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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About My Block
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...
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I'm Sitting This One Out
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....
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It's pronounced "winter-Tour"
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...
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The Big Small House
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...
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All That Glitters
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...
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Not So Big, but Really Old
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...
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A Political Mansion
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...
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The Right Thing
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...
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The Fixer-Upper's Dream
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...
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Outside Castle Hill
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...
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I Am a Lawn Man
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...
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Inside Castle Hill
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...
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Near Walden Pond
"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...
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Big Job
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...
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High Art and Deep Pockets
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...
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Fortune and Men's Eyes
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...
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A Virginia Plantation
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,...
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Victoria Lives... in Indiana
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...
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An Old Kentucky Home
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...
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Survival Euphoria
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,...
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