September 19, 2023

Late Summer at Greenwood Farm

By daseger

I’ve been taking walks at Trustees of Reservations properties all summer long, so it seems appropriate to end the season with a post on one: Greenwood Farm in Ipswich, Massachusetts. I had never been to this saltmarsh farm before this spring, and I returned every other week. Last week was definitely my favorite time: there’s just something poignant about golden late summer, just before the appearance of any red. It’s not a huge reservation, but it is a well-situated one, overlooking the marshes and islands of Ipswich Bay. A perfect first-period house, the Paine House, sits right there along the its main path, with no driveway or modern conveniences in sight. There are venerable oak trees, and some recent additions: “Remembrance of Climate Futures” markers, indicating how and when the landscape will change. They were the only source of anxiety on my walks around Greenwood Farm.

Once again we must be grateful for the efforts of an old and wealthy New England family, the Dodges, who purchased the property in the early 20th century, were responsible stewards during their summer residence, and eventually donated the farm to the Trustees of Reservations in the 1970s. A larger, newer farmhouse built on the property by Thomas Greenwood in the early 19th century served as their principal summer house, and they used the 1694 Paine House as a well-appointed guest house. I’d love to go inside, but it’s never been open—in fact I have never seen a single person on this whole property on my walks this summer! Of course there is a Salem connection: Robert Paine, the first of six generations of farmers to live in the house was a jury foreman during the Salem Witch Trials. As you can see, the house is a touchstone for me as I walk around the farm, but I’ve also developed more appreciation for trees this summer, and solid land when I come across these jarring “remembrance” markers.

Appendix: I searched for an image of the Paine house among the works of  Ipswich artist extraordinaire Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), who mastered all genres—oils, woodblock prints, cyanotypes—and seemed dedicated to depicting every square inch of his native town (as well as being a very influential art educator), but  found nothing. Many of his landscapes look like the farm, because saltmarsh farms ARE Ipswich. This little collaboration of Dow and the poet Everett Stanley Hubbard, which you can access here, is particularly evocative.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Houses, Nature

September 12, 2023

The Summer of Old Photographs

By daseger

I worked all summer long on my chapters for Salem’s Centuries and a few other projects, researching and writing, researching and writing, researching and writing. Once I’m on the trail, I’m a pretty steady worker, but I do take breaks: I’ve learned from other writing projects that you have to pause to let your mind absorb and process information. Sometimes the break might be at night when you’re asleep—I got into the habit of leaving a notebook by my bedside when I was writing my dissertation and when I woke up in the morning sometimes I would see notations inside that I didn’t even remember writing! That must have been one of the benefits of a younger mind because it didn’t happen this summer, when all my breaks were conscious. Every time I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley, I would dutifully call up boring municipal records but also collections which contained old photographs of Salem. I’d pore over them a bit and photograph them for later perusal, and by the end of the summer I had quite a collection. The Phillips has digitized two of its largest collections of Salem photographs: the Frank Cousins and Samuel Chamberlain collections, but there remain many seldom-seen images within collections. Fortunately there are great finding aids to locate such images, but also some very miscellaneous collections which yielded surprises, at least for me! I loved schoolteacher Grace Hood’s shots of the Salem and Massachusetts celebrations in 1926-1930 (PHA 67; including some completely new-to-me views of the opening day of Pioneer Village in 1930) and an unknown photographer’s depictions of a very gritty Salem encased in a large composite collection entitled Photographs of interiors and exteriors of Salem, Mass., circa 1890-1950 (PHA 151). And there’s much more.

Phillips Library PHA 67 & 151.

My favorite collection was the first one I accessed, back in May: a treasure trove of images contained in the scrapbooks of Francis Henry Lee of 14 Chestnut Street, mostly from the 1880s (Phillips Library MSS 128). Lee was the son-in-law of the woman who lived in my house, and a committed architectural antiquarian focused on documenting the history of every house on Chestnut and adjoining streets. He did not rely on hearsay, but sent queries to anyone who ever lived in the neighborhood, and his scrapbooks are filled with detailed responses, some written on black-trimmed stationery indicating that their authors were in mourning. I was familiar with his articles in the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, but surprised to find his research materials accompanied by so many wonderful photographs.

Some of my favorites: (I filtered those that were really hazy or damaged).

Chestnut, Summer & Norman Streets from two perspectives. I’ll never get over how wonderful Norman Street was!

Riding and looking north on Summer Street, and then south (Samuel McIntire’s house is on the extreme left of the last photograph).

Broad Street, looking west.

Cambridge Street, looking north and south.

Work on Bott’s Court.

Hamilton Street, looking north.

Chestnut Street Houses—what’s going on with that figure at the third-floor level of the third photo above, which I think is #26?

Warren Street, looking towards the “Turnpike” (Highland Avenue).

There were several photographs which were especially exciting to see among the Lee papers, including those which show the magnificent formal garden in the rear of the Cabot-Endicott-Low House on Essex Street, which extended to Chestnut before no. 30 Chestnut was built in 1896. This garden was quite famous: it was prominently featured in many horticultural publications and was by all accounts quite the tourist attraction, especially in the spring. A 1904 Boston Globe article on “Beautiful Old Gardens of Salem” reports that for many years the tulip bed was the greatest feature of this garden, and each spring, when these flowers were in perfection, and upper portion of the high fence on Chestnut was removed to enable the public to view the exhibit.

Even more exciting than this lost garden were two photographs of my own house that I had never seen before, including one sans the apartment that was added on in phases between 1890-1910. Our house is the right side of a double house built in 1827: both sides were identifical until the 1850s, when one of our owners expanded the house considerably in back and altered the interior to look more fashionable at the time—round mouldings rather than square ones! The big entrance alteration reflects the changes inside, but I did not know that this guy also put new mouldings over the windows, and disdained shutters as too colonial, I guess. Several owners later, there was a sequential addition on the side of the house: first as an office for a very well-know opthamologist who lived here, and then bedrooms were built above: this is our present-day 7 1/2, a really cute apartment with the best views of Chestnut Street. I assumed that it covered up windows which were on the side of our house, but it looks like there were none. As you can see from all of the other photos of the street, Chestnut was driveway-less in the nineteenth-century: the larger houses had carriage access on Warren or Essex: the property of our house actually wrapped around Hamilton Hall next door and so our carriage house—long- demolished—accessed Cambridge Street.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

September 5, 2023

Tips for Salem “Septoberween”

By daseger

Residents of Salem have long noticed that our city’s Halloween festivities are not confined to October, hence “Septoberween,” a phrase I’ve heard once or twice. It’s been crowded for some time though—all summer, late spring—people are coming for a general goth spookiness, I think, rather than just for Halloween. Of course, none of it is connected to Salem, or the Salem witch trials, because they were not witches but try telling that to a bridal party wearing little witch hats in July. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Salem’s dark tourism, but it does seem as if something needs to change in its overall management (I’ve given up on messaging). Whatever happens, if anything at all, will be the result of a top-down decision rather than any impetus from mere residents. After last Halloween season, when weekend crowds of a million people pushed around downtown, I decided that I had experienced my last Salem October: my husband and I are packing up the cats and moving to Maine for a month. Fortunately we have a big family house in York Harbor, which my parents generally vacate for a cozier condo nearby, so I’m going home. I think this is a good solution for my Halloween angst, but we’ll see: I’ll still be commuting to Salem several times a week! Since I’m getting out of town, I thought I would push up my annual little advice to visitors post a bit, especially as I’ve received a lot of email queries over the summer. This is hardly an exhaustive list: if you want that I suggest Destination Salem  (truly the master list of events and a very dynamic site, but skip the “History” sections which are dreadful), or Things To Do in Salem or the dedicated Haunted Happenings site. I am no booster, as regular readers of this blog know, so the most important assertion I can make here is that there is only one museum in Salem, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), and the best advice I can give is to avoid all the other venues calling themselves museums if you are seeking authentic objects and/or professional curation based on the most recent scholarship. If you are coming to Salem because you want to learn about the Salem Witch Trials, the PEM offers a lot, but not the whole story: that’s not its mission. However, in the past five years or so, the PEM has really engaged with the Trials, and this year is offering an exhibition entitled The Salem Witch Trials. Recovering Justice. I popped in yesterday and found it very accessible and continuous with its previous exhibitions’ focus on authentic documents and objects.

Given the focus is on recovering justice, I think it would have been nice to exhibit some of the restitution requests (+transcriptions) submitted by victims and victims’ families that are referenced above: these statements by those related to the “Sufferers in the time of the Witchcraft” are very compelling and can amplify the judicial tragedy. The struggle to clear the names of those who were not included in the 1711 Reversal of Attainder could have been given more attention as well—it extended all the way up the 21st century! The exhibition does include the most recent attempt at restitution: the successful campaign of North Andover middle-school students to exonerate Elizabeth Johnson, who confessed to practicing witchcraft and was condemned to death but obtained a reprieve but no reversal. Similar heroic efforts happened in the 1950s when Ann Pudeator “and certain other persons” were legally exonerated, and again in 2001 when those “certain other persons” were named in a formal resolution. The Recovering Justice exhibit invites its onlookers to dig deeper in both primary and secondary sources, and also to visit other galleries in the PEM: the month of October gets its own “chapter” in Salem Stories and related objects and images can also be found in On this Ground: Being and Belonging in America.

News clippings from exoneration efforts in the past (which also offer interesting insights into the commercialization of the Witch Trials in Salem), further reading in the Recovering Justice exhibition (including my colleague Tad Baker’s definitive book), October in Salem Stories and portrait of Witch Trial judge Samuel Sewall by John Smibert, 1733, in On this Ground gallery.

The PEM has a Trials “collection focus” page on its website with FAQs and also offers an audio self-guided “Salem Witch Trials Walk,” but if you want a more personal and narrative experience, you might want to take a walking tour, of which Salem has many. The quality spectrum seems very wide: you could take a tour with someone who has studied early American history for years and has the credentials to prove it, or you could be led around by someone who (literally) just got off the bus. I get asked for recommendations quite often and I am hesitant to offer any, because I just haven’t taken many tours. I am curious about a couple of things, however, and I’ve been working on a longer piece on Salem tourism for a while (now interrupted by the Salem’s Centuries project) so I intend to take more tours in the future. Having just watched them, I’m particularly interested in how tour guides use the physical space of Salem, where so few structures tied to the Trials exist, and also in what kind of context is presented: local, regional, Anglo, global? When you read reviews on Tripadvisor or Google, tourists often comment on authenticity (“all we saw were parking lots”: a paraphrase of a common complaint) or lack thereof: I’m curious how guides compensate for/use the relatively modern streetscape of Salem (the PEM must have noticed the authenticity issue too, as it has used that word in all press materials relating to its exhibitions). So with these questions in mind, I did take a walking tour this past weekend, with Krystina Yeager, a student in the Salem State MA program who was in my Renaissance grad course last spring. Krystina operates a tour called the Historian’s Guide to Salem and produces a podcast as well, and I chose her tour because I was impressed with her work in class but also thought her perspective on the Salem trials might be similar to mine, as she has been more focused on English witchcraft. We set off on a hot Sunday afternoon at a vigorous pace of walking and talking, and I was really glad that the tour group wasn’t too big–maybe 12 or so when the city allows groups of 40. If you’re a mere pedestrian on the streets of Salem you literally cannot get out of the way of such big groups. Krystina had me at the very beginning of her tour when she uttered the name “Martin Luther” as the Reformation is undeniably the biggest factor in instigating and intensifying fears and accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe. She presented a comparative context throughout while still focusing on the very personal stories and suffering of each and every victim of 1692. It was a very source-based tour: standing before a parking lot and the new building on the site of the former Salem jail, she described conditions within using the detailed restitution requests I referenced above. So that’s how you rise above the parking lot—with some pretty vivid testimony! Krystina explained the Protestant demonization of magic, the power vacuum that gave rise to the odd legal “system” put in place during the Trials, and the character of Giles Corey as close as we could get to the site of his torture–and much more. We wound up at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial downtown, a site that seems both authentic and modern at the same time and certainly an appropriate place to end the story of the “Sufferers in the time of the Witchcraft.” I was exhausted! This tour seemed to echo the whirlwind pace of the Trials themselves over the months of 1692 in its intensity, and I recommend it enthusiastically.

Krystina Yeager explaining Puritan theology and disdain of counter-magic in the courtyard of the First Church and the horrors of the Salem gaol in 1692 in a rather less inspirational spot: clearly tour guides have to be conjurers! Our ending point at the Witch Trials Memorial overlooked by the 17th Century Pickman House, which is now the Welcome Center for both the Memorial and the adjoining Charter Street Cemetery.

And speaking of authenticity, as I have throughout this post, I really can’t recommend the adjoining sites overseen by the Charter Street Cemetery Welcome Center enough, and its establishment was a City initiative, in collaboration with the PEM. A decade ago, both the Witch Trials Memorial and the adjoining Charter Street Cemetery, otherwise known as the “Old Burying Ground,” were being completely overrun by tourists: the walls of the former and graves of the latter were actually endangered by abuse. I don’t even like to think or write about it, if you want to “go” there, read this post, which I typed with my hands shaking. The City stepped up, restored the cemetery and opened an orientation center in the adjoining Samuel Pickman House owned by PEM. Welcome Center staff monitor both the cemetery and the Memorial, and every time I go there, even last Septoberween, there is an air of respect and stewardship for these sacred places. I saw Amber Shannon, another Salem State History grad who works at the Welcome Center, on my way out, keeping her eyes on both the cemetery and the Memorial and clearly steeling herself for the crowds to come. I think everyone in Salem was doing that, this first weekend in September.

Amber Shannon of the Charter Street Cemetery Welcome Center and Rory Raven of Salem on Foot Tours, the first Sunday in September, (relative) calm before the storm. I haven’t been fortunate enough to take one of Rory’s tours, but when I heard him speak at an event he made an impression, and so when some family members visited a couple of years ago I signed them right up. They raved, and so I would certainly recommend his tour as well, especially if you’re interested in a more general tour of Salem and not just the Witch Trials. As I’ve been ranting about here for years now, there’s so much more to Salem!

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Salem, Tourism

August 28, 2023

Treasure House

By daseger

Treasure House. That’s how the guide introduced the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts, long known as “The Grange,” at the beginning of her tour the other day. It’s a term which has a specific meaning for Historic New England, which has been the owner and steward of the house since 1968: not only the house itself, but all of the treasures therein, encompassing the possessions and papers of the Codman family of Boston. The Grange was their summer house, expanded and decorated in successive eras by family members/design luminaries John Hubbard Sturgis and Ogden Codman Jr. My ears pricked up when I heard that term, because it’s how Salem was often described in the early and mid-twentieth century, as a treasure house of American material culture. That’s certainly not how Salem is thought of now, but in that heyday, proponents of the Colonial Revival like Ogden Codman Jr. thought and referred to it as such. When I was writing my chapter on Colonial Revival Salem for our forthcoming book this summer, I read quite widely (trying to make up for a disciplinary deficit) and reread Edith Wharton’s and Codman’s classic collaboration, The Decoration of Houses (1897). This book is so crystal clear in its articulation and presentation of interior design as a branch of architecture rather than “dressmaking” that I became more interested in Codman, who was both an architect and interior designer. I went off on a tangent, learning some very interesting design theories and practices as well as trivial details like the fact that he called Wharton (who was his client before his collaborator) “Pussy” and she called him “Coddy.”  And then it only seemed right to revisit the Grange, as the last time I went there, when I was in my 20s, I didn’t have a clue. I seem to remember being impressed with its Federal forthrightness, but not its interior, which I found “shabby.”

Well, its origins are not Federal: the models above show how the original Georgian house was transformed into the Federal Grange over the next century or so. But, it still strikes me as shabby, in an authentic rather than “chic” way: very layered and very waspy. This was really his father’s house, and there were things that Ogden Codman Jr. could change and things he could or would not. You can see his attempts to lighten things up, in his characteristic French-Colonial Revival fusion style, but the heavier hand of his uncle, John Hubbard Sturgis, is still much in evidence. So it’s quite a melange! Toile and Chintz in the sitting rooms and Tudor Revival in the dining room. I think I liked chintz back then, not a fan now, but will always love toile.

The very different stamps of Sturgis and Codman Jr. make for an interesting house. The Elizabethan dining room must have driven the latter crazy, but I love it. We went into only the front bedrooms, which seemed very Ogdenesque.

The other layering effect in the house is a result of the sheer number of Codman possessions therein: photographs, paintings, books, assorted personal items. There’s a time-capsule feeling, as if the family just went out the door, quite a while ago. That feeling is really resonant in the back of the house, where the servants lived and worked. I don’t remember seeing these spaces before: such a succession of rooms and staircases! How many staircases are there in this house? An impressive double staircase in front, and two or three in back? I lost track. Sturgis designed the rear addition, but I’m sure that neither he nor Codman ventured out back, so in a way (and except for the appliances and utilitarian elements) these ways feel even more timeless.

All the staircases and the way out back, eventually into the Italian Garden, which was being set up for a wedding on a VERY humid afternoon. I hope everything went well!

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Houses

August 21, 2023

Salem’s Wooden Watchman

By daseger

Before there was Samuel McIntire, there was Lemon Beadle. Remember that name: Salem’s nineteenth-century antiquarians certainly wanted us to. Sometimes “Lemuel” is the spelling, but I’m going with Lemon, because Lemon Beadle!  On this past Thursday I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley, source of most of Salem’s history in textual and material form, to look at some sources for the history of Town House Square, the subject of the last piece I have to write for our Salem’s Centuries book. I had ordered up a notebook entitled “Salem Estates and Localities 1629-1842” which included a “Chronological Chart of Churches in Salem, Mass.” mostly because I wanted to look at the latter (and it is pretty great). The notebook consitutes the notes of William Phineas Upham, the son of  Charles Upham, the first great historian of the Salem Witch Trials. William, who prepared what must be one of the most important maps in American history (perhaps an overstatement, but I live in Salem), a 1692 view of Salem Village for his father, was clearly gathering information for his own magnum opus. The notebook was filled with extraordinary detail about many structures in Salem, illustrated occasionally with marginalia drawings of little houses. I found it charming and informative, but not particularly relevant to my topic, and I was about to close it and move on when I came to William’s rather compelling depiction of Salem’s central 18th century watch house, with its life-sized watchman on top, carved by Lemon Beadle. 

From Phillips Library Fam. Mss. 1047, Salem Estates and Localities, 1629-1842 by William P. Upham.

This illustration really intrigued me: could the “soldier” (as Upham calls it above) or “watchman” (according to other sources) really have been that big? Were there any other depictions out there? Sadly, I have found none so far, but I did get more details from a variety of old Salem sources. This particular watch house was likely Salem’s second, and it was built on Schoolhouse Lane, later School Street and the present-day Washington Street, in 1712: the carved wooden figure on its roof bore the date Anno Regina 1712 in large gold letters. If it was not conspicuous enough, town records indicate the watchman/soldier was painted in 1725. Lemon Beadle was chosen for the commission because of his experience crafting figureheads, and the entire production seems to have been part of policy to improve and standardize the watch system and remind Salem men of their civic responsibilities. While real watchmen endured into the nineteenth century, I’m pretty sure that was not the case with their wooden representative; there are the references to the watch house’s survival fifty years after its construction, but that’s it. Upham clearly wanted to “see” and portray it in his notebook, along with its adjacent whipping post.

Upham’s whipping post and other Salem structures; a watchman by Albert Blaisdell; Salem printer Ezekiel Russell’s watch order, 1777, Sang Collection via Sotheby’s;  Salem Gazette.

Since my focus is on the watchman statue, I’m a little out of my depth and discipline, but I did find one text which asserted that Lemon Beadle’s work is “the first documentable piece of free-standing sculpture in Massachusetts” (Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630-1730: An Interpretive Catalogue, 1988). That’s a pretty big claim; I wonder if it’s still standing. Elias Hasket Derby commissioned woodcarvers John and Simeon Skillen to carve four “free standing figures of larger dimensions, ranging between 4 and 5 feet in height” for his summer estate near the end of the century, but I have to say that without a more detailed depiction, Upham’s watchman sketch reminds me more of the……….(searching for correct word here, can’t come up with anything really applicable) rather less elegant figures which “graced” the very notorious Timothy Dexter’s estate in Newburyport. There were 40, including one of Dexter himself, and the Reverend William Bentley was not impressed when he visited in 1803: “There is no horrid violation of proportion in the district objects but the vast columns, the gigantic figures, the extended arches, & absurd confusion of characters, tend to convince us of the abuse of riches….Dexter was within doors, drunk, having just suffered from a heavy beating from his drunken son, urged on by a drunken daughter.”

 I have no doubt that Lemon Beadle could have done better.

 John Rubens Smith (engraver), A View of the Mansion of the late LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER in High Street, Newburyport, 1810.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture, Salem

August 14, 2023

Twilight Time

By daseger

Pardon me, I’ve got to engage in some historiography. The history of historical interpretation can be a deadly topic in the context of precise historical events or periods, but is nevertheless essential engagement for comprehensive historical understanding. I feel like I’ve been swimming on the surface with all the Salem stuff this summer, so took advantage of a rainy cleaning-out-my-study afternoon to re-engage with two classic books that have been part of my life and work since graduate school, if not before: Johan Huizing’s Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge (1972). I remember my first reading of both books very vividly: their ability to capture a mood and a time using a variety of sources and expressions and to illustrate the peak of their respective eras and civilizations in such captivating ways that you could feel the decline that followed. Both are “decline and fall” books that focus on the before, thus articulating the transition to after in such a way that you really don’t want to get there but you certainly appreciate the change. I think both books really set the standard for cultural history, and also for a succession of histories that focus on the late summer/autumn of civilizations, the waning, the twilight.

Late Summer and the onset of harvesting invokes feelings of seasonal change in general, but this particular summer has seemed almost apocalyptic to me in an environmental sense, so these books seemed to call to me when I was culling my library the other day—they will always be on my bookshelf but I don’t look at them every year. Huizinga’s period is my period so he’s always relevant for me, but even Before the Deluge felt timely when I opened it up the other day. The title is metaphorical, but it can apply literally now. Après moi le déluge, the famous phrase attributed alternatively to either Louis XV or his favorite, Madame de Pompadour, had a more specific meaning when it was uttered in the mid-18th century, but the overwhelming tide of change brought about by the French Revolution transformed it into both a prescient and universal statement by Marx in the 19th century and Great War survivors of the twentieth. I think both Huizinga and Friedrich have had a global impact in terms of imitators and successors, but I’m only familiar with European historiography so that’s going to be my focus in this post. The majority of “waning” books seem to dwell on the same eras as Huizinga and Friedrich, as well as that of the Revolution: they are seeking to explain and illustrate the great transitions from medieval to early modern and from modern to contemporary in classic European chronology. Not all are successful, as you will see from my comments below! 

Bouwsma’s book is inspired by two classical late medieval historiographical trends, that of Huizinga and his predecessor Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy articulated a definitive Renaissance break and the beginnings of modernity. Unlike Burkhardt, Bouwsma sees the Renaissance as ending, and not just evolving into the early modern era. I really like this book, but it’s narrower in focus than most books focusing on transitions, maybe because it’s not. Norman Cantor was a great medieval historian, but in his later years I think he veered away from his expertise a bit too much: I really did not like In the Wake of the Plague, and I wanted to like The Last Knight, but I think many of his assertions about John of Gaunt were speculative: but just look at the subtitle!

This book by the intellectual historian Michael Sonenscher comes closest to my original understanding of the Après moi quote, and really conveys social perceptions of the coming financial deluge in the later 18th century. It’s more about the “coming” than the “waning” but still belongs in my subgenre. The medieval and early modern “twilight texts” are definitely academic and thus hard going in places, but the interpretations become a bit more accessible with the Friedrich-inspired texts below.

Before the Deluge is about the 1920s and there are several books about the Weimar Republic which mirror its approach in places (I like Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy by Eric Weitz) but books which attempt to recreate the pre-World War I mentality seem to me a bit more Friedrich-inspired. Frederic Morton and Juliet Nicolson both have family history to draw on for their social histories of Venice and England before the Great War, and while their works don’t quite approach the dazzling depths of Friedrich’s book, they are both very readable and often poignant. Nicolson’s book is very atmospheric: as I’m not really a fiction reader, for me, The Perfect Summer is the perfect summer read.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture

August 7, 2023

Olmsted Central

By daseger

I have felt vulnerable all summer long, while working on my contributions for our Salem book: my chapters relate to academic fields for which I have no professional preparation, including African-American history (John Remond), art history (the Colonial Revival) and urban planning (Salem’s 20th-century development). I read widely and had support from my colleagues, and all the chapters will be peer-reviewed, so I don’t think I’ll embarass myself in the end, but I’m still a bit anxious. I’m co-writing the last referenced chapter, on Salem’s development from the Great Salem Fire of 1914 to the present, with my co-editor for the entire book, and after I plowed through rebuilding and urban renewal I simply dumped it on him, just done with it! It wasn’t fun to write and I needed some distance to reflect. So that’s what I have been doing for the last two weeks or so, trying to read histories of urban planning for pleasure. This is a field that intersects with the history of landscape design and garden history—and as the latter is more familiar to me I found a comfort zone. So I got some grounding and feel ready to go back into this chapter with some different perspectives and questions. I also realized I needed to cap off my weeks of reading with a visit to what must be the Mecca of landscape history: the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts.

So Chestnut Hill, a beautiful section of Brookline which extends over into Newton, was my weekend destination. This is where Boston Brahmins established their country seats in the later nineteenth century, and because of these considerable investments in land the area still retains its pastoral feel despite its proximity to Boston. At the height of his pathfinding career in 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted purchased an early 19th century farmhouse and several acres of land from two elderly spinster sisters who were reluctant to move: he built them a house next door. Another neighbor was Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose “Green Hill” summer house was built by Salem ship captain Nathaniel Ingersoll earlier in the century. Olmsted did not intend for his new house, named Fairsted, to be a seasonal showplace: it became the center of his business and his practice, as well as a center for the emerging new discipline of landscape architecture. This is the focus of the site’s interpretation: on the practice rather than the personal. The farmhouse was expanded in all directions, most conpicuously in the office addition which served as the headquarters of the Olmstead Brothers after the Frederick Law’s retirement in 1895. The firm endured (as the Olmsted Associates) until 1980, the same year that the National Park Service acquired Fairsted. As you can see from the photographs above, the orginal farmhouse its garden addition are not in the best shape: a planned and funded restoration has stalled due to the quality of the workmanship, and is delayed until the next funding process (but private donations can be made here). The interior of the farmhouse is pristine, and (again) dedicated to telling the story of the Olmsted practice. The office addition is like a time capsule of a 1920s-1930s architecture firm: with a drafting room, a photography room, a blueprint-printing room, a shipping room, and a vault, where all the Olmsted plans are archived.

In the main house: very few personal items, it’s all about the firm. I was primarily interested in the urban planning inititatives of the Olmstead firm as my chapter on Salem’s 20th century development begins with Harlan Kelsey’s 1912 City Plans Commission report. Because the Olmsted projects are so extensive, both in sheer number and geographically, the firm’s archives are always in demand and consequently the NPS has completed a major digitization project and also furnished researchers with an invaluable research guide to the collections. I found five Salem projects, the most important of which is the subdivision of the famous Pickman/Loring farm c. 1900: this was Salem’s first planned neighborhood, and I didn’t include it in my draft chapter (but I’m certainly going to do so now)!

The Olmsted site offers two tours, both of which were given by enthusiastic and articulate interns: one on the cultural landscape, the other on the office and practice. In the first, we learned all about Olmsted’s design philosophy (naturalistic and anti-Victorian, not particulaly interested in PLANTS, “borrowed view”) and the second focused primarily on how the firm was run during the era of the Olmsted sons/brothers. I just loved the office tour: forget AI and digital “reality”: this was immersion!

The Olmsted office wing: photography library with project #s (all materials are preserved in the vault now), drafting room, planting specifications, blueprint-printing room (and a very strange blueprint drying machine), shipping room, little cubbyhole office outside the vault.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

August 1, 2023

The Last Weekend in July

By daseger

I could have named this post “boats and blooms” because that’s about all I have to offer: this has been a working summer and I am running out of steam so no controversies, critiques or deep dives today. Just boats and flowers. We were up in York Harbor for the weekend and as usual, I bypassed the beach for Portsmouth. I just can’t stay away from that city: it was always the perfect place for me when I was growing up and I moved to Salem because it reminded me of Portsmouth but was a bit closer to Boston. Now it has become my anti- or ideal Salem: without witch kitsch and with smooth brick sidewalks. This year, Portsmouth is particularly festive because it is celebrating its 400th anniversary, and there were tall ships in the harbor, along with the usual display of exuberant gardens, shops, and architecture.

Back home, my father’s plentiful display of bee balm was kind of picked-over by all the hummingbirds it attracts, but still deserves honorable mention. And I never miss the gardens at Stonewall Kitchen’s flagship store in York.

And now for the boats! Something absolutely wonderful happened as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning: a windy storm came in and blew away all of the humidity that we’ve been living with for the past month. I know it’s nothing compared to the extreme conditions that other parts of the country are experiencing, but wow, Sunday felt like a whole new world. We decided to celebrate by going out on a sunset cruise of Portsmouth Harbor on the Piscataqua, a reproduction of a nineteenth-century gundalow, a coasting barge with a distinctive lanteen sail: it always looks medieval to me in the harbor! We sailed past the visiting NAO Trinidad, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (which is in Kittery, Maine), Fort Constitution in NH, Fort McClary in Maine and out to Wood Island, with a companion privateer, the Mystic, for the last leg.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture

July 24, 2023

Preservation Polaroids

By daseger

I have heard, and read about, Salem’s experience with urban renewal many times, including first-hand accounts, so I thought I understood its causes, course and impact pretty well, but when you write about something, you have to engage on another level and come to your own understanding in order to explain it to others. It’s the same with teaching. One of the chapters for Salem’s Centuries that I’ve been working on this summer is about the city’s development over the twentieth century and so I really had to dig deep into urban renewal. I decided to start fresh with primary sources, so I went through all the records of the Salem Redevelopment Authority (SRA) located up at the Phillips Library in Rowley (these are public records, which should be in Salem, but I’m actually glad they are in Rowley because the City’s digitized records are impossible to search and I don’t know how one might access the paper). The SRA was the agency created to oversee urban renewal in Salem’s downtown and it still has jurisdiction: its composition was incredibly important and remains so. I’m going to be quite succinct here, because the narrative is rather complex and therefore quite boring to read or write about, but here’s the gist of what happened: after conducting a comprehensive study in the early 1960s the City created the SRA and put forward a very ambitious urban renewal plan which was overwhelmingly focused on clearance, including the demolition of between 120-140 buildings in Salem’s downtown area. The goal was to create a new pedestrian shopping plaza, to compete with the new Northshore Shopping Center just miles away in Peabody. The focus was on Parking, Parking, and more Parking. What I did not know before I delved into this research was that at the same time that this plan was brewing, Salem also had another committee looking at the downtown: an Historic District Study Committee, which was surveying all of central Salem’s buildings for inclusion in potential historic districts. What a clash! The “before” photos that you see below, candid polaroids, were taken by members of the Study Committee in 1965, the same year that the SRA was rolling out its demolition plan. Among the SRA records up in Rowley, there is a mimeographed document entitled a “Do it Yourself Walking Tour” prepared by John Barrett, Executive Director of the SRA, for Historic Salem, Inc., Salem’s preservation organization, then and now. It’s a remarkable document, because Barrett basically takes the Study Committee’s inventory and turns it into a hit list: this is what we’re going to demolish! Take a tour and see for yourself! There were 119 building slated for demolition, a number that would expand to over 140 over the next few years. The polaroids represent buildings that Salem’s preservationists were trying to save: they were successful in some cases, but not in others. Their resistance resulted in a far less destructive approach to “renewal”, however, which focused more on rehabilitation than destruction, as these images illustrate well.

This doesn’t line up perfectly, but what a great restoration +addition by Salem architect Oscar Padjen: very representative of the creativity of  “Plan B”!

As these photos also illustrate, once rehabilitation became an objective, several key buildings were restored in exemplary fashion, by local Salem architects and utilizing the new means of facade easements. If you compare past facades of these building with the present, urban renewal looks great, particularly with the hardscaping design of landscape architect John Collins of Philadelphia, whose work is also representative of the “Plan B” approach. What is more difficult to illustrate are the great wide swaths of buildings that were taken down, principally on the main Essex and Federal Streets but also on St. Peter and Brown Streets, while Plan A was still operational. We can never see these buildings restored, they were just swept away. What remains are parking lots and ghastly modern buildings. I’m not a fan of what was called the East India Mall in its orginal incarnation, but its colonnaded side entrance (not quite sure what to call it???) was quite distinctive, and it was butchered under the auspices of the SRA in the 1990s so now we have the Witch City Mall. I think Front Street (below) it probably the most perfect example of Plan B, along with Derby Square, but Central Street (just above) is pretty representative too.

Washington Street was the boundary of “Heritage Plaza East,” where most of the renewal activity happened in both phases, but it did not experience as much demolition as it had already weathered a major tunnel project just a decade before. That’s another realization for me: I somehow never put Salem’s “Big Dig,” during which its railroad tunnel was constructed and depot demolished in the 1950s, in such close chronological proximity to its experience with urban renewal in the 1960s. This generation of Salem residents weathered a lot of construction and dislocation: as always, past experiences temper the present. If you shift the perspective even further back, to the 1930s, when the new Post Office was built after an entire neighborhood was cleared out, you can understand why there is so much concern about the lack of housing downtown today: 51 buildings gone in the 1930s, 87 in the 1960s. Salem’s long “plaza policy” certainly took its toll, but I remain grateful to those residents who persevered in their preservation efforts for what remains.

Strking transformations on Washington Street.

NB: I’m confident in most of these past-and-present pairings, but not all, because streets numbers can change—not quite sure about the Subway market on Front Street for example……….

 

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Salem

July 16, 2023

Lafayette, You are Here!

By daseger

I’ll drive down to Newport, Rhode Island for any occasion, and Bastille Day seemed like a good one as French expeditionary forces landed there in 1780 as part of their formal and personal commitment to the American Revolution, a commitment that is honored today by the “French in Newport” festivities on the second weekend of July. From the Rhode Island perspective, the French “occupation” of Newport is the beginning of the end, the road to Yorktown and independence started there. A friend had lent me the Newport Historical Society’s Winter/Spring 2023 issue of its journal, Newport History, which is entirely focused on the French in Newport, so I was well prepared by articles on “The Washington Rochambeau Revolutional Route National Historic Trail,” (from Newport to Yorktown of course), “Forging the French Alliance in Newport,” and “A New Look at how Rochambeau Quartered his Army in Newport.” I arrived just in time for the comte de Rochambeaut’s proclamation, wandered about checking in on my favorite Newport houses and others in which the French were quartered, and then returned to Washington Square to hear the Marquis de Lafayette give an amazing little talk on how he was inspired to cross the Atlantic and join the American ranks. I was quite taken with the Marquis, and as he was speaking an extremely precocious boy yelled out of the window of a passing car “Lafayette, you are here!”

 Print depicting the arrivl of Rochaembeau’s troops in Newport in July 1780, Daniel Chodowiecki, The Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, DC.

Rochambeau and General Washington got on very well, and had lots of planning to do during that fateful year, so Washington was in Newport too for a bit, staying, I believe, at the Count’s headquarters at the William Vernon House. George Washington 2023 was not in Newport, but a replica of his field tent was, as part of the Museum of the American Revolution’s “First Oval Office” initiative. It was rather intimate to go in there—I’ve really got to go and see the real thing, the ultimate “relic” of the Revolution—in Philadelphia. While the French rank and file seemed to be on duty, the officers were relaxed and conversational, underneath their own tent on in the Colony House nearby, wearing light floral banyans when not in uniform. I had not been in the Colony House for a while and had forgotten how grand it is. Certainly worthy of Newport.

A cool (actually very hot) bakehouse on site with an enormous clay (???) oven in back from which you could buy a toasted slice of bread with salt pork butter………

The Colony House, a private home on Spring Street where Francois-Jean de Chastellux, the liasion officer between Washington’s and Rochambeau’s armies, lived while in Newport, one of my favorite Newport houses which must go into every Newport post, and the tricolore.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Travel

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