll tell Brian to move the piano.

Morven Museum and Garden is owned by the state of New Jersey and operated by the non-profit Historic Morven Inc. Its policy is to exhibit objects relating to the house, the people who've lived in it, plus "outstanding examples" from New Jersey's cultural heritage. In addition to museum exhibitions, Morven is a venue for corporate and private events, garden strolling and (of course) weddings. Is there a part of my heart that wishes it were a little more run down? That would be a yes. However, the house is safe for the foreseeable future, and that's a good thing. The link is www.morven.org.

It's so easy, isn't it? to criticize, to find fault, to blame, or in the words of Spiro Agnew (or actually of William Safire and Pat Buchanan, who wrote his speeches) to be one of the "nattering nabobs of negativity." I haven't thought of Spiro Agnew in years. Our larcenous former vice president thrilled the "silent majority" when he nailed anti-Vietnam-warriors with gems like "pusillanimous pussyfooters" and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history" - at least until he was indicted for bribery and extortion.

What does this have to do with the beautiful ironwork on the facade of 3 East 64th St., a house designed in 1900 by Warren and Wetmore for Orme Wilson and his wife, "The" Mrs. Astor's daughter, Carrie? Actually, not much. (Sidebar: How charming is that little iron sprig, blooming perpetually amidst the wrought iron curves?) Today's post is about the constancy of beauty. Like spring, it always comes back. Instead of bleating about all the damage done to fine old buildings, today I'm going to acknowledge the good that Caesar also does.

Let's start with the Colony Club at Park and 62nd (Delano & Aldrich, 1916), not perhaps its designers' most distinguished work (it's a little boxy), but still and all an elegant neighborhood landmark.

Since my apartment is just OFF the corner of Park and 63rd Street, and my office is right ON the corner of Park and 59th, I walk past the Colony every single weekday. Recently all the club's windows were replaced. In large part (probably) because of Landmarks and Historic District legislation, the job was first rate. The new windows look precisely like the charming (and leaky) old originals. Window consciousness has come slowly to New York. Who could even count the number of uninformed landlords and coop boards who have substituted 6-over-6 or casement style windows with awful (if weather-tight) blank-looking 1-over-1 replacements in bronze colored anodized aluminum? Single sheet "picture windows" on the facades of fine prewar buildings on Fifth or Park - or anywhere, really - are even worse.

For as long as I can remember (which is getting to be an awfully long time), the main floor windows of the Colony were also barricaded with ugly iron bars. These presumably were a response to the rising urban panic of the late 1960s and early '70s, an era of crime, runaway graffiti, and a close call with municipal bankruptcy. Delano & Aldrich obviously had nothing to do with them. Now they're gone, leaving only a few mild and easy to overlook traces.

Nearby is this row of Neo-Grec, formerly high-stoop, brownstone-fronted, late 1870s, speculatively built row houses, located on the west side of Madison between 62nd and 63rd. There's a great quote somewhere from Henry James, if only I could find it, on the "unendurable" nature of West 53rd St., lined uniformly in his time with quite similar houses. Although the ones in these images have escaped replacement by a white brick horror, they have still been kicked around. Recently, Hermes' New York flagship, located across the street in the old Louis Sherry (later Limited) building, renovated the southernmost house.

Long before Hermes came along, the original window surrounds on this house had been scraped off by some misguided zealot. Hermes initially finished its renovation without replacing them. The result, for all the money spent, didn't look very good. In fact, it looked pretty bad. In a very short order, to my surprise and gratification, scaffolding went back up on the facade, and new window surrounds matching surviving originals on the house next door were installed. Good on you, Hermes.

I can't help wondering how many heavy plaster ceiling moldings, marble fireplace mantels and/or mahogany bannisters (even if painted red or brown) survive inside the un-renovated houses in this row.

A few years back the two houses at the north end of the row were combined into one swanky boutique office building that has also benefited from elevated window consciousness. The trio of houses between it and Hermes, despite posh street level stores and an uber-expensive restaurant called Nello, otherwise look pretty beat.

I've written about my own block - East 63rd between Madison and Park - several times, but # 45 is always worth another mention. It was built simultaneously with, and nestled demurely amongst, a row of five identical houses, two on either side of it retaining remarkably original looking facades. Like the Hermes house around the corner, the facade of #45 was stripped in the benighted past of all surface ornamentation. In 2010, its owners defined the "right thing" by putting it all back.

It's hard to tell which window is original and which is the 2010 repro.

The house in the image below exemplifies the "simplification" suffered by so many old city houses.

I've got a taste for limestone Neo-Renaissance city mansions like this one, located on the NWC of Park and 64th, and designed in 1911 by James Gamble Rogers for a rich paper manufacturer named Jonathan Bulkley. The Swedish government bought it from the Bulkley estate in 1946, and since 1951 its been the residence of their Consul General.

For most of that time, however, the windows and decorative ironwork have inexplicably been painted white. I have wondered for years - no, decades - who in the world was responsible for this striking lapse in taste.

Whoever did it has either redeemed himself (in my eyes, at least, assuming he cares), or perhaps been translated to a higher sphere. Whichever it was, the consul's windows have been redone, the beautiful ironwork painted a correct black, and the house is looking better than it has in years.

Too much good taste is not always a good thing. I agree with Mr, Mountchesney who, in Benjamin Disraili's 1845 novel "Sybil, or the Two Nations," observed, "I rather like bad wine. One gets so bored with good wine." The huge bow window on the renovated house in the image below, located on 65th just off Park, is bottom heavy, out of scale and should be painted black. For all that, I rather like it. The facade onto which it has been grafted is infinitely more interesting than that of the house next door. The room behind it must be equally so.

The lessons of Spiro Agnew aside, two old brownstones flanking 67th Street on the east side of Madison make "right and wrong" a clear issue of "black and white." A few years ago, the northern of the two, seen in the images below, got a first class facade restoration.

At practically the same time, the southern house disappeared behind construction netting and my hopes soared.

Then the netting came down and a part of me wished they'd put it back up.

I suppose there was some improvement - well, maybe not much.

The netting has gone back up, and so have my hopes.

My real estate partner Krisztina and I represent what we like to call a "chic" prewar rental building on the Park block of 67th, so I am quite regularly here. It is a block of mansions, half of which seem at present to be under renovation. Notable among them is #14-16, seen netted below. It is a double house designed in two stages. John Duncan designed #16 in 1905, then in 1919 its new owner Jeremiah Milbanks also bought #14 next door and hired Dodge and Morrison to combine the two.

In 1977, before the days of the Upper East Side Historic District, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccioni bought 14-16 East 67th St. and turned it into what Curbed New York called "five floors of disco-era glory." These included way too many marble statues, a Mediterranean themed courtyard, and an indoor pool surrounded by columns decorated with likenesses of Mr. Guccioni's face - not to mention those horrible modern windows facing the street.

In 2008, hedge fund mogul Philip Falcone bought the house for $49 million (it was the top of the market) and set about undoing the damage. From what's visible from the street, things look promising. However, six years have passed, years during which Mr. Falcone has made some highly publicized financial missteps. I don't know what'll happen next, although guys like Mr. Falcone usually land on their feet.

Another renovation/restoration - or, more correctly, a total reconstruction - is underway across the street at 11 and 13 East 67th St. Jeff Koons, the artist who, according to New York Magazine, is "known for his appreciation of American kitsch," is combining two limestone mansions into one historically accurate (at least from the street) mega-mansion.

Next door to the Koons project is 9 East 67th, seen below soon after a recent renovation that returned it to single family use. This house had been brutally altered, its interior chopped to pieces, its exterior steps torn off and replaced with a terrible looking front door.

Wonderful as the reconstructed stoop may have been, the front door and iron railings looked more appropriate to an East 80s walk-up off Second Ave.

Typical of our times, 9 East 67th is being done all over again. I'm hoping door and iron railings find the anonymity they deserve.

Mansion improvement is underway all over the Upper East Side and, thanks to landmark and historic district legislation, it's making things look a lot better. Great looking or not, the investment in private mansions begs the question of income inequality, a phenomenon as dangerous to society as cancer is to the body. But...that's a subject for another day.

Speaking of income inequality, some people are actually building new houses, like this limestone manse on the Junior League block of East 80th St., which is the equal of anything old.

On Easter Sunday I took my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter to lunch at a smart club near Millbrook. We sat under a big tent with maybe 200 other people, filled our plates with cleverly presented food, admired darling children darting underfoot, and appreciated the luxurious efficiency of the afternoon. My daughter caught up with pretty girls with whom she'd gone to school, girls accompanied, I might add, by equally pretty boyfriends and husbands. Toward the end of the afternoon, Jazzy turned to me and said, "Thank you for lunch, Dad. I feel completely comfortable here, but you know, it's really not my scene." Truth be told, it's hardly my scene either, although I've lived in it for most of my life. I associate my world with architectural beauty, contrived and artificial at times but, having been seduced by it, I remain dazzled, like the man with an unworthy lover.

Speaking of beauty, how charming are these limestone reliefs on the 70th St. side of 720 Park?

Restoring the amputated stoop of an old brownstone is a cardinal "right thing." I'd call this one, ornamenting the facade of 162 East 70th Street, "inspirational."

From time to time, every one of us in real estate gets a customer who knows, with evangelical certainty, that what he wants can be bought for half of what it's worth. "I know it's out there," he will inform us, adding sagely, "You never can tell." Actually, you can tell. There is a reason for everything.

The subject of today's post is a wonderfully needy old mansion at the north (read that, 'still intact') end of the city of Newburgh, located 60 miles north of Manhattan on the west bank of the Hudson. In 2005, Newburgh, a town that brims with the work of icons like Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing, became a "Preserve America Community." The benefits of this deserved honor include White House recognition, "Preserve America Community" road signs, authorization to use the "Preserve America" logo, and "enhanced community pride." Indeed, the Montgomery-Grand-Liberty Streets Historic District, in which today's house is located, contains more contributing historic properties than any other district in the state of New York.

Alas, initiatives like "Preserve America" can't change the fact that Newburgh is one of the five most "stressed" cities in New York, or that 40% of its 30,000 inhabitants are among the poorest people in the state. After the Second War, Newburgh's booming manufacturing economy was gutted by cheap southern labor, demographic shifts, suburban shopping malls and Interstate Highway construction. Orange County took up the slack by centralizing social services in the city's downtown, a process justified by an abundance of cheap local housing. As to which caused which - the social services or the cheap housing - that depends on whom you ask.

Starting in the late 1960s, Newburgh's rundown but architecturally interesting waterfront business district was bulldozed in the name of "urban renewal." A great deal of the area remains grassy fields today. Whereas economic distress and bad decision-making precipitated destruction of the historic riverfront, they have paradoxically preserved an amazing collection of nifty old houses in the residential quarters. Among these is 420 Grand Street, a house which, in another city, might long ago have fallen victim to new development. In Newburgh, however, there hasn't been much of that.

The north end of Grand Street, on which #420 is located, is really a beautiful area. OK, it's NOT completely consistent, but it IS filled with spacious and well maintained old houses, some owned by families with generations-deep roots in the city, some by fixer-uppers from New York who've landed a mansion for an unbelievably low price, and some by landlords who've chopped their property into cheap apartments. The latter are not too obvious. Indeed, the streetscapes up here, shaded by mature trees, spared incursions by horrid modern mid-rises, and lined with late 19th and early 20th century houses in every imaginable architectural style, are altogether appealing.

In 1900, the City of Newburgh celebrated its centennial with a parade. The marchers proceeded north along the river from the business district, then returned south along Grand Street. Here they are, seen in front of a smaller version of #420. To me, this house looks like it's already been enlarged once. The two-story gabled wing on the left has fashionable echoes of Bruce Price's work in Tuxedo Park. The rest of the place, if you take away the stone bib and the shingles, looks like a generic balloon frame Victorian house of no particular pretensions. If I'm right, it was probably originally covered in clapboard. A Newburgh lawyer named George C. Smith, later dean of New York Law School, moved to this address in 1899. My guess is he bought an existing house in the late 1890s, enlarged it by 1899, then enlarged it again shortly afterwards. The footprint of the present house appears already on a 1903 Orange County atlas. (Smith and his wife had 6 kids). Returning to Newburgh upon retirement, the 78-year old Professor Smith was strolling along the tracks of the West Shore RR when, instead of getting out of the way of an oncoming train, he walked directly in front of it. That was in 1942.

Back in 1916, Smith had sold the house to Moe Meyer, proprietor of Newburgh's busiest and most popular millinery and ladies' furnishings shop.

Meyer didn't enjoy the place for long, however, dying a scant five years after he bought it. In 1925 Meyer's old neighbor, Frederick H. Keefe, who had lived opposite the Meyers' former house on Liberty Street, became 420 Grand's new owner. 1925 was also the year Keefe became president of the Newburgh Daily News Corporation. Rising from press room, to general manager, to co-publisher of the paper his father had founded in 1885, Keefe eventually made the News into one of the best small-city dailies in the Hudson Valley. (It folded in 1990). He made changes to the house as well, in the form of three fabulous - not to mention unexpected - Olson Tile Bathrooms. Two of these, which we shall see shortly, look like they were designed by Busby Berkeley.

As is the case with residential Newburgh in general, 420 Grand Street, although down at the heels, is amazingly intact. P.S. Odd paint colors sem to come with the territory in this kind of place.

There is a whole lot of blessedly unpainted woodwork in this house. Opening from the north side of the spacious entrance hall is a parlor whose fireplace and ceiling strike an Arts and Crafts note typical of the 1890s.

This isn't quite the "living hall" of a McKim Mead and White country place, but it is informed by the same aesthetic. The entrance hall fireplace has that same Arts and Crafts look. The door on the far left, covered with plastic for winter insulation, leads to an outside porch. The wide doorway immediately left of the fireplace is covered with a hanging quilt which kept a caretaker, camped temporarily in the library, warm during the winter.

The main stair is on the south side of the entrance hall. Beyond it is the dining room.

The aesthetic look of the dining room, located in the south addition, reflects changes in taste during the early years of the 20th century. I'll bet a large mahogany server stood against that white wall.

How great is that scenic frieze? The door on the right in the image below leads to the serving pantry. The tall box in the second view blocks a swing door between pantry and kitchen.

Adjacent to the formal dining room is a breakfast room, probably used for most informal meals. Although it's a guess, I think the wallpaper throughout the house dates from Keefe's arrival in the 1920s. Much of it, unfortunately, is badly damaged.

That's not a real fireplace but... you know that already.

Between the breakfast room and kitchen is a service hall, with a service entrance on the back (east) side of the house. An exterior flight of stairs descends from that door to Leroy Place, where a garage is built into the side of the hill.

The kitchen, whose refrigerator currently blocks the door to the pantry, is a restoration project waiting to happen.

The servants' stair goes up...

...the basement stair goes down...

...and this door leads to the library where, surrounded by walls covered in mahogany, damask and plastic sheeting, a caretaker has been camping.

The owners' broker, Ryan Degnan, is holding back that quilt so we can see into the main hall.

Under the main stair is one of Keefe's 1920s bathrooms. I have a pal in Tuxedo whose '20s house has bathrooms with that identical toilet.

At the top of the stairs, a small anteroom accesses an owners' suite consisting of 2 big bedrooms (or 1 bedroom and a boudoir) and an amazing 1920s bath, all located in the southern addition.

An Olson Tile Bath, named for a noted local firm, was once a Newburgh status symbol. I'm pretty sure this, the powder room downstairs, and another bath we'll see in a moment were all part of a 1925 redecoration paid for by Frederick Keefe.

The corridor below leads north to 4 more bedrooms. The first, located immediately to the right, has an en suite Olson bath.

The wallpaper looks great, although I've got my doubts about the trim color.

On the other side of the corridor is another bedroom, which it somehow doesn't look like, or maybe a 2nd floor den or upstairs living room.

At the end of the hall are two more bedrooms and a bath.

No sign of Olson in the hall bath. The sink is clearly from the 1890s, but I think the fake tile dates from the '20s.

On the third floor are a handful of maids' rooms and a maids' bath.

Time to go...

In the early 1940s, Frederick Keefe produced the photo montage below, with a sales pitch glued to the back. It reads in part as follows: "English bungalow type (sic), field stone and shingle construction, built when real houses were built...admirably located in terraced corner of two best residential streets in City. A show place, attractive and home like...ideal for wealthy business man or retired gentleman...Price includes complete furnishings." The asking price was $52,000. The buyer, in 1944, was Beatrice L. Kidd, remembered (if remembered at all) as a designer of hats for Broadway shows. The current owners have held the property since 1996. It can be your turn next. Ryan Degnan of Rand Realty has the listing; you can reach him at ryan.degnan@randrealty.com.

Do lawn signs really sell houses? Apparently so. But what if the sign said, "For Sale, Ipswich Beach Farm, 1380 acres, 5 miles of beach," would you knock on the front door? A vacationing Chicagoan named Richard T. Crane Jr. (1873-1931), visiting the Massachusetts shore with his family in 1910, not only knocked, he bought.

By 1910 the Brown family had been in possession of the Brown Farm for almost 70 years. During the previous decade, John Burnham Brown, the most prosperous of the Browns up to that date, had tranformed the old farmhouse into gentleman's summer place and hired Ernest Bowditch to beautify the grounds. This was nothing compared to improvements to come, however, including the glamorous gate complex in these images, designed for Mr. Crane in 1926 by Chicago architect, David Adler.

Richard Teller Crane Jr. was the son of a very rich man. Poverty had driven his father, R. T. Crane Sr. (1832-1912), to go to work in a cotton mill at age 9. By 15 he was worilng at a Brooklyn foundry where he learned the metal and brass-finishing trades. Laid off in 1854 from a locomotive plant job, the 22-year old Crane went west to Chicago where, with a brother, he started his own foundry in the corner of an uncle's lumber yard. In 1857, R.T. Crane and Brother landed a contract to install steam heat in the Cook County Courthouse. By 1861 they had become major contractors to the wartime government in Washington, providing brass fittings, knobs, spurs, wagon equipment, etc., etc. During the postwar boom, Crane began manufacturing everything from fire hydrants to machine tools, water pumps to steam engines and, by 1872, even elevators. The 20th century arrival of the skyscraper meant huge new markets for pipes, valves and fittings. By 1910, the year R.T. Jr. bought the Brown Farm, Crane's original Chicago plant employed over 5000 people.

The Crane estate, called Castle Hill, looms over vast salt marshes, sometimes covered by water, seen beyond the gate complex below. Typical of big country places, this one has elaborate barns and cottages, gardens and stables, garages and, in this case, a separate casino and bachelors' annex. The barns are quite close to the gate.

David Adler was the last of several architects to work for the Cranes at Castle Hill. A pre-Adler version of the estate was completed in 1916 by the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan (pronounced roo-TAN) and Coolidge. SRC's provenance was more distinguished, at least in my opinion, that its opus. The principals were working for Henry Hobson Richardson (1839-1886) when the great man dropped dead at the untimely age of 47. ('Richardsonian Romanesque,' if I am correctly informed, is the only style of architecture that is actually named after an architect). SRC finished off two dozen pending Richardson projects, then continued his office under their own names. Most of their work was civic, collegiate, institutional or religious, as opposed to residential. Did the Chicago based Crane hire them out of admiration for their Chicago Public Library? or their World's Congress Auxiliary Building at the Chicago Columbian Exposition? or maybe the hulking Chicago townhouse they designed for former U.S. Attorney General Franklin McVeagh? I have no idea.

Castle Hill's farm complex, built between 1914 and 1916, is attributed in part to a man named Edward Burnett (1849-1925), "An Agricultural Designer on Gentlemen's Estates," per the title of a 1998 Master's thesis in Historic Preservation by a U. of Pennsylvania student named Taya Shoshona Dixon. Burnett's contribution focussed on the care and treatment of the animals inside; the design of the outer envelope was mainly SRC's.

The smooth stucco walls and Mediterranean tile roofs of the farm complex speak to Castle Hill's original Italian villa theme.

Behind the gardener's cottage, seen below, are a (still intact) greenhouse and a very large, stone-walled vegetable garden.

Here's Brown Cottage, the late 1890s vernacular shingled beach retreat built by the last of the Browns, seen before and after transformation to an Inn. Somewhere in the middle of it is what's left of an early 19th century farmhouse. Brown Cottage was a temporary residence during construction of the Cranes' mansion on the hill, then a guest house, then subject to a life tenancy by the last Crane to live on the property. It's now a stylish Bed and Breakfast called the Inn at Castle Hill.

The drive winds uphill past Brown Cottage.

It overlooks the marshes and the barns. The bright green lawn was the vegetable garden, the roof of an arbored pergola visible in the foreground.

At the top of the hill is - or used to be - an Italian villa of the "American millionaire persuasion," completed to the designs of Shepley Rutan and Coolidge in 1914. Note the smooth stucco walls, the glazed tile roof, the ornate recessed porch, themes hinted at in humbler structures below. I think it's a pretty great house. Ten years after it was built, they tore it down.

Here's Mr. & Mrs. Crane and their cat. (Remember that cat). The story is that Mrs. Crane never liked SRC's design for the new house. She called it "the Italian fiasco," inappropriate to the New England coastline, and once it was finished complained about drafts. Why her opinions were disregarded is as odd as Mr. Crane's response to them. According to local gospel, he told her to give it a try for ten years, and if she still didn't like it, he'd tear it down and build her something else. Could this story really be true? According to Susan Hill Dolan, Crane Estate's cultural resources manager, "As crazy as it seems, true to his word, Mr. Crane had the villa razed in 1924."

A new architect was engaged. David Adler (1882-1949) seen below looking young and beautiful in his Princeton days, was advising Crane as early as 1922 on the purchase of salvaged architectural elements. Apparently Crane made up his mind to pull down the Italian fiasco before the ten years was up. The paneling and stairs and fireplace mantels which he bought on Adler's advice - from W. & J. Sloane in New York - would eventually find places in a new Castle Hill. Chicago-born Adler is a legend in suburban Lake Forest (a Lake Forest debutante, incidentally, was the model for Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan), but his elegant houses for society folk are not widely recognized outside the Midwest. Most easterners have barely heard of him.

In 1912, after Princeton (Class of 1900), Munich Polytechnic (1904), a stint at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and a year with famous Craftsman architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, Adler opened his own shop. He was 30 years old. By 1924, now married to an Illinois writer and socialite named Katherine Keith, he was 42 and at the height of his popularity. Adler's grand and erudite design for R.T. Crane's Castle Hill is considered one of his best. Architectural labels are slippery, although visitors to historic houses yearn for them. This house is often described as a Stuart-stye mansion. With the exception of Cromwell's interregnum, the Stuarts ruled Britain throughout the 17th century. Typical of many English buildings from that period, Castle Hill incorporates a bit of the baroque, a dash of Palladio, a pinch of Christopher Wren, and miscellaneous details lifted from famous models (like the rooftop lantern from Belton House).

The new Castle Hill sits on the exact footprint - well, almost exact - of the old Castle Hill. The entry court on the south is unchanged.

The east wing houses a grand drawing room on the main floor and a portion of the owners' suite above.

The drawing room lets onto a terrace with broad views of the sea.

Below the balustrade are two descending terraces currently under restoration. The first was a tennis court, the second a maze, now alas completely gone.

The north facade facing the sea also articulates the interior spaces behind it. The protruding wing on the left houses a library at ground level and daughter Florence's suite above. The dining room occupies the complimentary wing on the right, with son Cornelius's suite above. A gallery stretches between the two on the main floor, guest rooms are above it, and a billiard room lurks behind the dormers up top. The balustrade in the foreground survives from the original house.

On this west facing exterior wall is a copy - not to say facsimile - of a deed for a parcel of land stretching from the ominously named "Labour in Vaine Creek" to the less threatening sounding "Chybacko Creek." Dated 1637, it is signed by John Winthrop as grantee and Maskonomett as grantor. Too many easy jokes can be made about this, so we shall simply move on.

Behind the terrace door is a long gallery that extends east and west. The eastern porch (on the left) adjoins the library. The one on the west is outside the dining room.

The view from the terrace to the sea is, to put it mildly, pretty impressive. A turf mall, 165 feet wide and half a mile long, unrolls arrow-straight down an undulating landscape to a bluff overlooking the surf at Steep Hill Beach. Crane originally hired Olmsted Brothers, run by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, to landscape the Italian villa. A sunken garden, which we'll see in a moment, was the first thing they did. For the landscape in front of the villa, however, the Olmsteds argued strenuously - too strenuously, it would seem - for a naturalistic series of open hay fields. Which got them fired. Enter Arthur Shurcliff, an Argilla Road neighbor who, in years to come, would direct the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. Shurcliff's uber-formal mall was a natural extension of SRC's Italian villa and, happily, was equally appropriate to Adler's English mansion.

But wait a minute, what's this? It's one of a pair of lead griffins (or gryphons, as I always thought it was spelled) that gaze down the mall from either side of the terrace. Designed by Paul Manship - famous (if you'd call it that) for his statue of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center - they were a 1928 housewarming gift paid for by a subscription from 3600 "Old Crane Company Employees."

Richard T. Crane Jr. was a popular employer. The enormous prosperity of the Crane Company during the Roaring Twenties made him a generous one as well. Part of that prosperity stemmed the revolutionary idea, both in marketing and manufacture, of the "beautiful bathroom." Heretofore considered a no-frills extra, Crane set out to convince America that stylishly designed fixtures and coordinated colors were exactly what it wanted. He bought pottery and enamelware plants, ran ads showing bathrooms with easy chairs and fireplaces, built a fleet of buses equipped with traveling exhibits, and opened special showrooms. One on these, on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, cost a million dollars. Crane let America know that Frank Lloyd Wright's new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo had Crane bathrooms, that King Hussein of Saudi Arabia installed them in his palace.

The north facade, overlooking the mall, after and before.

The service/kitchen court is tucked away on the west. The laundry is on the ground level; kitchen, pantries, flower room and butler's suite on the floor above; maids' rooms under the dormers on top. Strangely, access to the kitchen, including deliveries of food, is via those unprotected exterior stairs.

A path leads west from the mall to the Italian garden, begun by the Olmsteds in 1910. The architectural surround is SRC's work, designed to compliment the original house.

Further to the Olmsteds' fall from grace was the 1913 replacement of their "Wild Garden" with Arthur Shurcliff's Rose Garden. In its heyday, it contained 250 different varieties of rose.

Let's return to the mall, pass the north wall of the sunken garden, and continue towards the casino.

Here's SRC's Italian villa in 1915. The trees along the mall are still saplings; beyond the shallow steps is a swimming pool; bachelors' quarters flank it on the right, a casino (used for entertainments) is on the left. The arches in the middle are part of a retaining wall.

Here's what it looks like today, with a different house.

The pool terrace and casino buildings are currently under restoration. If past observations are any measure, I'll bet Castle Hill's present-day stewards won't let ivy grow back on the walls.

This is the view north from the balustrade above the pool. At the end of the mall is a stone marker atop a bluff, beneath which is Steep Hill Beach and the sea.

The mall looks equally dramatic in the other direction.

There's a different view from the top of the house, a view that's changed over the years.

Let's circle back to the entrance court.

In November of 1931, after spending only three summers in his new house, Richard T. Crane had a heart attack and dropped dead. He was 58 years old. Mrs. Crane continued to summer here until her death in 1949. The furniture was sold onsite at a 3-day Parke-Bernet auction in 1950. The Crane family then generously donated the estate to the Trustees of Reservation, the oldest private conservation organization in the world. The link is www.thetrustees.org.

Surely my readers don't believe for an instant that I would leave Castle Hill without thoroughly exploring the interior. In the course of my visit, however, I snapped over 400 images, a total that even violent editing couldn't compress into a single post. "Inside Castle Hill" would have appeared next week, but for a promise I made to the Millbrook Historical Society to prepare and deliver a lecture on Mary Flagler Cary. Can't do both at once, I'm afraid. I hope you will bear with me for a blank week, as Castle Hill's interiors are every bit as gratifying as one would expect.

My next serious post, "Inside Castle Hill," isn't written yet, but I couldn't let a week pass without posting something. Today's post is about my lawn. The Polar Vortex has receded, the leaves have burst forth, and my lawn is growing. I searched for a good lawn quote but the only ones I found came from people who mow (or mowed) their own. I do not mow my lawn. I do own the mower (which is bigger than a Smart car) and house and support (at least partially) the man who drives it.

I confess it: I am a lawn man. Some people condemn big lawns, others feel guilty about them, I revel in mine. It's too big for chemical enhancement, which I suppose is the usual ecologist's gripe. As a result, it is rife with imperfections - brown spots, crab grass, weird unidentified plant life, etc., etc. - but it looks fine from a distance. Since Daheim is a place where many things are viewed from a distance, this works well.

Three large outdoor rooms adjoin Daheim on the west, south and southeast. The broad lawn in first image above lies to the west. The gate in the image below leads to a walled orchard on the southeast.

In this wet spring weather, my grass quickly loses the manicured look that Bill and I - on mower and policy desk respectively - labor to produce each year. The orchard, whose walled enclosure covers approximately two acres, was, until the 1920s, closely cultivated with vegetables and flowers. When I came 30 years ago, it was an impenetrable mass of interlocking honeysuckle bushes, impossible to even walk through. It all had to be cleared and burned, which took a couple of summers. Of the few ancient apple trees that had survived to that point, only one is with us still. The back wall of a small tennis pavilion is visible at midpoint on the west wall.

Three large greenhouses, their metal framing donated in the 'Forties to the war effort, bordered the orchard on the east. Dressed stone stairs lead to vanished Victorian doorways. This one has a date of construction tooled into the threshold.

The ogee ghost on the wall of the powerhouse (a huge steam-producing boiler once lurked in its basement) shows the shape of the original glazing. A charming finial, deliciously green with age, survives atop the roof.

Beyond this gate is a flight of stone steps that leads up to the tennis lawn.

There used to be a tennis court (lawned over long ago) on this side of the circular fountain. The stonework under the trees to the right of the fountain marks the top of the orchard stairs.

Here's the tennis lawn from the other direction - more precisely, from my bedroom window. The tennis house is just visible beneath the tress on the left.

Straight columns on perpendicular axes are the key to an elegant lawn. Mower tracks that roam around in unplanned squiggles don't cut it.

Completed in 1928 for plumbing and manufacturing magnate R.T. Crane Jr. (1873-1931), Castle Hill in Ipswich, Mass reminds everyone who lives on a big place to keep a sense of proportion. The architect was David Adler (1882-1949), a Chicago-based practitioner famous for sumptuous houses for Social Register types. The parallel rise of the International Style and Adler's career marginalized him in the eyes of many contemporaries. However, his superb mansions have aged a whole lot better than the competition's cold and leaky boxes.

The plan below was drawn in recent years for people who want to get married or host a corporate retreat. It omits the kitchen wing - a grievous omission - but it's unfortunately the only plan I could find. Worse, I have nothing at all for the second floor except references in my text to what sits on top of what. Adler's layout is forthright and convenient - and big. The gallery is 62' long and 20' wide; the drawing room is 48' by 26'; the dining room 37' by 24'; and so it goes.

In December of 2002, an exhibit called "David Adler, Architect; The Elements of Style" opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago Tribune architectural critic Blair Kamin, wrote, "David Adler may be the only architect who was born Jewish, passed himself off as Protestant, and designed in a thoroughly eclectic manner that was catholic with a small 'c.' The sprawling country houses he shaped for a Social Register client list ranged from muscular Georgian to delicate Colonial Revival, lavish Italian Renaissance to austere Scandinavian classicism. The only consistent thing about his work, other than the fact that it was usually done for the very rich, turns out to be its enduring quality...He was a quiet, elegant fellow who traveled in influential circles and didn't generate personal scandals...(t)here is something deliciously against-the-tide about this exhibition, which appears at a time when a new form of Modernism...is all the rage. Perhaps because they contrast so thoroughly with the current fashion, Adler's designs seem as fresh as ever."

Castle Hill, whose site and exterior were thoroughly explored in a previous post, was a summer house - a place by the beach, if you will, albeit a beach 5 miles long and owned by Mr. Crane. Beachiness was no cramp to formality, however, as witnessed by the domed and marble-floored anteroom inside the front door. Here's what it looked like, back then and now.

Ladies' and gents' are on either side of this anteroom. Ladies' are to the left. The hand-painted Chinese wallpaper is intact, if somewhat the worse for wear.

The gents' is on the right; the stalls are an institutional addition; talk about gilded lilies, Castle Hill's sink and tub handles (and spouts) are all silver plated.

On axis with, and perpendicular to, the front door is the gallery, a 62-foot long homage to the English country house. For over 60 years the Trustees of Reservations have struggled to physically preserve and financially support Castle Hill. To their great credit, they have resisted that nefarious imperative, felt by so many institutional owners, to "renovate" the heart right out of the place. Save for the missing furniture, Castle Hill is amazingly unchanged from its days as a private house.

At the eastern end of the gallery is the Rotunda, more modestly labeled "hall" on Adler's original (and so far un-reproduced) plan that hangs in a frame in the butler's office. The Rotunda mediates access to the library on the north, the drawing room on the east, a guest suite (labeled Storage Room on the plan) on the south and, behind that demure curved door in the first image below, a quirky little spiral staircase that ascends all the way to the third floor.

A Chicago artist named Abram Poole (1882-1961) - married, interestingly, to the flamboyant lesbian playwright Mercedes de Acosta - did the walls. Who's that on the ceiling? Answer: family members, a few servants and Mrs. Crane's cat!

The library, seen below looking south towards the Rotunda, is an apotheosis of comfortable early 20th century upper class American luxury. In 1922, while the original Castle Hill mansion still stood, Adler convinced Crane to buy paneling and carvings from Cassiobury Park, a 16th century English house doomed to demolition by a local council intent on converting its grounds into a public park. In another era, with different players, the same might have happened to Castle Hill.

Crane's prize from the Cassiobury auction was an overmantel carved by the celebrated - indeed "legendary" - Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721). The Cranes' furniture may have been auctioned off in 1950, but someone at the Trustees has had terrific fun patching together an ensemble of pieces (even books) that, to the casual observer, look amazingly like the originals. Well, they don't really, but the effect is very good.

At the easternmost end of the house is this very grand drawing room. Great pains have been taken here to restore paint colors, curtains and valances. To many modern eyes, probably because it's big and has no furniture, the drawing room is assumed to have been a ballroom. Not so. It was intended for entertaining guests, usually before dinner, and would only have very occasionally (if ever) been cleared of furniture for dancing.

Let's take the door on the right of the fireplace, recross the Rotunda, proceed west down the Gallery (which in this view is filled with caterer's tables), and stop at the main stair.

Much like the Rotunda on the east, the stair hall on the west mediates room access on this side of the house.

The dining room faces the foot of the main stair. Adler incorporated more architectural salvage here, this time from an 18th century London house that used to stand at 75 Dean St. The dining room is not a reconstruction, but an original design. The view out the window overlooks an allee to the sea.

Why do I write this column? Because I want to climb around exactly those cool parts of big old houses - serving pantries, kitchens, bathrooms, boiler rooms, etc., etc. - that people never see.

The service wing, unfortunately omitted from the plan above, contains serving pantry, main kitchen, maids' rooms, butler's suite, flower room, laundry, all manner of storage closets, and access to an ocean liner sized boiler room in the basement.

So much for below stairs. Let's return to the main hall, note the silver safe concealed behind an appropriately elegant door, and climb to the second landing.

Beyond the double doors in the image below is a private corridor to Mr. & Mrs. Crane's respective bedroom suites, their daughter's bedroom suite, and a private upstairs family living room. This is not the first time I've seen parents and daughter(s) grouped together in semi-privacy at one end of the bedroom floor, and the son(s) billeted independently at the other.

Most of the woodwork in the upstairs living room came from 75 Dean Street.

The view of the sea once included a fantastic maze, planted in 1920, that has totally vanished.

Some of this furniture was actually here with the Cranes. Most of the room's decor, however, consists of careful paint and fabric recreations and clever filler pieces.

75 Dean Street, or at least parts of it, live on in 7 second floor bedrooms at Castle Hill. Here's Mr. Crane's which, together with the upstairs living room, is located above the main floor drawing room.

Not surprisingly, a man whose company was famous for luxurious bathrooms had a pretty good one of his own.

When those silver fixtures are polished, which they aren't at present, they look like this.

Mrs. Crane, the former Florence Higinbotham, was the privileged daughter of Harlow Higinbotham, co-founder of Marshall Field & Co. As recounted in "Outside Castle Hill," Mr. Crane had the original Castle Hill torn down after 10 years because his wife didn't like it. Wives' bedrooms almost always have the best views. Strangely, Mrs. Crane's faces inland while her husband's gazes out at the sea. Her pine paneling is from 75 Dean; her bathroom is a total knockout.

The Cranes had two children, who were bigger than this by the time Adler's Castle Hill was built.

According to "The Palm Beach Post" on September 1, 1935, "The former Florence Crane, heiress to a great fortune, could command an army of servants if she chose, but as the wife of William Robinson, author and explorer, she followed the path of adventure and now shares a simple shack with him in glamorous Tahiti."

"On Jekyll Island," the Post continues, "at Ipswich, in Chicago she always had a suite of her own, with marble bath and cedar-lined cupboards, where she could retire when she wanted privacy. However, her Tahiti residence has only one room, an enormous combination sleeping-dressing-and-bath room, and a porch that encircles it." That got tired soon enough, and in 1943 Florence married a White Russian prince and had two daughters. The private corridor to her suite at Castle Hill, where she could get a little privacy, is seen below. Her bathroom walls, instead of marble, are covered with panels of reverse painted glass. A small private porch overlooks the sea.

West of the parent-daughter bedroom corridor are three principal guest rooms named Chinese, Apricot and Oak.

Florence's suite is on top of the library; her brother's is over the dining room. In 1928, Cornelius Crane embarked on a Willie Vanderbilt style South Sea adventure of his own, collecting anthropological specimens from the comfort of a 148-foot yacht. He was accompanied by scientists from the Field Museum of Natural History, and the trip was documented on film by Sidney Shurcliff, son of Castle Hill's landscape architect. Crane was the last of the family to live on the property, occupying the former guest house with his wife until he died in 1962 at age 57.

There's one more guest room beyond Cornelius' suite - well below the salt, it would seem - plus a linen room across the hall and a door to the service stair. West of this stair is a hallway full of maids' rooms; go down to 1 and you'll come to the kitchen, pantries, and ultimately the boiler; go up to 3 and you'll eventually arrive at a lobby outside the billiard room.

The shelves in the billiard room supposedly housed a collection of nautical charts, although how exactly that worked is unclear to me. The spiral stair leads to the rooftop lantern, a faithful copy of the one atop Belton House in Lincolnshire.

Time to go down, this time via main stairs.

It's hard to say enough good things about the Trustees of Reservations. They have tried literally everything - concerts, theatre productions, music festivals, childrens' events, classic car shows, house tours, weddings, parties, corporate events, etc., etc. - in a determined effort to preserve this worthy old house and the estate on which it stands. And they've done it without compromising the integrity of the buildings. Considering the condition of many old houses (including my own), Castle Hill is in remarkably good shape, the direct result of intelligent long range planning. This post has only been about the mansion's interiors, but lots goes on around the grounds and on the beach. You can read about that, and about the Trustees' other properties, at www.thetrustees.org.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote in 1845. Sidebar: Did you know his name was David Henry Thoreau, and he changed it to Henry David? Or that it was pronounced THOR-row, which rhymes with Storrow? "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner." To which end, for two years, he lived in a hut by Walden Pond.

In 1862, the year Thoreau died at Concord, Mass, a different sort of fellow named Ogden Codman (1839-1904) reclaimed an ancestral estate (which sounds grander than it was) in nearby Lincoln. Codman is seen below in 1864 with his wife, Sarah Bradlee. "The Grange," as he named the new/old country seat, was almost exactly as far on one side of Walden Pond as Thoreau's Concord was on the other. Residential proximity aside, Thoreau and Codman were light years apart. One lived in the world of ideas; the other lived decidedly on earth, aided by a family fortune derived from the sea trade and Boston real estate.

The Codmans had six children, five of whom survived. The most celebrated was Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951), a society decorator who championed 18th century classicism in an aesthetic world besieged by 19th century excess. Who among us can honestly claim to have heard of the Great Boston Fire of 1872? (Not me). This epic conflagration, which obliterated 65 acres of downtown Boston, delivered a major hit to the Codman family treasury. Their cost-cutting response was typical of upper class Americans of the day; they moved to France. Sensitive and artistic OC Jr was 12 at the time. Nine years in the American colony at Dinard would inevitably influence his sense of aesthetics.

After several unenjoyable apprenticeships, Codman opened his own Boston office in 1891 at age 29. His practice grew through the '90s, stepping up a notch in 1893 with a do-over of author Edith Wharton's Newport cottage. A bigger boost came in 1894 when Codman was hired to decorate the second floor of Cornelius Vanderbilt's new Breakers, a fat and influential commission if ever there was one. In 1897, he collaborated with Wharton on a book titled "The Decoration of Houses," a watershed event in decoration and in Codman's career. "Houses" argued persuasively that good decoration is inherently architectural, that it is not, as Edith put it, a division of dressmaking. The book remains a classic today.

The Grange started life in the late 1730s as a 2-story Georgian provincial farmhouse of modest pretension belonging to a man named Chambers Russell. Russell's Tory grandson skipped town for Antigua during the Revolution, after which the property was inherited by a related minor child named Charles Codman. The child's father, John Codman (1755-1803), "federalized" the house, turning it into a 3-story cube with the assistance of Boston architect Charles Bulfinch. Mr. Codman, whose grandfather it is (perhaps) interesting to note, was poisoned by his own slaves, died in 1803, and by 1807 his son Charles, no longer a minor, had liquidated the property and set off on a life of expensive pleasures elsewhere. Here's the Grange in the 19th century, looking almost exactly as it does today.

In 1862, after 55 years of assorted non-Codman owners, newly married Ogden Codman Sr. fulfilled the burning desire - very much an American one for our 19th century grandees - of reclaiming the estate of grandfather John Codman. Together with his architect brother-in-law, John Hubbard Sturgis (1834-1888), Ogden Codman improved the grounds and outbuildings, and upgraded the house with, among other things, indoor plumbing and a Victorian paneled dining room.

In 1888, Codman enlarged the house with a gambrel-roofed kitchen, laundry and maids' wing that extended to the north. His children gravitated around the Grange throughout their lives, unencumbered by spouses, with the exception of Ogden Jr. who, in 1904, wed a rich widow with a Manhattan townhouse he'd designed for her late husband. OC Jr. tinkered with the Grange's interiors throughout the 1890s - what else would a decorator do? - toning down the Victoriana of his parents' early days and emphasizing the building's 18th century bones.

To the west of the house, occupying a sunken site more accessible to servants than family, is a delicious Italian garden laid out in 1899. It was a pet project of the senior Mrs. Codman (1842-1922), although I assume crucial design decisions were left to her decorator son.

The columns at the west end of the pool are salvage from the ruins of the Codman Building, destroyed in the Boston fire of 1872.

Like every big old house, the Grange needs a lot of TLC.

The front door is a good place to pause and compare evolving floor plans - well, at least for the first floor.

The Chambers Russell house was a simple affair in 1741, the second floor largely a duplicate of the first.

In 1790, John Codman didn't just add a third floor, he doubled the structural footprint with a bow-fronted "hall" - occasionally used as a ballroom, we hear - plus a kitchen annex in the back. Rather than rebuild the staircase to provide access to rear rooms on expanded upper floors, Bulfinch attached an inventive "mirror addition" on the north of it.

55 years later, when the house came back into the Codman family, architect Sturgis tacked a box addition onto the southwest parlor, making it into a billiard room, and balanced it with a porch on the east.

When the new kitchen and maids' wing went up in 1888, the old kitchen became the servants' hall.

The most unusual feature of the Codman house is the inventive and highly decorative staircase. A window at the northern end of the hall was replaced in the early 20th century by an elevator, alas at the expense of needed natural light.

The southeast parlor, which the Codmans called the Morning Room, preserves beautiful paneling from 1741.

The library is across the front hall from the morning room. OC Sr. used it as a billiard room; OC Jr. exiled the table and filled it with comfortable furniture and books.

The door to the left of the library fireplace leads into the bow fronted "hall" on the 1799 plan which, by 1866, had become a drawing room. By 1963 all the Codman siblings were dead, except sister Dorothy. She stayed on at the Grange until her own death in 1968, after which the property was donated to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (today's Historic New England) with absolutely everything still inside of it.

The image below shows the back half of the double stair, looking towards the front door. We're making a clockwise tour of the first floor. Next stop, the dining room.

OC Jr's Uncle Sturgis is said to have played an important role encouraging young Codman to pursue a career in design. Charming artifact or not, the Sturgis-designed dining room, with its dark woodwork and ponderous details, is just the sort of room Codman wouldn't like.

A door on the north wall of the dining room leads first to a service corridor with back stair, and then to a servants' hall. The over-scaled hearth, pot hanger intact, speaks to the room's original 18th century use as a kitchen.

Further on is the 1888 addition whose finishes, in serving pantry and in what the Codmans called the "new" kitchen, speak eloquently to the Victorian era. At the time of Dorothy Codman's death in 1968, the new kitchen had hardly changed.

Through a door on the kitchen's north wall is a corridor to the laundry room.

It's a long hike from laundry room to main stair, and an interesting hike to the second floor.

There are 8 principal bedrooms - 4 on the 2nd floor and 4 on 3rd - and not quite enough bathrooms. The senior Mrs. Codman's room is on the southeast corner of the 2nd floor. She had her own bath en suite.

A shared closet connects Mrs. C's room with that of her musical (and rather sheltered) son, Hugh (1875-1946).

The door from Hugh Codman's bedroom to the hall illustrates the necessity of the double stair. We'll descend to the mezzanine level in the middle distance, then climb back up to the landing at the front of the house. Mother Codman's bedroom is on the left (southeast); sister Alice's (1866-1923) is on the right (southwest).

Alice Codman's bedroom, to my eye, is pure Ogden Codman Jr. - bright, elegant, erudite and extremely comfortable. But she doesn't have her own bathroom.

Nor is there an en suite bath for this guestroom, located above the drawing room on the building's northwest corner. Alice and guests alike trekked to a hall bath by the back stairs.

Distributed above the kitchens and laundry is a former nursery, a gaggle of maids' rooms, a small servants' lounge, 2 back stairs, and one very modest bathroom.

We're back on the main stair, looking south towards the front of the house, about to visit the 3rd floor.

Ogden Codman Jr's room was on the southeast corner of the 3rd floor, directly above his mother's. After six years of marriage, Codman's wife, the former Leila Griswold Webb, died in 1910 at the age of 54 (Codman was 47). In 1920, he abandoned the States - together with a client list that included names like Cabot, Coolidge, Otis, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Paine - and moved permanently to France. It was here, in 1944, that an aide to General Patton discovered him in his suburban chateau, reading in bed while the Nazis fled Paris outside his window. He spent his last years embellishing a spectacular Riviera villa called La Leopolda, which he rented out but never personally occupied.

The southwest bedroom belonged to brother Tom (1868-1963).

And the northwest room on the third floor was Dorothy's (1883-1968). She died here at the age of 85, 48 years after Ogden left, 46 years after her mother died, and 5 years after the last of her siblings, brother Tom, passed away in 1963.

Across the hall from Dorothy's room is another hall bath,, this one shared by everybody on the 3rd floor except Ogden who, like his mother, had his own en suite. Next to the hall bath is the simple bedroom of Marie-Reine, Dorothy's French nanny who stayed with the Codmans for the rest of her life.

The family's trunks are still in the attic.

Shelves full of preserves - probably about to explode - are still in the basement.

My guides from Historic New England, Wendy Hubbard and Susanna Crampton, were not only infinitely patient and helpful, but understood completely that I wanted to see EVERYTHING. Historic New England owns 35 house museums, huge collections of art and artifacts, and important archives documenting New England architectural and social history. One of its early members, when still called the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, was Ogden Codman Jr. In 1920 Codman convinced the rest of the family that the Grange deserved preservation. A lucky thing for us all. The link is www.historicnewengland.org.

Here's a question I've had for years: Why was his name "Johns" Hopkins? Back when I was in college, my fraternity brothers used the first syllable of each other's last names, with an "s" tacked to the end. Thus, Jim Schumann became "Shoes," Nick Brazeau (for convenience) was "Braz," and I was "Forms." Johns Hopkins, however, had more legitimacy; his great-grandmother's name was Margaret Johns.

Born to Quaker parents on a Maryland plantation, Hopkins (1795-1873) became a Baltimore millionaire philanthropist and all around mover/shaker, parlaying a family provisioning business into a fortune in railroads (specifically the Baltimore and Ohio) and banking. Six years before he died, Hopkins incorporated the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Each was to be funded by his estate which, at the time of his death, came to a cool $7 million. Hopkins went to the grave a bachelor, reportedly carrying a torch for a first cousin his Quaker religion forbade him to wed. (We'll leave that one alone).

The elevation above shows Clifton, a provincial Georgian country house built in 1803 by a captain in the War of 1812 named Henry Thompson. Clifton stood on 165 acres on the Harford Road, once northwest - and now firmly in the middle - of the city of Baltimore. The house was originally one room deep and 5 bays wide. Flanking wings were added in 1805, and an octagonal dining room to the rear in 1812. In 1837, hankering for country air, the prosperous Johns Hopkins bought the place - at public auction, bad luck for the Thompsons - for $15,800. Between 1841 and 1853 architects John Rudolf Niernsee (1814-1885) and partner James Crawford Nielson (1816-1900), designers of railroad stations for the B & O, transformed Clifton into an Italian palace, the most notable feature of which is a memorable 81-foot tall campanile perched atop the porte cochere.

Man makes plans and the gods laugh, so the saying goes. It was the specific intent of Hopkins' will that Johns Hopkins Medical School be sited on the Clifton estate, which during his lifetime had grown to some 500 acres. Instead, the school trustees bought an existing school building closer to downtown Baltimore. Hopkins also intended that the new university be constructed on the property. The trustees dismissed the site as "malarial" and built the university 2 miles to the northwest. Hopkins had 22 years to spin in his grave while Johns Hopkins University converted his grounds into playing fields and his house into locker rooms. He probably spun faster when, in 1895, the university sold the land to the city of Baltimore for a public park, which it remains today, and turned the house into a sort of land-bound tramp steamer, used by everyone from park police to a municipal golf corporation to an operator of public ballroom dancing. Walls were pulled down, ceilings dropped, mantels and woodwork yanked out and sent to the dump.

The first sign of a new dawn came in December of 1992 when, for a dollar a year, a newly formed non-profit AmeriCorps program called Civic Works rented the house for its headquarters. Civic Works promptly set to work converting trash filled lots into community gardens, mentoring inner city students, rehabilitating abandoned housing, helping people get GEDs, teaching skills to young kids, finding jobs for the unemployed, even raising produce in urban farms. If all this weren't enough, they decided to restore the mansion as well.

Restoration started with one room, but celebration was short-lived when fire broke out in another. Happily, the house did not burn down, and a generous insurance check wound up paying for a new roof.

By 1998, Civic Works was more skilled in getting grants, attracting contributions, cultivating groups like the Friends of Clifton, and getting the estate listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

By 2004, a broad hall running down the east-west spine of the house and a couple of main floor rooms had been restored, purportedly to 1812 appearance. In 2013, however, Civic Works, the Baltimore Parks Department and the Friends of Clifton collaborated on a mega-restoration project that appears to have wiped out much of this previous work. Designed by the Baltimore firm of Gant Brunett Architects, the plan for the mansion amounts to total interior reconstruction. It is informed - indeed, mitigated - by considerable spelunking for historical stencils, wallpapers, etc. buried for generations under cheap paint, dropped ceilings and clumsy wall-boarding.

Clifton is an interesting house, from the standpoint of its structural evolution, the miracle of its survival, and the passion of those involved in its renovation/reconstruction/restoration. Despite the current work-in-progress disarray, I had terrific fun climbing all over it with CW's John Ciekot.

Henry Thompson's Clifton of 1803 was one room deep and occupied the footprint of the present living and breakfast rooms. A kitchen wing would have been appended somewhere on the back. The present main stair, located next to the porte cochere, occupies one of the 1805 wings. When Thompson's 1812 dining room addition replaced the earlier kitchen wing, a new kitchen was installed in the basement underneath it. The current plan is Niernsee's and Nielson's - not inspired, perhaps, but imposing in scale and, when first built, elaborately decorated.

You wouldn't be the first not to notice this frescoed view of the Bay of Naples that ornaments - or ornamented - the wall just inside the front door. Civic Works is absolutely serious in its intention to, one day anyway, restore it.

The long hall running the length of the main floor suggests the architects should have stuck to railroad stations. Its abundant wall space provided opportunity for much painted decoration in the past, and will again the future.

Here's the living room, with a door in the southeast corner that leads out to the porch. In the days before campanile and porte cochere, that door was Captain Thompson's front door. The original Georgian center hall on which it opened was combined by Niernsee and Nielson with the western parlor to make Hopkins' new living room.

Here's the breakfast room, restored in 1994. Outside of it is the long hall, looking west towards the porte cochere. Beyond John is the entrance to a glazed piazza.

Absent being told, I'd have never guessed this was Thompson's octagonal dining room of 1812 - partly, I suppose, because it's not an octagon. The elegant ceiling is barely hanging on; careful demolition has revealed a host of former decorating schemes.

The formerly elegant - and more visually comprehensible - drawing room is a study in Victorian era heft. I wonder who made off with the missing fireplace, unless some bureaucrat from the past simply had it chopped up and thrown out.

The adjoining library, minus what must also have been an imposing mantel, is an equal wreck. The hope is that those exposed fragments of vintage wall treatments will guide future restoration finishes.

The eastern end of the main floor is a forest of new 2 x 4 studs and attached electric cables in which there's not much of a story. Let's return to the main stair from which we'll enter Clifton's most exciting feature, the campanile. Beyond the campanile entrance, located on a landing just short of the second floor hall, a stack of little rooms rises, one on top of the other, ending on a narrow balustraded terrace with sweeping views of all Baltimore.

Clifton hasn't been occupied as a private house since 1873, so there are no bathrooms. Well, that's not quite true; there was one bathroom on the second floor across the hall from the billiard room. Anything that was left got pulled out during installation of a new elevator.

The second floor hall leads to bedrooms in various states of construction - or deconstruction, if you will.

One must step up to the billiard room, due to the extra high ceiling in the drawing room below.

The low steps on the right are outside the billiard room; the blue door on the left is the new elevator; the main stair is at the far end of the hall.

We, however, are taking the back stair for a peek at floor 3, where new studs are enclosing modern HVAC units. A peculiar floor plan once accommodated servants, although how exactly is a mystery to me.

At the foot of the back stair is the original kitchen, barely discernible as such but for an old cooking arm that once held pots in the fireplace. There is nothing peculiar about locating a kitchen on the floor below the dining room. In this case, however, there is no dumbwaiter. Apparently there never was one either. This required servants to hike ridiculous distances back and forth and up and down in order to serve meals in the dining and breakfast rooms above. I cannot fathom what Hopkins' architects were thinking about, since dumbwaiter technology was widespread by the 1850s.

As crucial as anything in the resurection of Clifton is its modern heating plant. 26 geo-thermal wells, each 350' deep, have been drilled around the house to serve 13 zone-controlled heat pumps. I don't really know what that means, but it sounds like they're doing the right thing.

What will Civic Works do with the finished Hopkins mansion? Besides enjoying a new headquarters, they'll invite other non-profits to open shop here, mount history exhibits, run house tours, host weddings, provide a venue for cultural events, and any- and everything else they can think of. It is a grand and ambitious project for which I wish them every success. The link is www.civicworks.com.

This is Mrs. John Work Garrett (1877-1952), nee Alice Warder, whose husband was a grandson of the first president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The Garrett family fortune was a whopper, although by 1908, the year of Mrs Garrett's marriage, the B&O had already gone bankrupt once. Garrett dollars remained abundant, however, if no longer illimitable. Judging from the marcelled hair, the satin frock and the divine lighting, I'd say the photo was taken sometime in the early 1920s. Pretty hot for a forty-something. Mrs. Garrett is the star of today's post, and we'll return to her later.

In the summer of 1888, while out on the Chesapeake Bay, Mr. Garrett's father drowned in a yachting accident. He was only 39. John Work Garrett II (1872-1942), seen below, was 16 at the time, the eldest of three boys. "How can I ever settle down to be a business man, a banker or a railroader?" Princeton freshman Garrett wrote in 1892. "There is a splendid business waiting for us...(but)...it's hard work to enter without a father to show us what to do." Four years later the B&O was in receivership, and young Garrett was dealing with trustees he didn't really trust.

The Garrett's Baltimore house, called Evergreen, was built in 1858 by a fellow named Stephen Broadbent. In 1878, B&O President John Work Garrett I (1820-1884), bought it for his son, the unlucky yachtsman. Between 1885 and 1886 the house was substantially enlarged with athletic facilities - a gym, bowling alleys and a billiard room - for Garrett's three boys. One doubts the facilities got much use, however, as their mother, Mrs. Alice Whitridge Garrett (1851-1920), closed the house after her husband's death and moved to Princeton, NJ.

Widow and sons were back at Evergreen by the late 1890s, at which point Mrs. G. electrified the place, built additional servants' quarters on the north, combined the double parlors of 1858 into a modern drawing room, and added an elegantly canopied entrance, with paneled and mezzanined stairhall within.

Subsequent alterations eventually quadrupled Evergreen's floorspace.

The drive-through is part of yachtman Harrison Garrett's 1885 athletic addition. Guestrooms are above the arch; athletic facilities out of sight beyond it to the left; a sliver of Mrs. G's 1895 service addition is visible at left foreground.

The original athletic wing, re-purposed in the 1920s, is on the right, extending east from the back of the house. The roof of a 1908 enlargement lurks behind the cupola. The wing on the left is the library, completed in 1928.

I doubt the view from the library terrace included so much pavement in the Garretts' days. An ornate greenhouse originally stood between the retaining wall and the lawn.

The path and stairs once led to the greenhouse.

Let's continue closkwise around the building to the front door of 1858.

By age 29, John Garrett had solved the problem of what to do with his life. Thanks to a combination of education, social standing, natural tact and family connections, he became a diplomat. In 1901 he joined the Foreign Service and, at different times, served in Holland, Luxembourg, Berlin (where his future wife was studying voice), Argentina, Venezuela and eventually Rome. When his mother died in 1920, he inherited Evergreen and, together with his wife, turned an architectural showplace into a high culture mecca.

Garrett's father is responsible for the heavy late 1880s look of the main hall, as well as the reception room immediately left of the front door.

In 1895 Garrett's mother combined the Victorian double parlors of 1858 into one large drawing room. Beyond the door in the distance was the dining room, built simultaneously with the athletic wing.

The dining room from the late 1880s was transformed in 1932 into a reading room, really an extension of the 1928 library.

The library, from whose terrace we admired the lawn, is, to my eye, an apotheosis of 1920s architectural glamour. It manages to be grand, elegantly proportioned and elaborately paneled without recourse to Edwardian heft.

Let's recross the reading room, duck across the main hall (the tapestry is Flemish 17th century, which you probably guessed), and have a look at the relocated dining room. Considering the rest of the house, it isn't very inspiring, in spite of the fact its decoration is attributed to (of all people) the famous costume and set designer, Leon Bakst (1866-1924), about whom more later.

The door to the kitchen corridor is on the east wall. Past dish pantry and back stairs is a really interesting room - the kitchen.

Now we're back in the main hall, looking west towards the old front door.

Just short of the reception room, the hall makes a 90 degree dogleg towards the new front door.

An obscure footnote in American social history concerns John Garrett's uncle Robert (1847-1896). Robert Garrett had been president of the B&O until his retirement at age 40, when, according to his New York Times obituary, he became "mentally...unfit to participate in any business and ...seldom seen in public." Actually, he did go out a bit in society, accompanied by a patient wife who urged other guests to indulge her husband's delusion that he was actually the Czar of Russia. Or maybe it was Napoleon. This is one of those odd society stories you read, then cannot for the life of you remember where. Robert Garrett's mental collapse, one year before brother Harrison's drowning, only compounded problems at the B&O.

The view below looks north from the mezzanine to the stair down. The 2nd view below looks from the mezzanine up to the second landing.

These stairs lead to the third floor which, to my consternation, was "off limits" on my tour.

Houses built in 1858 are by definition deficient in bathrooms. Evergreen's many alterations and additions largely corrected that, although a slightly awkward hall bath survives at the western end of the second floor hall. The only room it serves is a guestroom immediately to the north.

On the south side of the hall bath, a pair of bedrooms were combined into an owners' suite, with new en suite bath. The dressing room (or boudoir or study or whatever they used it for) in the image below displays artifacts from Alice Garrett's many collections. P.S. Mrs. Garrett is not to be confused with her mother-in-law, whose Christian name was also Alice, and whose house the younger Alice move into with her diplomat husband in 1920. Mrs. Garrett Jr. was a financially able patroness of the arts who, accompanied by her dashing husband, inhabited a glamorous world of writers, artists, dancers, diplomats, critics and musicians. Alice Garrett was an early collector of Utrillo, Picassso, Dufy, Bonnard, Derain, a subject of Zuloaga (whose portrait of her husband hangs above the library fireplace), and the guardian angel who literally rescued Leon Bakst from homelessness.

Beyond the bedroom is the owners' en suite bath, redolent with '20s swank.

Across the hall from the owners' suite is a north-facing guestroom whose attached bath was decorated in 1886 by the famous high Victorian New York firm of Herter Brothers. (Think: Vanderbilt mansion, Fifth Avenue).

Herter Brothers' so-called "gold bath" is named for the curious excess of genuine gold leaf that has been applied to, among other surfaces, the seat on the can.

Mr. Garrett's boyhood room, above and south of the drive-through arch, became his study. The picturesque gallery looks original to the 1880s. Beyond this room is a double-doored elevator, on whose far side a corridor crosses the arch en route to the athletic wing.

A guestroom and bath situated en route above the arch overlook lawns and the site of the former greenhouse. Beyond the arch, long corridors lead to servants' rooms sandwiched originally between bowling alley below and gymnasium above.

Let's go up first, to what used to be a gymnasium.

In 1922, Leon Bakst arrived at Alice Garrett's Baltimore mansion in order to design a private theatre. And here she is, dancing "Songs in Costume" for her gala 1923 opening. The St. Petersburg born Bakst, who costumed Nijinsky and Pavlova and designed sets for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, was part of the Garretts' cosmopolitan/artistic millieu. At Evergreen in the '20s, high culture and cutting edge art met at a venue of luxe living.

By his early 50s, Bakst's youthful fame and fortune had been replaced by physical woes and financial terrors. He might well have lost his house in 1919, plus most of his paintings, had Mrs. Garrett not advanced him substantial sums "...based upon my paintings." She become his professional agent, organized a series of successful shows, purchased a number of his works herself, and pulled him from the brink.

Bakst died at the end of 1924, only 58 years old but at least no longer worried about money.

Two levels down is the former bowling alley which, not being bowlers, the Garretts converted early on to a gallery for their collection of Asian art.

Adjacent to the Asian gallery is the former billiard room, now a gift shop located strategically at the end of everybody's tour.

Evergreen is a huge house, much bigger than it appears at first blush. I estimate I missed about a third of it, about which I will say no more. John Garrett was 70 years old when he died in 1942, at which point Evergreen was willed to Johns Hopkins University, subject to a life tenancy by his wife. Alice Garrett died in 1952 at the age 75. There were no children. In the palmy 1880s, 51 servants worked in the house, stables and grounds. A comparative handful runs the place today, administering an important library and conducting public tours. The link is http://museums.jhu.edu/evergreen.php.

It is the charm of the American class system, according to some, that most people don't know it exists. And if they do, they don't know their own place in it. Sumner Welles (1892-1961) knew his real place. Son of one of New York society's "Patriarchs," grandson of "the" Mrs. Astor's sister Katherine, and Edith Wharton's grand-nephew, Welles at age 12 carried Eleanor Roosevelt's train at her wedding to FDR. According to a 1997 biography by his son, he would become one of "the half dozen most influential American career diplomats of this century."

During his years at the State Department, Welles advocated the so-called Good Neighbor Policy, which substituted a degree of sensitivity for the reflex military invasions that formerly greeted any threat to American investment. Smiling at villains like Cuba's Fulgencio Batista came with the territory, but didn't minimize the importance of the policy.

Welles was married three times, his second wife a divorced beauty named Mathilde Townsend. Until her death in 1949, the couple's in-town address was this Washington D.C. mansion, rebuilt by Carrere and Hastings in 1901 for Mrs. Welles' mother. Since 1950, it's been the Cosmos Club.

President Coolidge, a friend of Mrs. Welles' first husband and moralist of a sort familiar in that era, observed Welles in her company before the divorce. "So long as I am president," he supposedly muttered, "that young man will never even be a minister." Coolidge made sure the young man didn't even have a job and Welles soon found himself back in private life. Until FDR's election, Welles wrote tomes on foreign policy from comfortable exile on a 245-acre estate called Oxon Hill Manor. The property was located in Prince George's County, MD., all of 9 miles from the U.S. Capitol Building. Such was the world before urban sprawl.

An early 18th century manor house, also named Oxon Hill and rife with important colonial associations, stood on this site until gutted by fire in 1895. In 1927, Welles and his wife bought the land and hired architect Jules Henri de Sibour (1872-1938) to design this handsome neo-Georgian mansion, completed in 1928. de Sibour, reputedly a direct descendant of Louis XVI (a neat trick, since that unlucky Louis had none), was, per "The Georgetowner," Washington's "charming maestro of Beaux Arts architecture." Some pretty grand stuff on Massachusetts Avenue, notably the Uzbekistan embassy, finished in 1909 for coal magnate Clarence Moore, was de Sibour's work. An alumnus of St Paul's, Yale, Skull and Bones, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the New York offices of society architects Ernest Flagg and Bruce Price, he was a natural choice for a client like Welles.

Most people, thinking mistakenly that Beaux Arts is a style and not an approach to form and purpose, wouldn't call this a Beaux Arts house. It is, after all, a long way from the "Cartouche Architecture" for which de Sibour had such a flair. Oxon Hill, stylistically anyway, is a sort of homage to the original brick manor, seen through a 20th century lens of American wealth, convenience and comfort. I have to say, I like it a lot. It's got light, heft, style, big rooms, and big views which, though not quite what they used to be, remain surprisingly sylvan, 9 miles from the Capitol.

A kitchen wing extending to the north, with maids' and footmen's quarters on separate 2nd floor corridors, is remarkably invisible considering its size.

This admittedly unsatisfactory image nonetheless shows Oxon Hill's simple, gracious and calmly efficient first floor plan.

I doubt strongly these are original colors on the walls. Too bright, I'd say. Fortunately the essential aristocracy of design and proportion remains unobscured.

Oxon Hill Manor house and grounds, owned by Prince George's County since the 1970s, is used by all sort of groups and individuals, prime among them people getting married. I suppose it doesn't much matter that most of them have only the vaguest idea of how these interiors would originally have been decorated.

When FDR was elected in 1932, Welles returned to government as the new president's principal foreign policy advisor. Between 1937 and 1943, he was Under Secretary of State, in which position he guided policy not just in Latin America, but on Soviet annexation in the Baltics (we refused to acknowledge), the plight of German Jews (we refused to help), and the future of the United Nations (we were big supporters). On August 11, 1941, Welles was on the cover of Time Magazine. Throughout these same years, he was locked in combat with Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1871-1955), an adversary consumed equally by ill health and personal rancor toward Sumner Welles.

I love this house, but the veneered library paneling is not the quality you'd find in a house built 20 years earlier. As for those light fixtures, all replacements I'm sure...well, the less said the better.

You have to look beyond the dreadful modern decoration to appreciate Oxon Hill's grand and beautifully proportioned dining room. Serving pantry and kitchen, save for new floor tiles, are 1920s antiques in practically original condition.

So what was wrong with the old floor?

A service entrance adjacent to the kitchen court opens onto this hall. The door to the kitchen is on the left; ice was loaded into the walk-in through the high door on the wall; the servants' hall, now an office, is through the doorway on the right.

Let's retrace our steps through the kitchen, pantry and dining room, to the main stair.

How graceful is the stairhall, although after walking though this house it was a while before I could look at an egg yolk. The dining room is through the door on the left; the service hall is straight ahead in the distance; the ladies' and gents' are tucked under the stairs; and the reception room (see floor plan above) is behind the wall on the right.

I've made some assumptions with my second floor labels - the female servants facing the Potomac; the men facing inland; the location of Mr. Welles' study and his wife's boudoir - but I'm probably right.

At the top of the stairs, Guest 1 and its en suite bath are essentially intact. My regular readers will recognize the upscale 1920s Crane bathroom fixtures and hardware.

A patched baseboard molding betrays the modern insertion of a door that blocks the original view south down the 2nd floor hall.

The guestrooms are mostly intact, but their baths have been randomly cannibalized.

In September, 1940, returning to Washington from the funeral of House speaker William Bankhead, Sumner Welles propositioned not one, but two Pullman porters who, if the incident weren't already spicy enough, also happened to be black. The porters complained to the railroad and, although the press of the era avoided private scandals, this provided no protection from Welles' nememis, Cordell Hull. On the night in question Welles was seriously drunk, not for the first time. Nor was he trawling for sex with men for the first time either. Sumner Welles was a sexual libertine whose college addiction to hookers had long ago graduated to men. Despite a vendetta launched by Hull's State Department cronies, notably Ambassador (to the Soviet Union and France) William Bullitt, FDR protected Welles. Quite aside from Welles' sexuality, he was an extremely able negotiator and policy expert. This made no difference to Republican Senator Owen Brewster, however, who, through Hull's efforts, learned of the scandal and threatened Roosevelt with a Senate investigation unless Welles resigned. Being gay back then was a crime, after all, and gay government men, especially in wartime, were considered threats to national security. In September, 1943, FDR angrily relented, accepting a good man's resignation rather than let a life be ruined. The photo below of Mr. & Mrs. Welles looks to have been taken at about this time.

The owners' bedroom is on the southwest corner of the house, between his study and her boudoir - although maybe the study was actually his bedroom. A large sunny terrace enjoys a good view of the Potomac, despite growing trees and the new National Harbor complex located just downstream.

A door on the north wall leads to what I'm guessing was Mr. Welles' study. The fireplace strikes a masculine note, in contrast to all that lemony yellow paint. A bath and shower are en suite.

Mrs. Welles' bath and boudoir are beyond a door on the bedroom's west wall. Her grand old marble bathroom, like others in the house, has suffered serious shopping raids, which the county shouldn't have let happen.

Let's head back along the bedroom hall, bearing in mind that door in the distance wasn't de Sibour's idea, cross the landing at the top of the stairs, and have a look at the servants'quarters.

This view shows the double corridors, for male and female help respectively, connected here but also separately accessible. Oxon Hill had live-in accommodations for 12 in help. I've lived in houses with equally dispirited looking servants' quarters. If the main rooms look fine, one tends to forget falling ceilings in distant unoccupied maids' rooms.

Having successfully chased him out of government, Welles' foes, like the press, went back to ignoring his sexual peccadillos. For the rest of the '40s and into the early 1950s, he was a radio commentator of some note, wrote an important book on Palestine, and championed (belatedly) the cause of Israel. By the time of his 3rd marriage in 1952, both the house in town and Oxon in the (still) country were sold, symbolic of a new start in life. Having largely escaped the viciousness of the McCarthy hearings, Welles fell victim in May of 1956 to a mean-spirited expose in Confidential Magazine. "We Accuse Sumner Welles" screamed the front page."No government at war could commit greater folly than to retain a confirmed homosexual in its No. 2 Foreign Policy post." Rather than quote passages from this article, I will pick from the text a selection of pithy nouns and phrases, to wit: "homosexual" (appears practically in every paragraph), "conspiracy of silence,""security risk,""perversion,""public indignation,""liquored up,""prissiness,""morally ill,""lavender stripe,""obstreperous" and, juiciest of all, "squiring a handsome youth."

Of course I looked at the basement, where I admired the new boilers and wondered what in the world had happened to the original floorboards and plastered walls.

Welles and his last wife Harriet Post had been married only a few years when Confidential's expose was pubished. Five years later he binged himself to death at the age of 68. Despite heavy suburbanization in recent years, Oxon Hill's country acres survive, surprisingly intact, as county parkland, albeit now bisected by a stretch of the Capital Beltway. The link is http://history.pgparks.com/sites_and_museums/Oxon_Hill_Manor.htm.

Sonnet 29, by William Shakespeare:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns of praise at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Here I am at the gate to Oatlands, built in 1804 outside Leesburg, VA by a great slaveholder named George Carter (1777-1846). Carter didn't live to see it, but in the wake of the Civil War his son, George II, was reduced to running Oatlands as a boarding house. But I digress.

Oatlands' builder was the great-grandson of Robert "King" Carter (1662-1732), the richest man in the American colonies. How rich? Answer: 330,000 acres and 1000 slaves rich, not to mention profits from 47 plantations and the (undoubtedly profitable) royal governorship of Virginia. King Carter was a remote and powerful autocrat who, as the saying goes, ate lesser men for breakfast.

King Carter's grandson, Robert "Councillor" Carter III (1727-1804) had 17 children - (poor Mrs. Carter) - the 15th being Oatland's George. Young George's share of the Carter land empire came down to three tracts, the largest covering some 3400 acres just south of the little town of Leesburg. "Councillor" Carter was called the "First Emancipator" because he freed 500 of his slaves. His son George, a different breed of cat, started out at Oatlands with 17 slaves, then bought, sold and steadily increased their number during the rest of his life. "I do not understand the management of slaves," he confessed, oddly, in a letter to his sister, Sophia, "neither do I think you do, or that either of us ever will."

Dulles Airport may not be close to Washington D.C., but it's quite close to Leesburg. This has had the predictable effect of transforming a once rural town, founded by planters in the 1730s, into a commuter suburb of splanches, garden apartments, and 12-lane boulevards lined with America's usual cast of big-box and mass-market retailers. At least, that's the way it looks on the east. Go west or south and old Virginia still survives, albeit invaded here and there by condo clusters. The views from Oatlands, now protected by viewshed legislation, are wonderfully intact. Alas, the music of birds and fields is underscored by the unrelenting rumble of truck traffic on Route 15.

The Carters laid out extensive terraced gardens east of the house. Indeed, they rest within them to this day, in a hillside mausoleum. Oatlands' gardens were rescued from ruin in the early 20th Century by the last private owners, about whom more shortly.

Sometime in the late 1820s or early '30s - maybe in anticipation of a late life marriage (in 1835 at age 58), or maybe not - George Carter gave Oatlands a very thorough makeover. The view below shows the north, or back, elevation of what had formerly been your basic (and slightly boring) 5-bay, center hall, provincial Georgian brick house with hipped roof surmounted by a large glazed lantern. (Think: Colonial Williamsburg). As part of this makeover the three center bays on the back were blown out and replaced by 3 new floors of elegant octagonal rooms - well, octagonal on the first and second floors and subdivided on the third. Matching hexagonal wings containing twin staircases were attached to each end.

The south-facing entrance facade received a more impressive facelift. Carter, the rich southern planter, had a 2-story porch with grand Corinthian columns fabricated in New York, shipped south by packet, then dragged to his Virginia plantation by teams of oxen. The front door and Paladian window above it were likely features of the original house. The additional fenestration on either side of the porch, the third floor above it and, of course, the flanking wings were all new. Oatlands' original brick walls were covered with stucco and, at least in the beginning, scored to give the appearance of stone blocks.

"I comfort myself in knowing," George Carter wrote, again to his sister Sophia, "that I have no mulatto children - It is a Sin, I am only answerable for, to my God." Which may explain why his slaves kept running away. "(A)s soon as they leave me," he continued, "I consider myself absolved from every type of affection." As for the annoying proximity of judgmental Quakers and the Underground Railroad, Carter struggled "with the most enthusiastic and invincible opposition in the recovery of my property, from the Quakers and others. The sneers, the contempt, and scorn of the whole mass of aiders, advisors, and accomplices of runaway slaves...(are)...now triumphing at my shame."

Perhaps the specter of mulatto children led him in 1835 to wed the rich Widow Lewis of Upperville, VA. He was 58, she was 39, and before his death, 11 years later, they produced two sons. Elizabeth Osborne Grayson Lewis Carter (1797-1885), seen below holding a plant before a watercolor of her house - actually, only one of her houses - has a deceptively schoolmarmish air for a woman who, according to the 1860 census, owned 133 human beings. The Battle of Ball's Bluff, fought outside Leesburg in October, 1861, was a Confederate victory, but close enough to Oatlands to rattle the Widow Carter. She packed up forthwith and departed with an entourage of slaves and household good for Upperville, leaving son George in charge of Oatlands.

Now we come to "Gone with the Wind" territory, a world where impoverished southern aristocrats do what must be done in order to eat. George Carter II, married since 1863 to another Upperville belle named Katherine Powell, tried without success to make Oatlands a paying farm, then a genteel girls boarding school, and finally a summer boarding house. Here they are, the boarders that is, in 1895, gathered on the porch of a pretty dispirited looking Oatlands, gazing over an ad hoc tennis court that has been laid out on the lawn.

But wait, it gets worse. In 1897, the last of the Carters sold Oatlands to Stilson Hutchins (1838-1912), founder of the Washington Post. Hutchins locked the place up, never moved in, dawdled around for six years while it filled up with bats and bugs, before finally selling it in 1903.

The new owner was William Corcoran Eustis (1862-1921), grandson of the famous philanthropist and art gallery donor William Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888). (He was also, coincidentally, the brother of my Millbrook landlord's grandmother). Eustis and his wife, Edith Livingston Morton Eustis (1874-1964), installed bathrooms, a heat plant, gaslights, pulled out a labyrinth of rooming house partitions, restored the formal gardens, cleaned, painted, repaired and restored Oatlands to a level of luster that probably exceeded its antebellum state.

These were distinguished people. The Harvard educated Eustis served as an American diplomat in London, then as a captain on "Black Jack" Pershing's staff during the First War. Not surprisingly, he became Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1900, shortly before purchasing Oatlands, Eustis married the daughter of former New York Governor and U.S. Vice President (under Harrison) Levi P. Morton (1824-1920). Mrs. Eustis occupied Oatlands until her death in 1964 at the age of 90.

What Oatlands lacks in Beaux Arts sophistication it makes up for with pedigree. Design-wise, it is a lavish antique, somewhere on an arc between high style American Federal and Greek Revival. The Eustis upgrades, largely completed by 1908, barely affect the early 19th century architectural gestalt. The furniture, most of which looks as it did in Mrs. Eustis' time, lends a delicious air of old family upper class authenticity.

Oatlands' Regan Reedy took me on an excellent tour that did not omit one square inch of floor space.

The front door (below at right) opens directly into an elaborately detailed hall, which in turn mediates access to an open fan of principal rooms. The smoking room on the southeast is dead ahead; the dining room on the northeast is through the door beside it; an octagonal drawing room on the north is behind the door on the left. Both the library on the northwest and the reception room on the southwest are behind the camera.

The view below looks the other direction, towards reception room and library on the left and right respectively.

The north-facing drawing room is on axis with the front door. Oatlands is a place where so many things have been done right that I hesitate to criticize anything at all. That said, the drawing room furniture was recently removed for better access, and if it were up to me, I'd put it back.

I'm all for decorators whose rooms convey an aura of luxe the likes of which the client's parents would hardly recognize. However, like poker players around a baize table, rooms have "tells." Family photos in black and white, fringed lampshades, a lot of real books, good antiques mixed with comfortable but undistinguished overstuffed sofas, faded slipcovers, actual ancestors on the wall, and always something (a cup, a statuette) relating to horses, are figurative boxes that not everybody can check.

The small reception room is located on the southwest corner and reads today as more of a passage to the western staircase. Tucked back here is a Eustis era powder room.

From the foot of the western stair, we'll reverse direction and cut across the library and main hall to the door of the smoking room on the southeast corner.

Beyond the smoking room is the eastern stair. Question: Which of these was the main stair? Answer: I don't think there was one. Let's turn left and have a look at the dining room where, among other decorative items, a frame on the wall contains a lock of George Washington's hair.

The dining room also connects to the eastern stair, but instead of going up, we'll head down to the kitchen suite.

The servants, when Oatlands was built, were slaves whose comfort was not overmuch on their owner's mind. Mr. & Mrs. Eustis modernized kitchen and pantries in the style of 1908, after which - except for the occasional insertion of a new appliance - these rooms remained virtually unchanged. Current kitchen excavations have exposed the original cooking fireplace, although where this project is going is unclear.

The servant hall below is adjacent to the western stair. However, we are returning east, for reasons I've forgot, to take the eastern stair to the second floor.

There's a hall bath at either end of the 2nd floor bedroom corridor. Here's the bath on the east.

The bedroom hall is accessed at either end by the two identical staircases. This is practical in an antique sort of a way but hardly a Beaux Arts solution. Oatlands has no "back stair." Two guestrooms are located at this end of the hall, two are on the west, and the owners' bedroom is in the middle.

The owners' bedroom sits above the drawing room. Unlike other bedrooms on this floor, it has its own (disarmingly rural looking) en suite bath. I doubt Ogden Codman decorated Mrs. Eustis's bedroom, but the light colors, charming fabrics and French furniture are very much his look.

The hallway passes another pair of bedrooms before arriving at the hall bath on the west.

Let's backtrack to the middle of the house and take the stair to 3.

Old houses are like horses; in some ways they're all the same.

I think we've now seen Oatlands.

In 1965, Margaret Eustis Finley (seen below) and her sister Anne Eustis Emmet, gave Oatlands on 261 acres to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Trust's founding chairman, not coincidentally, was Mrs. Finley's husband David. Mr. Finley was also the first director of the National Gallery of Art, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts and, interestingly, director of the famous Roberts Commission, whose W.W. II exploits against art-thieving Nazis inspired the film, "The Monuments Men."

Ten thousand visitors tour Oatlands every year, while another 30,000 attend dog shows, horse races, harvest festivals, etc., etc. on the property. Thanks to recent acquisitions, the estate now covers 415 acres, not counting protected viewsheds. Many thanks to the Oatlands Historic House and Garden Archives for use of vintage images. The link is: www.oatlands.org.

In 1867, dry goods king William Culbertson (1814-1892) hired a pair of architect/builder brothers named William and James Bane to construct this fashionable Second Empire manse on the corner of East Main and East 10th in New Albany, Indiana. Who would guess New Albany was once Indiana's largest and richest city? Alas, booming Louisville, KY, facing it across the Ohio River, eventually sucked the life force right out of it, banishing New Albany into anonymity first, and then into a sort of somnolent decay.

That sly old codger Culbertson had 3 wives, 10 children, and a new house budget of $120,000. His first wife, Eliza Vance, bore him 8 children before succumbing to typhoid in 1865. Two years later, coincident with ground breaking on the new house, Cornelia Eggleston became Mrs. C. #2. She gave him another 2 children before dying of cholera in 1880. Four years later, the appropriately named Rebecca Young became Mrs. C. #3.

Cornelia Culbertson, a.k.a. wife #2, was not the longest running Mrs. C. - the marriage lasted only 13 years - but the house on East Main, started the year she was married, seems to me more hers than anyone's.

The splendid looking Culbertson house, or Mansion as they call it, has not only survived the inevitable brushes with destruction, but absolutely flourished. Culbertson's will stipulated that any one of his children could buy it for $30,000, but not one of them jumped. Instead, his widow sold it in 1899 to a New Albany local named John McDonald for the knock down price of $7100.

McDonald wanted to build a hospital on the site, but the scheme tanked for lack of financing. He walled off the third floor instead, moved into 7 of the remaining 20 rooms and his family stayed there until 1946.

Midwestern rivers are lined with view-blocking levees, a fact we easterners tend to overlook. Does that inviting gallery on the south side of the Culbertson house provide sweeping views of the mighty Ohio? That would be a no. In 1946, the McDonald family sold the house to the local branch of the American Legion, which thrived here for many years. Declining membership and rising costs in the early Sixties led the Legion to request a zoning change that would have permitted demolition of the house and construction of a gas station. Horrified neighbors scrambled to form a nonprofit called Historic New Albany, bought the house with donations, and opened it as a museum in 1964.

Here's another vintage view of the house, behind an iron fence on 10th Street.

Here's my nephew Kyle, standing in front of that same 10th Street fence. Regular readers of my column may think, "Hmm, another nephew." In fact, 2 years ago I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that I had a heretofore unknown brother named Fred, product of a youthful indiscretion on the part of my late father - or, more correctly, our late father. Fred has children of his own, who have children of their own, and I now find myself the unexpected uncle of a considerable group of people.

Kyle and his father Kurt, members of today's expeditionary team, live in the Louisville area with Kyle's brother and Kurt's wife. This is why I'm here, and how I heard about Culbertson.

In 1976, Historic New Albany donated Culbertson to the State of Indiana, which has operated it ever since as a state historic site. Our hostess, site manager Jessica Stavros, is justifiably proud of ongoing restoration work that can only be described as spectacular. No, Jessica is not 6 years old; the door is 12 feet high. The decorated anteroom between inner and outer doors gives a taste of what's to come.

People are forever overestimating ceiling heights. I know, I know, it looks like it's 25 feet high. Actually this is a 15-foot ceiling. P.S. That's 23-carat gold leaf on the cornice molding.

On the east side of the main hall is the Formal Parlor, an apotheosis if ever there was of post-Civil War provincial elegance.

By the time the American Legion pulled up stakes, most of the ceilings had been painted white. The remarkable polychrome geometries we see today were originally painted by a German immigrant named Ernst Linne. They have been meticulously restored - recreated, really - by Cincinnati restoration artist Kristna Lemmon.

Through a door at the south end of the Formal Parlor, notwithstanding the musical ceiling motif, is the library.

What they call the Small Parlor, together with the dining room, flank the main hall on the west. Bear in mind when Historic New Albany took possession, the original furniture was long gone and the walls and ceilings were all painted dingy white. What HNA and the State of Indiana have recreated here is simply amazing.

Adjoining the small parlor is the dining room.

A service wing (with a not very sophisticated plan) adjoins the dining room. Back stairs lead to servants' rooms aloft, kitchen and laundry facilities below, and a former breakfast room on the other side of the hall. The old breakfast room is now an exhibit space illustrating in a most original and comprehensible manner precisely how this abused old mansion recovered its glamor.

The kitchen is downstairs; there is no dumbwaiter.

Mr. Culbertson is not really on ice in the basement, but a scarily realistic facsimile of him is. The non-profit Friends of the Culbertson Mansion, established in the early 1980s, sponsors murder mysteries, applies for preservation grants, holds herb sales, Victorian teas, Xmas galas and Mansion sleepovers. Most importantly, for the last 30 years they have, with the help of Mr. Culbertson, produced an annual sold-out October "Haunt" during which, as Jessica puts it with perfect sincerity, "people pay money to be scared out of their wits and chased by a chainsaw." The Haunt alone has funded most of the Mansion's restoration.

Let's retrace our steps to the foot of the main stair.

I'd describe this staircase as "impossibly voluptuous."

A dog-leg corridor just short of the 2nd floor landing leads to the gallery that doesn't have a river view. The American Legion tore the original gallery off. What's here now is a reproduction.

The second floor plan, despite its period charm, is not brilliant. The owner's suite, located on the west side of the hall, contains a bedroom (currently furnished as a sitting room), a tiny dressing room (in lieu of closets, of which there are none), and a boudoir (now furnished as a bedroom).

A door from the owners' boudoir or sitting room (which at present looks like a bedroom) leads to the back stairhall. The sole original bathroom, removed years ago by the Legion, was located half a flight down. Another family bedroom, used now for museum storage, is curiously located on this same back hall.

Two more bedrooms and an upstairs sitting room re located on the other side of the second floor hall. As for closets or bathrooms, sorry, not a one.

The third floor is equally interesting for wholly different reasons, the principal being that it's not yet restored.

Could that be an Arts and Crafts color on the walls? Nope, it's generations-old residue from smoky coal fired heat.

On the east side of the hall is a ballroom, presently used for local history exhibits. Third floor ballrooms appear from time to time in showy houses remote from social centers back east.

Two more bedrooms, looking kind of dreary compared to what's downstairs, are on the opposite side of the hall. The southerly of the two connects to the back stair. The latticed enclosure overlooking the stair well is an original feature.

What is it? A punishment closet (true!) for bad boys, not like Kyle.

Is there anything else to see? Yes, a final bedroom now filled with pipes, ducts and HVAC equipment.

As I note at this point each week, I think we've seen it.

How cool is this house? If you're ever in Louisville, it's 15 minutes from downtown. The link is www.indianamuseum.org.

Here's Jack Pickford, as Billy Garrison in a scene from the 1923 film "Garrison's Finish." He's standing in front of Whitehall, the Louisville, KY manse of turfman John Middleton, who probably just died or there wouldn't be a movie crew trampling all over his lawn. Pickford was the hard drinking, fast living, scandal haunted, good timing brother of Mary Pickford, the Oprah of her era. Dismissed by many as a no account whose star status was strictly a function of his sister's power in Hollywood, Pickford nonetheless appeared in 80 movies, some of which, including "Garrison's Finish," he produced himself. You've never heard of a Garrison finish, have you? It's where the winner streaks from behind at the last moment and stuns the crowd with an upset victory. The plot of "Garrison's Finish," alas, has been consigned to anonymity. An online filmography notes plot keywords "horse,""amnesia," and "based on novel," and that's all.

In 1924, a year after Pickford filmed "Garrison," the Middleton place was sold to a 62-year old Louisville businessman named William Hume Logan (1862-1948). Logan had been married for 36 years, had 5 kids, and was president of something called the Logan Company, Kentucky's largest manufacturer of, among other things, industrial conveyors and, not coincidentally, the employer of 600 local souls. Too bad good looking Jack Pickford drops out of our story at this point, as his scandals and alcoholic end (at age 36), though tragic, make juicy reading.

When built in 1855, Whitehall looked quite different than it does today. It started life as a two-story, center-hall brick Italianate (meaning heavy cornice at the eaves and flat or low sloping roof) suburban home of no great pretensions that bounced between half a dozen owners until 1909, when the stylish Mr. & Mrs. Middleton bought and transformed it into a fantasy plantation.

Mrs. Middleton is said to have conceived and supervised the job, which included construction of three wings (on east, west and south), raising the first floor ceiling to 14', redesigning the floor plan, and garnishing the whole with a grand 6-column portico with flashy Corinthian capitals. Unless she was a trained architect - which I would have heard about if she were - it's unlikely this was done without professional help.

Two generations of Logans made no significant changes to the house, and none of significance have been made since 94-year-old Hume Logan Jr. died here in 1992.

The Logans had gardens, naturally, but aside from assorted forest-sized trees and the occasional stone balustrade, the look of the place today is primarily the work of a volunteer landscaper named Michael Hayman and a full-time mother and son gardening team.

Whitehall's "woodland garden," spang in the middle of a closely developed suburban neighborhood, is the work of volunteers from the Jefferson County Master Gardeners Assn.

Two of the 1909 wings are easy to see in the image below; the kitchen wing is on the left, and the east wing on the right.

In 1938 Mr. & Mrs. Logan celebrated 50 years of marriage, commemorating the occasion with a photo of themselves in front of Whitehall.

In 1994, Whitehall was the Junior League of Louisville's Designer Showhouse, at which time it was professionally redecorated by an old line local firm called Bittners. Everything indoors remains very fresh and clean and, I suspect, rather perkier than it was in Logan days.

Would that we all still dressed for the holidays. The Logans are seen below at Christmas, posed in front of the hall fireplace at Whitehall. Hume Logan Sr. (2nd row, left) and his wife, the former Susan Smith, are surrounded by smiling children and grandchildren. Three of their four boys, plus the boys' sister Eva, stand in the back row behind their parents. The fellow with the patent leather hair is Hume Logan Jr. He bought the house from his father's estate in 1951 and lived here until his death in 1992. I don't see Scott or Zelda in this photo, but this is the world they came from - a world of rich, sometimes narrow Mid-westerners, successful in business, locally prominent and surrounded by provincial luxury.

The most stylish feature of Whitehall's interior is the big drawing room - or double parlor, as they call it - that spans the width of the house on the east side of the hall. Between the 1890s and the First War, prosperous America went on a spree building houses with columns and balustrades and classical moldings and calling them "Colonial." Mrs. Middleton appears to have been bit by the national bug.

A door on the east wall leads to the so-called yellow parlor, occupying the ground floor of the eastern wing. Whitehall's furniture is a mixture of Logan family pieces, donated items and longterm loaners. The interior may be architecturally intact, but it doesn't look much like it did when Logans lived her.

Let's recross the drawing room and head to the other side of the hall for a look at what they call the blue parlor.

It used to be a library, and was a lot more usable looking when it was. The chandelier is a donation; the fireplace is typical of the 1890s to the 1910s.

The dining room is down the hall, around the corner, past the main stair and located in the west wing. The light fixtures are donations; the muscular Victorian fireplace was salvaged from a demolished mansion in downtown Louisville.

A swing door connects the dining room to a serving pantry where wallpapering is underway. Beyond the pantry is a spacious kitchen, upgraded for wedding caterers, of which there is no lack given all the people who get married these days in museum houses.

The back stair leads to a modern office, intended originally, or so one assumes, for use by an upper servant. Most of the help was billeted in a separate building out back. This is a not a back stair kind of a tour, however, so we'll retrace our steps through the kitchen, pantry, and dining room to the foot of the main stair, then climb to the 2nd floor.

I counted 4 bedrooms, 3 baths and a sitting room in the family section of the second floor.

The last owner, Hume Logan Jr., slept alone in the room above the library. His bedroom door is at the end of the hall on the left. Why alone? Because he never married. Instead, according to site literature, he "put all of his love and affection" into Whitehall. I am reminded of the improbable torch Johns Hopkins is said to have carried throughout life because his Quaker religion wouldn't let him marry his cousin.

This is why certain old bathrooms shouldn't be "modernized." Forty years down the line (or usually sooner), it becomes an obvious mistake.

I'd guess Mr. Logan used the connecting room, now furnished as a guest bedroom, as an upstairs study. Another damaged bathroom is outside in the hall.

Across from Mr. Logan's rooms, on the eastern side of the house, a more logical owner's suite is entered at the end of a short corridor.

Besides the bedroom, there's a big wardrobe closet with adjoining bath, and a sitting room or boudoir, the latter located over the yellow parlor. These rooms open onto a private hallway that separates them from the rest of the floor.

If those marble walls are any measure, this was a great old bathroom. The door beside the tub connects to the wardrobe closet.

The 4th bedroom is in the north wing, the door to it at the top of the main stair. Besides an en suite bath, this room connects to a large closet, beyond which is an upper servant's bedroom. These latter two spaces are now used as offices. On the landing between them is the stair down to the kitchen suite.

We, however, are taking the main stair, and the front door.

In 1992, Hume Logan's will left Whitehall to the Historic Homes Foundation, owner of three historic sites in the state of Kentucky. Whitehall is, per its website, "open to the public for tours and is a popular venue for weddings, receptions and other momentous occasions." The link is www.historichomes.org.

In 1821 the young, talented, bitter and self-pitying English poet John Keats died in Rome. "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," reads a portion of his wordy tombstone. It is human, I'll grant, to yearn for recognition, but truth be told, all of us will eventually be completely forgotten.

Keats cheated obscurity longer than many, and so, accidentally, did Thomas Brennan (born in Ireland in 1838, died in Louisville, KY in 1914) - the former by virtue of his poems, the latter by virtue of his house.

In 1884, rich from the manufacture of farm equipment, 46-year-old potato famine refugee Brennan moved his wife and a brood of children into this elegant South 5th Street Louisville mansion, built after the Civil War by a tobacco wholesaler named Francis Ronald. 631 South 5th Street has endured; everything around it has not.

Brennan had 8 children (7 survived), virtually all of the latter, when they grew up, moved to New York. An exception was John Arvid Ouchterlony Brennan (1880-1963), seen in a passport photo below. He became a doctor, added an office wing to the family home in 1912, and stayed in it after everybody else left. Dr. Brennan never married and died here in 1963 at the age of 83.

Interesting fact: Louisville, KY is named after King Louis XVI. Revolutionary War uber-soldier Georges Rogers Clark (1752-1818) founded it in 1778, while its namesake still had his head. In those days, the Ohio River was navigable only as far as Louisville. A treacherous falls at the site required commerce in either direction to haul itself out of the water and portage past the danger. Such was the origin of Kentucky's modern capital of horse racing and fried chicken.

The back yard at 631 South 5th looks charmingly peaceful, but only in one direction.

Although the architect of this High Italianate period piece has not been absolutely identified, a hugely prolific local (also an Irish immigrant) named Henry Whitestone (1819-1893) usually gets the credit.

Not only has the Brennan house escaped demolition (not to mention mutilation), it has come through the years with its original contents intact - contents that include some perfectly amazing pieces of Victorian furniture.

A grand double parlor flanks the south side of the hall.

Let's go back to the hall and have a look at the dining room.

Like many old guys with marriage, children and boyfriends behind them, I work my way indiscriminately through the same pile of clean clothes that Chiqui stacks up for me every week. Somehow this yellow shirt keeps coming up on Saturday.

I guess they didn't have had swing doors when the house was built in 1868, since the door to the service corridor is hinged. That miniature Jules Verne contraption at the end of the hall is a water heater.

Behind the water heater are doors leading to a breakfast room (currently fitted up for audio/visual presentations), a modernized hall bath (not shown), and the kitchen, the latter probably unchanged since Dr. Brennan's last day at home. A door from the kitchen leads to the back yard.

The Brennan house has three and a half bathrooms, the half being an afterthought squeezed onto a back stair landing between basement and first floor. In fact, in order to get to the basement at all, you must actually walk through the half bath.

Let's retrace our steps down the service hall and across the dining room for a look at the library.

There's such a sustained aura of luxe in this place that you don't notice at first what's missing, namely, a reception room. Steering casual visitors into that glittering double parlor seems oddly inappropriate, to me anyway. A more fitting space is needed for a different level of intercourse, and it ain't here. (P.S. I would kill for that red chair).

When Dr. Brennan added the office wing in 1912, the bay window in the library was bricked up and a connecting door inserted. Beyond the door is a literal time capsule, right down to original instruments, examination table, and waiting room.

Here's Brennan House Executive Direction Marianne Zickuhr, stationed behind the doctor's receptionist desk, making sure I don't miss anything.

Time to go upstairs.

There are officially 6 family bedrooms on the second floor, although at least two have historically been used in combination as an owner's suite. The suite is on the south side of the hall, above the double parlor. It has no closets, but does have a little dressing room. It is nowhere near the closest bathroom, bathrooms being a later additions at 631 South 5th. The 3 doors in the image below access the owner's sitting room (on the left), bedroom (in the middle) and dressing room (at the end of the landing).

This astonishing bedroom set was manufactured in Louisville by the J.W. Davis Co. and exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876.

Next to the bed is a door to the dressing room. The doctor's little brother Napoleon (they called him Bruce) drew the picture of his father's house for school, and it's still here. Bruce Brennan, parenthetically, didn't get married until he was 77 years old.

Let's leave the dressing room and go back to the top of the stairs for a look at sister Mae's room.

Mae was a beauty, according to this painting over her brother's fireplace. She was married twice and lived in New York, but stayed in this room when visiting Louisville. Question: What is odd about this room? In fact, what is odd about the whole house? Answer: The windows are frosted. By 1916 the neighborhood had become so commercial the Brennans no longer wanted to look out.

The door beside Mae's fireplace connects to what appears to be a bedroom, although I believe she used it as a sitting room or boudoir. The black door beside the bed connects to the only en suite bathroom in the house.

Two more family bedrooms (hardly enough, it would seem, for all those Brennan children) plus a back stair to the kitchen occupy the rest of the second floor.

I couldn't open Mae's black door above, so we're slipping into her bathroom from a landing at the top of the back stair. A hall bath on the other side of the corridor was simply impossible to photograph - even for me.

Let's head up to 3 for a look at what's left. Dr. Brennan's will bequeathed the house to the Filson Club Historical Society, named after John Filson (1747-1788) explorer-author of "The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucky." Notable in the society's collection is a tree trunk into which has been carved the words, "D. Boon kilt a bar 1803."

Filson rented the top floor to the Kentucky Opera Company, whose office conversion presumably accounts for this combination of servants' rooms.

In 1986 Filson, which had been an excellent steward of the property, moved to grander quarters further south. Six years later, a non-profit corporation called Preservation Louisville took title to the house with a mission to protect and promote community heritage. It does this by giving tours, hosting events, providing a glamorous venue, and keeping the house in spectacular condition.

Residential fashion fled this stretch of 5th Street a century ago, but big old houses flourish elsewhere in Louisville.

Some dozen blocks south, the original look of South 5th survives on block after block of fantastic old houses. The mid-west is full of great stuff, as I discovered on this trip. But of course, you can't go inside these. The link to the Brennan House is www.thebrennanhouse.org.

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It's pronounced "winter-Tour"

The Big Small House

All That Glitters

Not So Big, but Really Old

A Political Mansion

The Right Thing

The Fixer-Upper's Dream

Outside Castle Hill

I Am a Lawn Man

Inside Castle Hill

Near Walden Pond

Big Job

High Art and Deep Pockets

Fortune and Men's Eyes

A Virginia Plantation

Victoria Lives... in Indiana

An Old Kentucky Home

Survival Euphoria